1 thought on “Here’s your Sunday open thread”

  1. Zach, appreciate all you do.

    In terms of hope for the New Year, this 6.5-minute CNBC video of Jim Chanos’ (Milwaukee native) energy picks ranks high on my list.

    http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/17/jim-chanos-here-are-my-energy-shorts.html

    Chanos, a famous short-seller, is trying to make money on these positions. He thinks BMW’s whole fleet might be electric by 2025. He’s very bearish on crude oil. He thinks the electricity to power vehicles will come from solar and natural gas.

    I’m not a big fan of pulling natural gas out of the ground. Wisconsin has a lot of renewable natural gas in the manure from 1.27 million dairy cows. http://www.wmmb.com/assets/images/pdf/WisconsinDairyData.pdf

    Per a Penn State link, “Given the gas production rate of the Penn State digester, a net daily biogas output of 40 cubic feet (1.2 m3) per cow,…”

    Using that estimate, that’s around 18.5 billion cubic feet of renewable natural gas a year from Wisconsin’s dairy herd.

    If I’m reading this chart https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_cons_sum_dcu_SWI_a.htm
    of Wisconsin natural gas use correctly, and that’s doubtful, Wisconsin consumes about 462 billion cubic feet of natural gas per year.

    The bigger payoff of generating natural gas from cow manure is that we’re preventing a lot of the methane in cow manure from exacerbating climate change. Everyone needs milk. It would make sense for the federal government to stop subsidizing unsustainable milk production.

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