The Digest’s Top 10 Advanced Bioeconomy Markets and Predictions for 2021

3. Every Dairy Becomes a Heat & Power Producer by 2030

Why aren’t dairies as attractive to investors as fracking operations in geologic formations that may or may not have affordable natural gas to recover? Two reasons, really. First of all, the scale, we need chains of dairies to compete with gas fields. Secondly, fracking operations are happiest when they find wet gas (ethane, propane) rather than dry gas (methane). 

Just saying, we think there is a generation of microbes beyond the methanogens that produce methane gas from ag, municipal and food waste. Where are the ethanogens and propanogens? As this research paper noted in 2006, “Concentrations and isotopic compositions of ethane and propane in cold, deeply buried sediments from the southeastern Pacific are best explained by microbial production of these gases in situ…Production of C2 and C3 hydrocarbons in this way…upsets the general belief that hydrocarbons larger than methane derive only from thermal degradation of fossil organic material.” 

It wouldn’t take a new generation of organisms to make dairies and agwaste sources into the heat and power giants of the Sustainable Revolution, but it would help. We sometimes wonder why organism developers at Zymergen and Ginkgo don’t work on this.

Meanwhile, scale will help in the near term and scale is on the way with companies like Brightmark and Vanguard Renewables.