Environmentalists Raise a Stink Over a Proposed Gas Pipeline to a Dairy Farm

Updated on August 15, 2023.

The last time Vermont’s sole natural gas utility sought to significantly expand its service area, it set off a firestorm. Vermont Gas Systems’ push to build a 41-mile pipeline to Middlebury fueled climate protests against “fracked gas” and spawned multiple lawsuits.

VGS is now proposing a more modest pipeline project in Franklin County that has attracted little public attention or outcry from environmental groups.

Until now.

A small but influential band of critics is pushing to block the proposed eight-mile pipeline between Enosburg Falls and a biogas project in Berkshire, at the largest dairy farm in the state. A Michigan company, Novilla RNG, wants to build a 2.5-million-gallon manure digester at Pleasant Valley Farms.

The system would collect the waste from the farm’s nearly 6,000 cows, heat it to around 100 degrees in a 92-foot-tall tank and capture the resulting methane. The gas, referred to as biogas or renewable natural gas, would then be injected into the VGS system, which serves about 56,000 customers in northwest Vermont with natural gas that comes mostly from western Canada.

The Public Utility Commission is taking testimony on the project through the end of this month and could issue a permit this fall.

The majority of that testimony so far has been from officials at Novilla RNG, VGS and the farm’s owners, detailing the project’s goals, technical specifications and economic benefits.

Last Friday, however, the Conservation Law Foundation of Vermont delivered a broadside against the project, declaring it a false climate solution and asking regulators to reject it.

Elena Mihaly, director of CLF Vermont, said the project “makes no economic or environmental sense.”

“Projects like this one generate as much polluting methane as possible, lock farms into industrial dairying, and saddle Vermonters with the bill for expensive, unnecessary gas infrastructure,” she said in a press release.

In its filing, the group calls the claimed reductions in greenhouse gas emissions “insignificant and illusory” and argues that there are more cost-effective ways to meet the state’s emission-reduction requirements.

Large farms should be required to reduce the waste and emissions they produce in the first place, not encouraged to maximize it, the group argued.

Approving such projects only rewards polluting farms with investment while making it harder for smaller farms that use more sustainable practices to survive, the foundation claims.

Further, regulators should not allow VGS to expand an overwhelmingly fossil fuel-based system when the need for rapid decarbonization grows more urgent by the day, Mihaly told Seven Days. This summer’s disastrous flooding in Vermont and pervasive wildfire smoke from Canada have brought climate change “right up in our faces” in a way that has Vermonters demanding real climate solutions, Mihaly said.

“Building a new gas infrastructure in 2023 is probably an even harder pill for Vermonters to swallow than it was in 2017,” she said.

It’s unclear whether the group’s objections will fire up climate activists or hold much sway with utility regulators. The commission has been supportive of the company’s drive to access fuel sources other than “fossil” gas. The commission signed off on a manure and food-scrap digester that began operating at the Goodrich Farm in Salisbury in 2021 and provides gas through a new six-mile pipe to VGS and Middlebury College. And last year regulators backed VGS’ plan to purchase gas from New York State’s largest landfill — Seneca Meadows, east of Rochester.

“We’re excited about this project,” said Tom Murray, VGS’ vice president of decarbonization technology. “It’s going to bring more [renewable natural gas] into our system. It’s going to help out farmers, [and] it has enormous climate benefits.”

One of the chief criticisms of renewable natural gas projects is that they are expensive and represent a small percentage of the total gas market. Nevertheless, utilities tend to heavily market the projects in what opponents say amounts to greenwashing. They argue that the tiny renewable-gas volumes contribute to the illusion that natural gas is a climate-friendly fuel when, in fact, despite having lower emissions than coal or heating oil, it remains a major driver of climate change.

They argue that options such as electric heat pumps are cleaner, more cost-effective and far better for the climate.

“Our goal is to really end the greenwashing of large-scale [renewable natural gas] projects like this,” Mihaly said.

Less than 3 percent of the gas that VGS sells today is renewable, but the utility hopes to increase that to 20 percent by 2030.

The Berkshire project alone may represent a small percentage of VGS’ total supply, said Mark Hill, Novilla RNG’s co-CEO. But the same could be said of solar projects in the 1990s, which, thanks to sustained investment, have helped dramatically reduce the carbon emissions from the electricity sector.

Because of their multiple benefits, renewable natural gas projects are rapidly gaining acceptance across the nation and political spectrum, Hill said. The Pleasant Valley Farms project is his company’s fifth in three years, and he said Novilla RNG expects to add about a dozen more in the next two years.

