By Jim Lane
February 20, 2018
This week, we heard the “carbon-negative” magic words via Argonne National Labs, According to this source, Argonne National Labs GREET model is showing that under certain circumstances R-CNG produced from anaerobic digestion of food waste is net-carbon negative over its lifecycle, including production, use and avoided emissions. That means making and using it actually results in lower atmospheric GHG than if the fuel were never made or used.
Now, that conclusion is coming from a sustainable NGO, Energy Vision, which co-sponsored the two case studies with Argonne on anaerobic digesters to capture the biogases from decomposing organic waste.
One study looks at Fair Oaks Farms, a large dairy cooperative in Indiana with roughly 36,000 cows. It converts manure to R-CNG using a large anaerobic digester, and uses the fuel to power its milk tanker trucks. The other study assesses the Sacramento BioDigester, the first food-waste digester in California to turn commercial organic waste into R-CNG vehicle fuel using anaerobic digestion.
Argonne is being a tad more conservative on the findings. Marianne Mintz of Argonne National Laboratory’s Energy System Division, who co-authored the case studies, opined that “R-CNG can achieve the greatest GHG reductions of any transportation fuel today — 70% or more as compared to gasoline or diesel.”
Nationwide, renewable natural gas has grown over 70% annually in recent years -production for transportation totaled 151 million gasoline gallon equivalents in 2017, up from 125M GGEs in 2016 and 90M GGEs in 2015. Also, there’s good news on associated pollutants. compared to diesel, it reduces carbon monoxide up to 70%, nitrous oxide up to 87%, and particulate matter up to 90%, as well as reducing noise up to 90%.
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