Saturday, 29 August 2026

California's Air Resources Board (CARB) assigned a biogas-to-hydrogen project at the Bar 20 dairy farm the lowest carbon-intensity rating ever issued under the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), according to Inside Climate News.

The rating was set at -1887.35 grams of CO2-equivalent per megajoule, a measure of the greenhouse gas a fuel is responsible for relative to the usable energy it produces, Inside Climate News reported.

The project is run by H2B2, which captures biogas from methane waste lagoons at the roughly 13,000-cow Bar 20 dairy in Kerman, California, and converts it into hydrogen sold as a transportation fuel under the LCFS.

CARB spokesperson Lindsay Buckley said the project is groundbreaking on two counts: it converts a waste into electricity using a fuel cell, and it converts biogas into hydrogen.

The negative rating matters because LCFS credits scale with how far a fuel sits below the program's benchmark. A deeply negative score reflects the avoided methane emissions credited to capturing gas that would otherwise escape from the lagoons, rather than the energy content of the hydrogen itself.

CARB has pointed to the program's cumulative effect, stating that since the LCFS began, more than 31 billion gallons of fossil fuels had been displaced by lower-carbon options.

The scale of the digester buildout underpinning those credits is contested. At least 165 digesters operate in California, in a state with more than 1,000 concentrated animal feeding operations, according to Inside Climate News. CARB has disputed the argument that digesters are a factor in accelerating herd growth on farms.

That dispute goes to the core of how the credits are calculated. If digester revenue encourages larger herds, the avoided-methane baseline that produces ratings such as the one issued to the Bar 20 project would rest on emissions the subsidy itself helped create. CARB rejects that link.

H2B2's output enters the transportation fuel pool, tying dairy manure management to hydrogen supply for vehicles rather than to pipeline gas or on-site power alone.