Such projects benefit farmers and the environment, reduce the need for fuel imports, and are financially viable due to growing renewable-energy credit markets, Hill said.

“We as a country and Vermont as a state continue to use natural gas, and the majority of it does come from fossil fuels, but that is changing,” he said.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that has about 28 times more heat-trapping power than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period. It accounts for about 12 percent of all emissions in the United States. Much of that comes from the digestive systems of livestock but also from stored manure.

When dairy cows are confined to barns year-round, their manure doesn’t land in a pasture where, in the presence of sunlight and oxygen, it breaks down and its carbon returns to the soil. Instead, manure is flushed into huge lagoons where it decomposes and, because there is little or no oxygen, huge volumes of methane are generated and rise into the atmosphere.

Narrow margins in Vermont’s dairy industry have forced the march toward fewer, larger farms. With the trend come environmental concerns; larger farms mean more manure lagoons — and more methane.

Between 2012 and 2022, the number of dairies with more than 700 cows doubled. These farms, including Pleasant Valley, are managing massive amounts of animal waste.

Pleasant Valley, which is close to the Canadian border, stores 61 million gallons of liquid manure in 19 ponds on its properties. Its cows generate four times as much waste as a city the size of Burlington, according to Conservation Law Foundation’s 25 pages of comments on the project.

Amanda St. Pierre, who co-owns the farm with her husband, Mark, and sons Bradley and Jamie, declined an interview request or farm visit. In an email, she said they spent a year exploring the solutions to replacing their aging, undersized digester and picked Novilla RNG to help.

“Ultimately this project will enable our farm to continue to provide jobs, and economic benefits to our area of Vermont,” she wrote. “It creates an efficient and effective upgraded digester system which can help our farm achieve goals in reducing the carbon footprint.”

Novilla’s Hill said it’s vital to capture the methane these farms produce and put it to good use. The digester will be able to annually produce enough biogas to heat about 1,400 homes.

The project would prevent the existing methane from rising directly into the atmosphere. It would be burned as fuel and displace a comparable amount of fossil-fuel gas, Hill said.

According to filings, Pleasant Valley Farms already has a smaller digester that was approved in 2006 to collect methane and burn it to generate electricity, often referred to as the Cow Power program. But the farm’s population of milking cows has grown from 2,000 then to more than 4,000 today, and not all the manure can be processed through the existing digester.

Under the proposed project, the farm would stop burning methane to generate power and would instead sell it to VGS, which would build the pipeline. The company estimates that it could hook up an additional 50 homes and businesses along the route, likely switching people from higher-cost, higher-carbon propane and fuel oil, Murray said.

Because the project would prevent methane emissions and take the place of fossil fuel use, the renewable natural gas generated by the digester would be not merely carbon-neutral but also carbon-negative, Hill said.

That means a blend of 25 percent renewable gas and 75 percent natural gas can be considered carbon-neutral, Hill said.

That’s just garbage, Mihaly said.

Biofuels may have a benefit in specific industries that can’t easily be electrified, but continuing to use fossil fuels to heat homes and business when electric solutions are readily available makes no sense, she said.

“If a company uses [renewable natural gas] to justify the ongoing use of large quantities of fossil fuels, it is pushing a false climate solution,” she said.

CLF isn’t the only critic of the proposal.

James Dumont, the Bristol attorney who fought the pipeline expansion into Addison County, said he doesn’t trust VGS to build another pipeline through sensitive habitats, given the shortcuts it took on the previous project.

These included failing to get a licensed engineer to sign off on the construction plans, digging the pipeline too shallow in places and not installing features required to protect wetlands.

“Will history repeat itself?” he asked.

Murray said the pipeline to Berkshire would be a much smaller, four-inch-wide, low-pressure distribution line, a far cry from the high-pressure transmission line the utility built to Middlebury.

Academic research is also calling such projects into question. Last year, the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law & Graduate School published a study called “Rethinking Manure Biogas.”

The paper, which the Conservation Law Foundation cites in its comments, argues that investing in farm biogas systems will serve to perpetuate the production of methane instead of eliminating it.

“Renewability does not necessarily mean that a fuel is sustainable or climate friendly,” the report found.

Kevin Jones, director of the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law & Graduate School, said he has seen no evidence that renewable natural gas projects such as the one proposed will help decarbonize the gas industry quickly or completely enough to meet the state’s emission goals.

“I share the concern that CLF and others have that this is really an attempt by industry to distract us from the reality that we need to transition away from these fuels expeditiously,” he said.