Nebraska feedlot launches project to convert manure to natural gas

A large cattle feedlot in central Nebraska's Custer County is being rebuilt to turn manure into natural gas.

Construction equipment dumps, grades, and compacts concrete at the Adams Land and Cattle Company feedlot outside Broken Bow on a warm spring afternoon. Here, in cattle pens on about 600 acres, 85,000 cattle are fed three times a day. The construction project is converting dirt pens to concrete for the cattle to live on, while they gain 700 to 800 pounds before they’re sent for slaughter.

Adams CEO Abram Babcock explained one advantage of using concrete pens.

“Dirt pens are great when it's dry out," he said. "What happens in Nebraska, though, cattle feeding -- you get wet, you get a lot of rain, and then you can be dealing with kind of muddy pen conditions, and then the mud in the pens takes a lot of work with loaders and side dumps and keeping the pen surface clean, but also anytime cattle have to walk through mud to get to the feed bunk, it takes energy, and then cattle don't convert feed into pounds of gain as good."

While it takes 200 square feet per animal to prevent overcrowding from tearing up dirt pens, Babcock said with concrete it will only take 125 square feet. That means Adams will eventually be able to handle 150,000 cattle at a time, on the same amount of land.

Babcock added that living on concrete is not harder on the animals’ legs.

“No, actually, so that's a question that we asked, and a lot of people ask, and we've done a lot of research, we've done a lot of trial work where we allocate cattle to dirt pens and concrete pens, and then actually there's been a lot of other studies done in Canada and Pacific Northwest, and every data set that I've seen actually show that, foot issues specifically, are better on concrete than dirt, which is goes against kind of what most people would think," he said.

“Every animal you'll see here is standing on a concrete surface,” Babcock added while showing part of the yard where cattle are already living on the new surface.

The surface looks like dirt, but Babcock says they don’t put dirt on top of the concrete.

“When we're scraping up the manure, we just don't go all the way to the concrete, and it kind of creates just a hard surface on top,” he explained.

Babcock added that changing to concrete pens is a big improvement.

“When you clean a dirt pen, you're doing it on a dirt surface, so typically when you take that manure out, 60% of it's still dirt," he said. "Where when you're harvesting this manure off concrete, it's pure manure, so it's a lot better product."

For now, that product is still spread on fields as fertilizer. But by 2028, the plan is to put it in one of eight methane digesters planned for the site.

Jeff Stander, vice president of sustainable asset energy development at Neogenyx Fuels, the company that will build those digesters, discussed what will happen next.

“They will bring the manure to us, where we will then load it through conveyors, mixers and sorters to make sure that there's no rocks and stuff in it, and it makes its way into the digesters, where biology takes over, and through that biology, with a certain amount of retention time, a certain amount of heat control and a certain amount of mixing, those bugs thrive and they break down that manure, and a byproduct of that is methane,” Stander said “We will take the methane that's produced off the top of these digesters, and we will pipe that raw methane, which is primarily methane and CO2, are the major constituents in that gas stream, and we'll put it into a conversion facility, which basically pulls the CO2 out, and basically you end up with 96, 98, 99% pure natural gas.”

That gas will then be fed into the local Black Hills Energy pipeline.

Stander added the project will be a good step forward.

“We're making a useful product, meaning natural gas, effectively renewable natural gas, out of a waste stream that wasn't producing any beneficial value, other than some nutrients getting back to the to the land,” he said.

Methane digesters have been used for many years, including on dairy farms. But using them in combination with concrete pens on feedlots is new.

And while removing methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is good for the environment, some critics remain skeptical.

A study last year by the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future concluded “the review of the evidence suggests manure digesters offer modest reductions in some pollutants while exacerbating others, and thus are not the solutions they are often touted to be.”

“Critically, further investments in industrial livestock operations, manure digesters and associated infrastructure risk entrenching and expanding an industry that runs counter to public health and environmental goals,” the study added.

But Babcock said the changes Adams and Neogenyx are bringing to the livestock industry will be positive.

“We produce a really safe, sustainable product that people enjoy to eat, and there's a lot that goes into a feedlot from a science perspective," he said. "You know, everything we do out there, we measure, we experiment, we improve. It's all about continuous improvement, how we get better, and there's always things we can do better, but at the end of the day, I think we're doing everything right."

The changes to the yard should be finished and the digesters up and running in about a year and half.