Manure in Demand as ‘Renewable Natural Gas’

DENVER—Visitors to the American Biogas Council’s annual Biogas Americas trade show at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver might think J. Paul Getty got it backward when the oil tycoon said, “Money is like manure. You have to spread it around or it smells.”

For renewable natural gas vendors at the April 28–30 event, manure is like money. It’s something to concentrate, convert into power, and reinvest to seed future growth. Otherwise, it risks smelling like a lost waste-to-energy opportunity to cash in on an ample resource.

“There’s a lot of manure out there and more is always being made,” ChemtronRiverBend’s senior director of biotechnologies and engineering, Christopher Hatch, said.

Which makes manure, “a renewable natural gas,” he added.

Developing markets for renewable natural gas (RNG)—created by extracting methane from manure, landfills, and wastewater treatment plants—is among the themes at the 2025 trade show.

With more than 2,200 attendees and nearly 200 exhibitors from 30 countries, the event is North America’s largest annual gathering of biogas industry leaders, manufacturers, and supply chain vendors.

According to the council, which represents 400 organizations and 6,000 professionals, the United States’ $6.5 billion biogas industry spans about 2,500 systems across all 50 states, including 1,180 at water treatment plants, 609 on dairy farms, and 583 at landfills.

Biogas generates enough electricity to power 2.46 million homes a year in the United States, but it is primarily used as a transportation fuel and to power farm operations independent of the grid.

Less than 1 percent of the nation’s electricity is produced by biogas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Biogas is the anaerobic, or oxygen-free, digestion of organic matter such as food waste or manure that produces a gas made of 60–70 percent methane and 30–40 percent carbon dioxide, which can be used for heating, electricity generation, and powering vehicles.

To “maximize the ability to make methane out of substrate manure, you can take it and concentrate it up, put [it] into digesters, and the biology” does the rest, Hatch told The Epoch Times, as he and his crew set up their exhibit on Monday.

ChemtronRiverBend, of St. Charles, Missouri, is a water-treatment company that provides lab services where he’s worked the past 20 of his 29 years developing biogas.

“Manure doesn’t have a lot of energy, but it’s got some,” Hatch said, before repeating, “and there’s a lot of it.”

Nitty-Gritty

As manager of renewable natural gas development for Chicago-based Amp Americas, Sam Bramfeld knows the industry’s nitty-gritty, overseeing seven dairy biogas-to-transportation fuel projects that “borrow” manure from 100,000 cows across 20 dairies in the United States.

“Some farms, they‘ll set up the dairy barns in a way that the cow’s butt is basically hanging over a long concrete bathtub and they’ll poop in there and every hour or half hour, they’ll flush it and it goes into a holding tank,” he told The Epoch Times.

The tank goes to an Amp Americas plant.

“We put it into a digester where it kind of gets to the right temperature. We put a bacteria in it that helps promote the methane production,” he said.

Extracting the methane from the manure takes three weeks.

“We borrow that manure for three weeks,” Bramfeld said. “Basically, we borrow it, we pull that gas out, and we give it right back to the farmer. That farmer then takes it, spreads it on his fields for fertilizer.”

Amp Americas is proud of its hands-on manure management proficiencies, offering visitors to its exhibit hall table smiling poop swirls sponges.

“They’re very popular,” Bramfeld said. “They make great Christmas stocking stuffers.”

It’s a waste to see waste underutilized, PlanET Biogas USA Inc. President Derek Hundert said.

“Typically, farm practices right now, if it’s in an open lagoon or not being treated in some way, that methane is vented to the atmosphere and not captured or reused for any beneficial reuse,” he told The Epoch Times. “So this kind of industry was built around, ‘Hey, that’s probably a wasted opportunity.’”

Hundert said PlanET, a Germany-based parent company that operates 870 anaerobic digestion systems and 150 renewable natural gas plants worldwide, was founded in 1998 by Jörg Meyer zu Strohe and Hendrik Becker as “a university thesis project.”

They grew up on farms and were familiar with anaerobic digesters but wondered, “‘Hey, can we make money turning cow manure into electricity?’ They wanted to prove that as part of their thesis,” he said. “That was the incubation. They built this thing up from, well, the grassroots.”

‘Don’t Know Where It’s Going’

On display across the trade floor are the latest anaerobic digesters, compressors, vacuum pumps, turbo blowers, membrane separators, and Denver-based EcoVapor Recovery Systems’ ZerO2 DryOxo oxygen removal unit, where RNG Product Manager Marcus Knox was busy explaining its features.

“This machine allows a company to economically sell their gas. And what that means is, when you use your stove at home, your stove at home has a couple of things that are missing from that gas. It’s missing dangerous contaminants and it’s missing water,” he said.

The DryOxo removes those contaminants and water during gasification for shale-based natural gas, Knox said, as well as for cow and swine-based renewable natural gas.

“Most of our customers tend to be what we would call ‘biogas upgrades.’ They need to increase that pressure so it’s easier to move the gas, and they need to move the contaminants out,” Knox said.

The key is separating the methane from the carbon dioxide in anaerobic digestion. It’s a delicate process that has to be done “at atmospheric pressure.”

“I like to call it at ‘fart pressure,’ he said. “That’s about the same bodily process we have as a digestion, right?”

Bison Ametek Technical Sales Engineer Doug Pliszka demonstrated his company’s Nautilair High Energy Blower, and said he was “trying to talk to engineering firms who are building a digester, that they can stack our blowers into them.”

The Kent, Ohio, manufacturer logged $7 billion in sales last year, selling regenerative, chemical processing blowers that “move biogas and help with the collection of energy,” he said.

They’re also lifesavers.

“It can deal with, can withstand, all kinds of nasty gases. Like, if you were to try to breathe it, you’d be dead,” Pliszka said. “It withstands up to over 200 chemicals that would kill you.”

Business is good, but President Donald Trump’s 145 percent tariffs on China and the trade levies against other nations are generating concerns.

Bison Ametek’s primary factory is in North Carolina, and it gets motors from Arkansas, so its blowers are “American made,” but “copper, steel, and aluminum are primarily sourced, unfortunately, out of China,” Pliszka said.

“We haven’t had any huge impacts, but we have had some tariffs passed on to us,” Pliszka said. “But, where do you get your products from? We’re having to look through that. It’s still kind of new to us. We’re still kind of finding out what’s going on.”

Denver-based 2G Energy Inc.’s western regional sales manager, Jon Going, said much of the biogas industry is treading uncertain waters and is concerned that tax credits and other incentives associated with the Biden administration’s focus on renewable energy could be slashed under the Trump administration.

“You know, it’s so hard, honestly. I mean, the problem is, we don’t know where it’s going,” he told The Epoch Times.

“We believe it’s going to be more natural gas-focused.”

Sustaining advances in biogas is worth every cent of taxpayer investment federal policy can provide, he said.

“I mean, obviously, they’re going through and they’re looking at cutting anything that doesn’t make sense, right? And they’re big on natural gas,” Hatch said. “Well, this would be renewable natural gas, and we got a lot of it.”