A Texas Dairy Ranks Among the State's Biggest Methane Emitters. But Don't Ask the EPA or the State A
Three years ago, North Dumas Farms was an empty field near the northern edge of the Texas Panhandle. Today it is a massive dairy operation—and one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters in the state.
The dairy is permitted to hold up to 72,500 cows, whose burps and manure would produce an estimated 13,096 metric tons of methane each year, according to an Inside Climate News analysis of data from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
This analysis builds on the pioneering work of Climate TRACE, a nonprofit coalition that is developing methods to provide a farm-by-farm inventory of methane emissions from cattle based on public records, satellite imagery and artificial intelligence.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that on a pound for pound basis is 81 times more effective at warming the earth’s atmosphere than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. If all of the methane produced by the North Dumas dairy entered the atmosphere, the farm’s annual greenhouse gas emissions would equal that of nearly a quarter-million automobiles.
Methane’s potency as a greenhouse gas combined with its short lifetime—methane remains in the atmosphere for just 12 years—means that curbing emission of the gas is the single best way to combat climate change in the short term, according to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18082023/texas-dairy-among-states-biggest-methane-emitters/