Middlebury is on track to become carbon neutral by 2016, although it will have to rely heavily on the controversial Addison-Rutland natural gas pipeline to do so.
According to Director of Sustainability Integration Jack Byrne, the College has reduced its carbon footprint by 55 percent since 2008. Most of this reduction in carbon footprint has come from the use of the campus’ biomass gasification plant for electricity and heating.
“The reduction in carbon comes primarily from our switch to using wood chips as a fuel in the biomass gasification plant,” Byrne said.
Byrne expects most of the rest of the reduction in carbon emissions by 2016 to come from switching from burning petroleum fuel oil to burning methane in the biomass plant. The replacement of the fuel oil used in the biomass plant with methane (i.e. renewable natural gas) captured from cattle manure is planned to reduce the College’s carbon footprint not only by eliminating the need to burn fuel oil in the biomass plant but also by preventing the captured methane, which is a greenhouse gas that is 20 times as effective as carbon dioxide at trapping heat from escaping into the atmosphere.
“If you look at our current footprint, about three-quarters of it comes from the oil we still burn [in the biomass plant], since on the coldest days the wood chips are not capable of providing enough steam so we have to burn oil,” Byrne said.
“We’re anticipating in about a year that we’ll begin receiving renewable natural gas from a manure digester in about a year. The manure digester project will be the key way in which we achieve carbon neutrality.”
The reason why the pipeline is so critical for the carbon neutrality effort is because it provides a storage space for unused methane, which Byrne estimates would be too expensive for the College to consider building.
“One of the options we looked at before was a pipeline coming directly to the College,” Byrne said. “One of the problems with that is that we wouldn’t be burning all the gas as it came in, so we would need someplace to store it, since the biomass is often sufficient for what we need. The only option for storage before the pipeline became possible was to build an underground storage facility, which was economically unfeasible. The gas pipeline that’s coming down to Middlebury provided a way to solve that problem.”
The pipeline, which will carry natural gas obtained through fracking, in addition to the natural methane that the college will use, has been controversial, including on the College campus. Despite this, the decision to support the natural gas pipeline was made after consulting with a number of students.
“The administration has been listening, but they’re not producing the response that all students want with the pipeline,” said Lindsay Warne ’15, a member of the SGA’s Environmental Committee. “The administration asks for student input, and there’s a lot of ways for students to get involved.”
If the gas pipeline falls through, the college plans to replace the oil used in the biomass plant with renewable diesel fuel.
“We can burn renewable diesel oil, which is our backup plan if the manure digester project plan failed: we would switch from the fuel oil to the renewable diesel, which is carbon neutral,” Byrne said. “That would present some other problems, since we wouldn’t get credits from the avoided methane emissions, but it would still get us very close to our goal.”
The biggest challenge in the future is expected to be staying carbon neutral after 2016, especially in the face of growth in the size of the college. Byrne expects this challenge to be addressed through promoting energy conservation and making college buildings carbon neutral.
“I think that for us the challenge will be once we achieve carbon neutrality, how do we stay there, because we will probably grow, we will probably add another dormitory at some point down the road, so we will have to pay more attention to the energy efficiency of our buildings.”
Because of the importance of energy efficiency to the commitment to achieving carbon neutrality, the College has commissioned several studies on how to best promote environmentally friendly behavior and reduce energy usage, including a senior thesis by Abigail Karp ’14, which tested to see whether posting energy conservation tips and installing iPads that displayed a hall’s electricity usage in some halls in Hadley led to lower electricity consumption.
Karp’s thesis showed a significant reduction in electricity usage in the halls that had the iPads relative to other similar halls in the same building that did not.
“All participants increased their pro-environmental behavior over the course of the project and that the iPad feedback/reminder had no meaningful effect on this increase,” Karp wrote. “The iPads did, however, lead to a significant reduction in the experimental group’s energy consumption compared to the control group that did not have the iPad feedback/reminders.”
