Turning Pollution into Profit

The industry leads the way in deforestation, habitat loss, overfishing, and ecosystem degradation. Massive factory farming operations release harmful chemicals into the air and water. And due to the drain on resources required to produce meat, animal products are the least sustainable foods to eat.

Then there’s the issue of greenhouse gases. Global food production accounts for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions, and the majority of that comes from meat production, according to a 2021 report in Nature. The estimates vary depending on the source, but research suggests the raising of livestock accounts for somewhere between 11% and 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

With this new understanding about the negative impacts of animal agriculture, there’s been a concerted global push to reform our food systems. At the grassroots level, nonprofit groups and activists have advocated for a more just and sustainable industry. While at the highest levels—all the way up to the United Nations—experts have urged people to consider adopting plant-based eating, or at least drastically cutting their consumption of meat and dairy products.

At the same time, instead of passing legislation to more effectively regulate agricultural emissions, the US government has invested millions of dollars into a system that allows the industry to benefit off its own waste. Using devices called “biodigesters,” Big Ag is now turning its animal manure into an allegedly clean energy source called “biogas.” Researchers and watchdog groups, however, are sounding the alarm that this is only the latest scheme by factory farms to avoid oversight while turning pollution into profit.

What are “biodigesters” and how do they work?

There are a few others names they go by—anaerobic digesters, dairy digesters, or simply digesters—but they all refer to oxygen-free tanks that take in organic waste. The waste is then heated and stirred continuously. The process lasts about 20 days and, through some bacteria-induced chemical transformations, produces biogas. The biogas is mostly made up of methane and carbon dioxide. The leftover solid material is typically used as crop fertilizer. According to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, the United States currently has 2,200 operating biogas systems, and the potential to add well over 10,000 more.

Once produced and captured, the biogas can produce heat and electricity for use in engines, microturbines, and fuel cells. It can also be purified to become “renewable natural gas” (RNG), which is interchangeable with the natural gas extracted in the “fracking” process.

Though biogas and and RNG have recently been touted as a clean and renewable energy source, experts have refuted this as a form of greenwashing. For starters, the fuel source is mostly methane—a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide at heating the atmosphere, and responsible for around 30% of the current rise in global temperatures.

Perhaps even more troubling, however, is the fact that investing heavily into biodigesters would further ingrain the country in a deeply flawed system of unsustainable, industrialized agriculture.

Doubling down on a broken system

Documented in a recent report from Food & Water Watch, the current push toward biogas represents an unholy alliance between two giants—Big Oil and Big Ag. The largest companies across these industries have been teaming up and investing big in biogas during the past several years. Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the world, has joint ventures with both Duke Energy and Dominion Energy, and RNG operations on factory farms across the country. Smithfield’s investments into these ventures total more than half a billion dollars.

Meanwhile, the country’s top oil companies have been staking their claims in the lucrative promise of biogas. Chevron, looking to become a “U.S. market leader in RNG,” has spent several hundreds of millions of dollars toward that pursuit. The company’s most notable partnership is with California-based bioenergy company, CalBio. Together, their operations currently include more than 80,000 cows. According to its own press release, “There are 1.8 million cows in California on more than 1,500 dairy farms—so plenty of opportunity to grow.”

British Petroleum (BP) and Shell are getting in on the biogas race too. In late 2022, BP bought out RNG provider Archaea Energy in a 4.1 billion acquisition, the largest biogas buyout to date. Shell is investing in projects across Idaho, Oregon, and Kansas, with eyes on Minnesota and Wisconsin, as well as a distribution site in California. The world’s second largest investor-owned oil and gas company also purchased the largest biogas producer in Europe, Nature Energy, for 2 billion.

At a critical juncture when the world needs to reevaluate its consumption of both animals and energy, factory farms and oil giants are attempting to inextricably link the two.

There are government incentives for it too. The Biden-Harris administration is providing financial incentives and technical assistance via the Inflation Reduction Act. And this database shows almost 100 different tax credits, rebates, grant programs and other incentives across the country buoying biogas development. In October 2023, The Humane League joined more than 200 other organizations in penning a letter to USDA Secretary Tim Vilsack urging him to reconsider the department’s support of biogas.

“These industrial practices will exacerbate climate change, waste taxpayer dollars, and harm Indigenous Peoples and environmental justice communities,” the letter reads. “This directly contradicts the intent of the Inflation Reduction Act and the stated priorities of the Biden Administration.”

Encouraging the biggest polluters to get bigger, and pollute more

When these Big Oil and Big Ag companies announce their new joint ventures into biogas and RNG, they usually couch the news within a broader message about their commitment to promoting sustainability and cutting down on fossil fuels. The same can be said for the US government touting the green promise of biogas, as it heavily subsidizes the technology’s growth. So why aren’t activists celebrating these billions of dollars in investment?

