EARTH.COM - A year-long experiment on a Central Valley dairy farm has confirmed that sealing manure lagoons under gas-tight tarps can trap roughly 80 percent of the methane they would otherwise release.
By capturing the gas and sending it to fuel markets, the system turns a potent climate threat into a usable resource.
Led by researchers from the University of California, Riverside (UCR), the study gives the first independent, year-over-year check on dairy “digesters” that California regulators have counted on to meet aggressive methane-cutting goals.
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“The digesters can leak, and they sometimes do,” said Francesca Hopkins, the UCR climate scientist who led the work. “But when the system is built well and managed carefully, the emissions really drop. That’s what we saw here.”