Rep. Lucius Parshall represents Cheshire County District 10 on the House Science, Technology and Energy Committee.
I want Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) to work. I want it as badly as I want plastic recycling to work. I recycle what little plastic that I cannot avoid, but I know that 91% ends us in the unfiltered waste stream. By anyone’s measure, that is a failure.
In both recycling and RNG, what we have is an obvious case of greenwashing. It is a feel-good measure to mask the potential hazards while providing consumers and legislators some degree of plausibility. In fact, the feel-good term of RNG is meant to mask what is actually being produced. So let’s begin by forgoing buzzwords and get straight to the matter. We are discussing the impact of human-sourced methane.
Senate Bill 424 addresses the recovery of costs related to the production of methane. It will be heard before the New Hampshire House shortly. In addressing SB 424 we have to further distinguish the type of methane that will be produced by this legislation. The first way to produce methane is through anaerobic digestion technology. This is what we see on pig farms and what is burned off in our landfills. There are currently 317 small systems using this technology in the United States, several being in New England, but none in New Hampshire.
The second method is by using biomass, which is what this bill advocates. Through thermal gasification, agricultural and forest harvests are turned into syngas, which can be further refined into methane. According to a survey by the State of Oregon, “There are currently no commercial-scale thermal gasification plants in the United States that convert biomass into methane.”
To reframe what I’ve indicated above, I want methane recovery to work. When we look at the sourcing of environmental methane the main contributor continues to be agriculture at 36%. This is followed, not by landfills at 19%, but rather oil and natural gas systems that contribute 31% of our methane emissions. Basically, the energy industry leaks as much methane through their handling of fossil-based natural gas as is produced by agriculture, and far more than is produced by landfills. This is not a good record on which to base future management of bio-fuel.
There is also the economic cost factor. A million BTUs of methane gas costs $3. The estimated cost for the same amount of manufactured methane is about 6 times that, at $18. Even with the diminishing quantity of existing natural gas driving prices upward, clearly using thermal gasification to produce methane is not a viable cost alternative. Given a best-case scenario, we cannot expect to meet more than 20% of our gas needs with thermal gasification, making it an enormous losing proposition.
There are volumes of research that indicate the best way to reduce methane is to also create sustainable markets that lock carbon into the soil, benefiting both agriculture and the environment. One study from U.C. Davis suggests that compost is key to sequestering carbon in the soil.
If we truly want to preserve our New Hampshire forests it may prove to be wiser to recognize carbon sequestering through an active carbon offset program that would benefit both foresters and the environment. To divert biomass from proven sustainable uses to questionable technologies laden with false claims is no basis to make good legislation, or even feel-good legislation.