The reason is explained succinctly in a 2024 report published by Friends of the Earth US (FOE) and Socially Responsible Agriculture Project (SRAP): “Manure biogas will further entrench inherently unsustainable and unjust systems of industrial animal agriculture and fossil fuel energy for decades to come—all for methane reduction benefits that have been considerably overstated by the U.S. government, are inadequately tracked, and are insufficient to meet climate targets.”

Biogas isn’t a “cash cow” for the average American farmer. Most small family farms likely don’t have the money to invest in biodigesters. Even if they did, they wouldn’t produce enough animal waste to make it profitable. This means that CAFOs, the biggest polluters, are in the best position to profit from this emerging system. Non-factory farms, meanwhile, are “completely excluded.”

Not only are the small farms left behind, but behemoth factory farms are incentivized to get even bigger, since more animals mean more waste, and more waste means more money.

Consolidation has been running rampant in the dairy industry—with the number of licensed dairy herds getting cut in half between 2002 and 2019, despite milk production increasing during that time. With its bias toward factory farms, the latest investments into biogas could further fuel this consolidation. Friends of the Earth and SRAP found that herd sizes at facilities with biodigesters grew 3.7% annually compared to operations without them.

As CAFOs grow bigger, it will also be in the owners’ best financial interest to choose less sustainable waste management practices. While dry manure management systems generally emit less methane compared to wet management systems, biodigesters only work logistically with manure in the form of a liquid or slurry.

The backwardness of these policies are made most clear—according to the FOE and SRAP report—in the case of poultry farms. Although birds on poultry farms produce dry waste that normally doesn’t produce much methane, poultry CAFOS are beginning to add water to poultry litter manure, so that their waste can produce methane and be processed into biogas. This not only creates unnecessary opportunities for methane to escape into the atmosphere, but also expends thousands of gallons of water per ton of manure.

Creating, not fixing, environmental and safety concerns

While its proponents tout the emission-reducing abilities of biodigestion, its detractors say that its reduction in emissions is overestimated, and far outweighed by the negative effects the process has on surrounding communities and natural resources.

A 2022 analysis by Imperial College London found that the biogas supply chain leaks twice as much methane as previously thought. Another survey of almost 1,000 biogas plants between 2011 and 2019 revealed leaks in 85% of them. Meanwhile, some emissions slip away under the radar. In an article from the The Counter, a journalist describes visiting a farm in New York State, where excess methane from the farm’s biodigester was regularly being “flared off” so that the digester wouldn’t explode from being too pressurized:

“Essentially it was like watching money and energy disappear into the wind—greenhouse gas emissions with no benefit…. When asked how much methane is flared off, [the farmer] said he didn’t know because there wasn’t an incentive to monitor that.”

While flaring off is a preventative measure against explosions, biodigester accidents still happen. When officials in Dane County, WI pursued a biogas program, residents were soon plagued by a series of pipeline breaks, manure spills—totaling 400,000 gallons of escaped manure—and even a digester explosion.

More recently, the residents and natural resources of Wayne County, NC alike have suffered from a local hog farm’s faulty biodigester. In 2022, collapsed biodigester spilled millions of gallons of hog feces into the fields surrounding White Oak Farm. A year later, water sampling tests revealed “high levels of fecal coliform,” a bacteria that can cause illness in humans and animals, in a nearby wetland.

It’s a well-documented fact at this point that factory farms disproportionately impact people of color, since these massive agricultural operations tend to develop in more impoverished communities with higher Black, Latinx, and Indigenous populations. By diving headlong into biogas production, the environmental injustices against non-wealthy, non-white neighborhoods become even more likely.

Biogas isn’t the answer

Biogas isn’t the solution to the problems factory farming poses. It’s just the industry’s latest revenue stream. Unfortunately, the fact that biogas development is getting subsidized by taxpayer dollars is a sign that government leaders are doubling down on the broken system of industrialized agriculture. Rather than looking for ways to think differently. Rather than pursuing real clean energy sources. Rather than transitioning away from meat-heavy diets and toward far more sustainable plant-based eating habits.

If you’d like to join a network of activists who are thinking differently about our broken food system, consider volunteering with The Humane League. The organization urges elected officials to act in the best interest of animals, and works hard to hold corporations accountable for how their actions affect the planet and all of its inhabitants.

Join THL's Fast Action Network, which gives you a way to take part in various impactful online activities, such as signing petitions, emailing decision-makers, or applying pressure via social media.