Comments condekedar has made
Using biogas is expensive
While I am not a fan of flaring perfectly usable biogas, I also work in this field, and I know why so many choose to burn the stuff.
First and foremost, the cost of gen-sets and biogas scrubbers (if you want to produce electricity) is exorbitant. A medium-sized gen-set can cost two to three times the cost of the biogas recovery system, be it for a landfill or a CAFO. These projects, in general, don't make much money. They're green, but there are few incentives that matter; carbon offsets have made these projects more viable, but they're still far from huge profit-makers.
Second, utilities don't make it easy to put biogas-electricity or cleaned up biogas (which is essential natural gas) onto the grid. Interconnection fees are high, and the project developer usually has to bear the costs of upgrading the grid to accommodate any green power he produces. Necessary legal costs and extremely intricate pricing structures put this option out of the reach of most CAFOs and municipal landfills.
Flaring is not ideal, but it's the lesser evil in a country which makes it as hard as possible to be green and stay in business at the same time.On Bogus offsets merely ease emitter's remorse posted 1 year, 1 month ago 8 Responses
A couple comments
- Where did you get your US GHG data from? Because you've completed excluded one of the biggest emitters of all: agriculture. All those cows and pigs and chickens at CAFOs produce a lot of methane, through enteric fermentation and then the subsequent anaerobic decay of their manure.
- Your output-based standard seems reasonable for certain sectors where data is easily trackable and available (a point that you acknowledge). I like the idea.
- The beauty of the Kyoto carbon offset market is this: it transfers money, skills, technology and ideas to the developing world in a novel, win-win format. Most of these CDM projects would have never occurred without carbon credits, and CDM does a great job of introducing new technologies to countries that would otherwise suffer without them (due to prohibitive costs and skills-barriers). Project developers in the industrialized world like the revenues and entryways into developing countries that offsets provide; the public, and most project owners at large likes the sexiness of carbon offsets.
- Developing countries don't have caps or regulations on their industrial and agricultural gas emissions. Maybe they might in the future (and that, too, might be limited to India and China and no other developing country), but for your output-standard idea to work, it'll still require huge capital costs that offsets help to meet. You won't see as much technology-transfer and skills-transfers to the developing world through your output-based system, because it will be just as expensive (if not more, due to trade laws, importation of western technology, taxes, customs issues, etc.) to develop an output project in Mexico as it would in Belgium or any other developed country. There has to be some kind of market for offsets to encourage clean development in countries that don't have access to capital or have difficult, restrictive importation laws.
- Where did you get your US GHG data from? Because you've completed excluded one of the biggest emitters of all: agriculture. All those cows and pigs and chickens at CAFOs produce a lot of methane, through enteric fermentation and then the subsequent anaerobic decay of their manure.