February 23, 2021

By Lynda Kiernan, Global AgInvesting Media

Equilibrium Capital announced the successful sale of its Boardman, Oregon-based renewable natural gas facility to Resilient Infrastructure Group, a water infrastructure platform owned by private markets firm Partners Group.

Developed by Equilibrium in partnership with Threemile Canyon Farms, the Boardman project is one of the largest dairy manure to RNG facilities in the U.S., able to manage and transform methane emitted from dairy cows into a lower carbon intensity RNG fuel.

Through this process the facility reduces greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural waste and wastewater, while also displacing the fossil fuel used in transportation by producing RNG that meets California’s low carbon fuel standards.

As a leading sustainability-driven real asset manager targeting food, agriculture, waste, water, and energy, Equilibrium was an early actor in the waste-to-energy sector, focused on advancing food and agricultural waste-to-renewable energy at scale.

Equilibrium stated that its capital commitment to this project is an example of how the firm’s investments are working to build critically needed carbon transition infrastructure (CTI), and the resulting facility represents the successful partnership between an investor committed to using capital markets to address climate challenges and a leader in sustainable farming operations.

The Scoop on Poop

Each average 1,400-pound dairy cow produces almost 54,000 pounds of methane (a greenhouse gas that is more harmful than CO2) per year.

Driven by climbing demand for renewable energy sources, the need to diversify their businesses, and the desire to tap into certain federal tax credits, biodigesters turning livestock manure into natural gas on U.S. farms increased from 24 in 2000 to 255 today, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

And although methane from cow manure accounts for five percent of the total methane given off the animal (95 percent is burped out as it digests), and agriculture accounts for 10 percent of the greenhouse gasses emitted in the U.S., turning cow manure into natural gas remains a reliable method of working toward carbon neutrality, and can reduce greenhouse gasses generated from a dairy farm by 35 percent when biogas replaces traditional electricity, according to a study co-written by Rebecca Larson, associate professor of biological systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin.

While Equilibrium worked on developing cow manure-to-RNG technology on the West Coast, on the U.S. East Coast, in Massachusetts, a group of five farmers and energy consultant Bill Jorgenson launched AGreen Energy LLC on five farms. By 2014 Vanguard Renewables set its sights on the operation, and merged with the business, raising $72 million to expand its farm network across New England.

This in turn attracted Dominion Energy, which joined Vanguard along with an investment of $200 million in the business, expanding the company’s network into Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Georgia.

And now natural gas companies are joining in, looking to sell biogas from hog farms and sewage plants instead of from wells, reports Scientific American, which noted that the bottom line was summed up succinctly by Massachusetts dairy farmer Randy Jordan whose cow manure is collected by Vanguard Renewables and processed in an anaerobic digester on his farm, when he told a Boston reporter, “Poop is gold today.”

– Lynda Kiernan is editor with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, and HighQuest Group’s Oilseed & Grain News. She is also a contributor to the GAI Gazette. She can be reached at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com.