Top: Image courtesy of American Biogas Council

The American Biogas Council (ABC) launched its Biogas Carbon Accounting Tool (Biogas CAT) to track the full lifecycle emissions of biogas projects. The tool was prepared for ABC by EcoEngineers, a clean energy consulting, auditing and advisory firm. Biogas CAT, which builds on existing compliance and voluntary carbon market methodologies, is designed to assist biogas project developers and operators to “accurately quantify carbon emissions data for companies that purchase renewable energy from biogas to meet their voluntary greenhouse gas reduction targets,” explains ABC. “This allows voluntary buyers to more accurately report their emissions cuts to their customers and shareholders. In turn, precise emissions data allows biogas projects to participate fairly in carbon markets that trade carbon certificates and realize the fair value of their investments.”

Prior to the introduction of the Biogas CAT, the market’s most usable model was GREET, created by the Argonne National Lab primarily to serve California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard program. While GREET is still a gold-standard tool, it is only focused on the use of renewable fuels for vehicles and it does not account for the environmental benefits of replacing synthetic fertilizer use with digested material from biogas systems, one of their key benefits, notes ABC, adding that “the Biogas CAT builds from the strengths of GREET and other carbon tools and fills in the parts that have always been missing because the developers of those tools are not biogas experts.” Biogas CAT also includes digesters processing all livestock manure (dairy, swine, poultry and beef) whereas GREET only considers dairy and swine manure as eligible feedstocks.