Making Digesters Work on More Dairies

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

This week we’ve been reporting on a project in California that is paying dairy farmers to convert manure into renewable fuel. Daryl Maas of Maas Energy Works says this opportunity is not unique to just California.

Maas… “Outside of California, there's also a lot of development because you are allowed to build a digester outside of California and send your gas into California. And other states are creating programs, so I think the combination between mandatory regulation in some states and voluntary industry targets for marketing and other sustainability goals; between both of those, it seems that dairy farms in the U S at least the larger ones are going to have some form of bio gas project in the majority of cases. It really seems likely given the market we're in, and given the fact that dairies are such a great opportunity. They have a concentrated source of feedstock. You know, there are other businesses say the biodiesel industry, which goes around collecting grease and collecting oil and trying to gather it and transport it. But a dairy is sitting right there, it's got all this feedstock there every day, 12 months out of the year, that can be made into energy. So those of us in the industry are just trying to find ways to do that more efficiently and reach out to more producers and build business models that work for them.”

Maas hopes that in the future these digesters are accessible to even smaller and more remote dairies in the U.S.