IMAGE: chad crowe

Starting this week, bills mailed to NW Natural gas customers will include a pitch to cut greenhouse gases by investing in the company’s new “Smart Energy” program.

For just $6 a month, the utility’s 590,000 customers in Portland and throughout Oregon are told they can reduce their carbon footprint by helping to build a “biodigester” somewhere in the state that converts methane from dairy-cow manure into renewable energy.

But critics say what hasn’t been reported is that the plan being sold as an environmentally responsible program to customers actually subsidizes an unsustainable and ecologically destructive form of agriculture: the factory farm. How? By subsidizing those large farms’ waste disposal.

“Portlanders want green energy, but they don’t want their energy coming from industrial factory farms,” says Kendra Kimbirauskas, a Portland-based consultant for the GRACE Factory Farm Project, a New York-based nonprofit that opposes industrial farming.

To be fair, NW Natural isn’t hyping manure energy to customers as “green power,” although it’s regarded as such under state law. It’s merely selling investment in the program as a carbon offset: By funding a biodigester to help reduce methane, a greenhouse gas, customers are told they can make up for the carbon they emit with their natural-gas use.

Yet the program is billed as a way to help the environment. And opponents of factory farms say that’s a deceptive sales pitch.

“What they’re actually doing is subsidizing the waste problem for large factory farms,” says Nicolette Hahn Niman, a rancher and environmental lawyer from Bolinas, Calif., who’s written critically of such projects in The New York Times and other publications.

A costly headache for large dairy farms is how to dispose of the manure their herds produce—14.4 million pounds a day in Oregon alone.

One solution is to use biodigesters—a technology that’s currently in vogue in Europe. Ranging from 10,000 to 40,000 square feet in size, biod take methane—a greenhouse gas emitted by manure that’s 23 times more harmful to the atmosphere than CO2—and burn it, using the heat to generate electricity.

Critics say biodigesters don’t live up to their eco-friendly reputation, because after the methane is trapped, they still leave large amounts of solid waste behind.

In theory, that waste can be sold as fertilizer. But few biodigesters exist in the United States because they don’t pay off without outside investment. That’s where NW Natural comes in—with the help of as many customers as it can persuade.

Shareholders in the Portland-based gas provider voluntarily agreed this month to offset the carbon emissions from heating the company’s facilities by investing $77,000 in the project. Now they’re offering customers the chance to offset their carbon emissions by investing as well. The company hopes 3 percent to 4 percent of its Oregon customers kick in $4.4 million in five years.

The project allows NW Natural customers “to make a positive climate impact,” says Jed Jorgensen, spokesman for the Portland-based nonprofit the Climate Trust, a partner in the project and one of the nation’s leading organizers of carbon-offset programs.

But if “Smart Energy” is good for the environment, it presents an even sweeter deal for any big dairy farms that end up with biodigesters.

Details of the project are still uncertain—the Climate Trust is currently shopping for farms and engineering firms to take it on. But Sean Clark, director of offset programs at the Climate Trust, says the deal may look like this:

An engineering firm will agree to build a biodigester on a large farm at a cost of $2 million to $4 million.

The farmer will lease his land to the project, and besides collecting rent, will get a portion of the revenue from selling the energy and fertilizer that’s produced. The farm also gets a way to dispose of its waste for free—with the help of NW Natural customers, who provide an additional revenue stream by purchasing the carbon offset.

“We’ve been told for the last 30 years that you need these big factory farms because they’re more economically efficient. So why can’t they pay for their own waste management?” Niman asks. “You’re subsidizing their nonsustainable way of farming by infusing money into the system.”

Clark says the program never set out to reform agriculture. “We’re not changing that with...carbon offset,” he says. “This is a good technological and environmental solution to a problem which is not going away.”

Oregon’s 120,000 dairy cows on 350 farms produce 120 pounds of manure per cow a day, totaling 14.4 million pounds.