The Midwest has “significant” potential to make use of its agricultural waste and resources to produce renewable biogas, according to a new report from the Great Plains Institute out this month.
But, it warns that federal and state policies do not currently recognize the “tremendous resource potential from biogas”.
Biogas facilities – often using anaerobic digestion – can turn waste management costs faced by farms and industry into an income stream by turning it into renewable energy for use in electricity.
Increasingly, biogas projects can be used to produce a compressed methane gas that can be used in transport.
The US has “yet to scratch the surface” of its biogas potential, the Great Plains Institute suggested, adding that public policy was a “major limiting factor”.
It said more incentives were needed to support the emerging technology, and should be set to encourage alternative uses of biogas other than just electricity generation.
With its “vast” agricultural resources and processing industries, the report said the Midwest had a particularly significant potential for biogas projects.
The report, written by energy policy specialist Amanda Bilek, looked into the situation in 12 states, including North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio.
Policies
The report entitled Spotlight on Biogas: Policies for Utilization and Deployment in the Midwest notes that bonds and tax credits are “attractive” policy measures for encouraging development of biogas projects, including industrial and municipal facilities.
However, it recommends expanding tax credit programs to provide incentives for other uses of biogas, other than electricity generation.
Biogas projects could benefit from other policy measures currently being discussed by Congress, including a national Renewable Energy Standard, as well as any kind of greenhouse gas emissions cap-and-trade scheme, it says.
In the Midwest, the report looks at state policies that are or could be important in supporting biogas developments, including production incentives, net-metering, feed-in tariffs, business loan programs and Renewable Portfolio Standards.
The report states: “Without additional mechanisms and incentives geared towards diverse biogas utilizations and expanded ownership or management models, biogas development will struggle to grow and an opportunity will be missed to diversify our energy supply with a stable and versatile renewable resource.”
Regional
Ms Bilek pointed to lessons from abroad in stating that the Midwest could do well to develop more centralized biogas plants, making use of multiple varieties of organic feedstocks from regional areas, instead of individual single-farm facilities.
With 151 operational on-farm biogas facilities, only 13 are centralized or regional in scope.
“The Midwest could produce more biogas from combining multiple organic feedstocks in the same system and developing centralized biogas plants Such new production models would be instrumental in expanding biogas production beyond the large livestock facilities, where the technology has previously been associated.”
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