Here's how Warren Buffett’s money is doing environmental double duty with a $10 billion pipeline deal:
“Pigs are extremely efficient,” says Kraig Westerbeek, who oversees renewable energy production for Smithfield Farms, the world’s biggest pork producer. For what farmers put into them, they get a lot out. “They eat 2.4 pounds of feed per pound of gain,” he says. “And they produce more gas per pound of live weight.”
Over the next decade Dominion aims to invest $650 million into agriculture-derived gas projects. Smithfield will contribute another $250 million. The expected result: 8 billion cubic feet per year of livestock gas – thus preventing the emissions equivalent of 3.5 million tons per year of carbon dioxide. That’s like taking 750,000 cars permanently off the road, or planting 60 million new trees every year.
What a departure this is from the old Dominion Energy. The utility was founded as Virginia Railway & Power Company in 1909 by Frank Jay Gould, son of robber baron Jay Gould. Its roots are firmly planted in Appalachian coal. Even as late as 1995, when its current CEO Tom Farrell came onboard as general counsel, more than half of its power came from burning coal.
Dominion is far from alone in its rush into renewables. Since 2003 — when coal provided 51% of America’s electricity — the nation’s power utilities have dramatically cut back their combustion of coal in favor of renewables and cleaner-burning natural gas. Currently, coal fuels just 17% of electricity, and renewables have surpassed it for the first time ever. This trend is just getting started.
Dominion is also working with start-up Vanguard Renewables, which deploys similar systems at dairy farms. Vanguard is backed by the foundation of eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll, among others. It already has 42 diary farms signed up. Vanguard president Kevin Chase says that even though so called dairy digesters had been perfected in heavily subsidized Europe over the past decade, owners of natural gas pipelines were initially skeptical at letting in bovine gas.
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