PIXLEY, Calif. _ Lyle Schlyer grinned as a river of frothing manure oozed down a concrete channel, the murky greenish fluid soon disappearing into a storm drain-like hole.
It was a sunny March afternoon, a few days before the novel coronavirus began shutting down much of California, and the smell of cow dung was doing nothing to dampen Schlyer's enthusiasm. He stood atop a towering contraption that separated the manure into solid and liquid parts. A conveyor belt deposited the brown solids at the top of a stinking mound. The fluids filtered through narrow slits in a metal screen before continuing down the concrete channel.
The liquids would eventually reach a double-lined holding pond, larger than a football field and covered by a thick black tarp. A stew of gases _ mostly methane and carbon dioxide _ bubbled up under the tarp, creating enough pressure that you can walk across the undulating surface with sinking steps, like an open-air bounce house or a bizarre sand dune.
A few steps away, thousands of Holstein cows looked on, their moos audible over the industrial whir of the manure separator.
At this dairy farm outside the San Joaquin Valley town of Pixley, Schlyer's company turns cow droppings into energy. Left untouched, the decomposing manure might otherwise spend months sitting in open lagoons, getting broken down by bacteria in a reaction that produces methane gas, a powerful planet-warming pollutant.
Calgren Renewable Fuels captures that methane before it enters the atmosphere, then injects it into the pipeline network owned by Southern California Gas Co., a utility that serves more than 21 million people from Fresno to the U.S.-Mexico border.
SoCalGas calls the manure fuel "renewable natural gas" and says it can help fight climate change by keeping methane out of the atmosphere, and by replacing some of the "fossil" natural gas that normally flows through the company's pipelines.
This is one vision of California's clean-energy future. It's gaining traction in the gas industry, and with some government officials.
But not everyone is on board with a future powered by cow poop.
