Isramart : Cash cows boost carbon trading; Cleaning up in California greenhouse-gas emissions

Isramart news:
The thousands of dairy cows in just one of the 100 industrial farms in California's San Joaquin Valley can produce the daily equivalent of waste a small town produces. The manure is cleaned out of the barns with high-pressure water and turned into liquid slurry, which is pumped into an outdoor lagoon that is about five metres deep and the size of a large parking lot.

There, it festers: The solid waste separates from the liquid and falls to the bottom of the lagoon, where it becomes food for bacteria. As the bacteria digest this waste, they produce methane gas that rises to the surface of the putrid lake, releasing thousands of tonnes of methane — a greenhouse gas — into the atmosphere, altering the Earth's climate.

The farmers' crap has become the driver of a Quebec company's balance book. L2I Solutions, based in Saint-Lambert, on Montreal's south shore, is turning this odorous, harmful sludge into millions for itself and the farmers in rural California by creating a carbon-offset program, handling the paperwork and the verification process and acting as a middleman between the farmers and the carbon brokers, who do the actual selling and trading. The World Bank estimates the global carbon-credit market was worth about US$126-billion at the beginning of 2009.

Yves Legault, L2I Solutions vice-president in corporate finance, and his team convinced 28 San Joaquin Valley dairy farmers to use a waste-filtering technology before pumping the manure slurry into their lagoons. The waste that is filtered out in this two-step process is reused as bedding for the cows and as fertilizer. As a consequence, less manure enters the lagoon, eliminating a good deal of the food for bacteria and the corresponding methane.

The methane that has been saved or "offset" from entering the atmosphere can be quantified. One tonne of carbon dioxide equals one carbon credit. Since methane, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has a global warming potential 23 times that of CO2, each tonne of methane not released into the atmosphere is worth about 23 carbon credits.

L2I Solutions estimates in the span of the offsetting program, which runs until 2015, the farmers, together, can create about 1.6 million carbon credits. The price of these credits varies widely because there is no federally regulated market in either Canada or the United States.