Decades of research and reporting since the 1990s have shown the harmful impacts<\/a> of the pork industry on rural communities in Sampson<\/a> and Duplin<\/a> counties, where about a quarter of the population is Black, about a quarter is Latino and over 20 percent of residents live below the poverty line. Manure sprayed on agricultural fields drifts into people\u2019s homes, contaminating them<\/a> with dangerous bacteria. Phosphorus and nitrates from wastewater<\/a> seep into the groundwater, poisoning local rivers and drinking wells. Hog manure lagoons also drive climate change, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas more than 80 times more potent than carbon-dioxide over a 20-year span, into the atmosphere.\u00a0<\/p>\n Biogas production, where farmers install methane-trapping devices known as digesters over their manure lagoons and turn the captured gas into fuel, is promoted by the pork and biogas industries, and utilities, as a way to address some of these problems\u2014namely, the methane emissions and noxious odors from manure ponds.<\/p>\n \u201cFew technologies can achieve so much good, so broadly across the community,\u201d said Aaron Ruby, a spokesperson for Dominion Energy, a partner on the Align RNG project, a $500 million joint venture between the utility and the agricultural conglomerate Smithfield.\u00a0<\/p>\n But since the technology has started becoming more prevalent in the region, it\u2019s spurred new concerns<\/a> among local residents.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cCommunities have been suffering with the swine CAFOs for many years,\u201d said Hall. \u201cWhenever you begin to talk about biogas, then it just further embeds the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n Advocates say that instead of reducing the number of hogs on farms, or encouraging cleaner<\/a> alternative manure management systems to reduce air and water pollution, biogas production locks in the current manure lagoon system with all its potential for groundwater seepage and spills during floods<\/a>. And while covering lagoons to capture methane can potentially lower greenhouse gases and pathogens, it alone does nothing to limit many of the other pollutants in hog waste, like fine particulate matter, nitrogen, and phosphorus, which still get sprayed onto nearby fields.\u00a0<\/p>\n Some studies have even shown that digesters, depending how the devices are operated, can increase livestock waste\u2019s releases of ammonia<\/a>, a toxic gas linked to 12,400 deaths<\/a> in the U.S. per year.<\/p>\n The United States Department of Agriculture warns that the methane capture process can exacerbate certain water quality issues<\/a> by increasing the water-solubility of nitrogen in livestock waste. That raises the risk of nitrate contamination of drinking water which is linked to miscarriages and infant mortality and is a particular concern in an area where most residents draw their water from wells.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been using the term \u2018pollution swapping\u2019 to acknowledge that this is a technology for which there\u2019s evidence that it may reduce some pollutants while also making others worse,\u201d said Brent Kim, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins Department of Environmental and Engineering who was part of a recent literature review<\/a> that concluded digesters should not be promoted as a manure management and energy solution.<\/p>\n Digesters can also introduce new pollutants when they flare, or burn excess biogas, he added. \u201cYou might get byproducts like nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, particulate matter and other things that pose respiratory risks for people.\u201d<\/p>\n Biogas Spreads Controversy East and West<\/p>\n All the way across the country in California, a program called the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) has long been a point of conflict between environmental justice groups, state air regulators and the renewable natural gas industry, especially when it comes to its incentives for dairy and swine biogas.\u00a0<\/p>\n The program launched in 2012 with the aim of reducing transportation emissions in the state. It sets an average, gradually lowering carbon intensity threshold for fuels, and requires higher carbon fuel producers, like oil refiners, to buy credits from lower carbon fuel producers, such as solar developers or companies that make biogas from livestock and landfill methane. The expectation is that the alternative fuels will displace fossil fuels in the mix over time.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dairy and swine biogas generates about a fifth of the credits in the program, earning hundreds of millions in subsidies each year.\u00a0<\/p>\n The state says the program as a whole has reduced the carbon intensity of the fuel mix by 15 percent since it launched, and California dairy farmers say it provides them with the money they need to install methane capture devices to lower their climate impact, technologies for which there aren\u2019t many other funding streams available.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not only counterproductive and a distraction from real climate solutions. It\u2019s also having serious environmental and public health consequences for communities across the country.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Amanda Starbuck, Food & Water Watch<\/p>\n But environmentalists and environmental justice advocates say the program vastly overcredits CAFOs for these reductions, diverting precious resources from electrification to reduce fossil emissions toward a fuel that may exacerbate local pollution around farms and still emits carbon dioxide and other harmful pollutants when combusted in trucks and buses.<\/p>\n Even more egregious, they say, is the fact that the program allows farms in Wisconsin, Texas, New York, Missouri and several other states to sell biogas credits into the California market for fuel that never makes it into California pipelines. About 45 percent of the biogas credits in the program go to 196 out-of-state farmers, according to the environmental group Food & Water Watch.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not only counterproductive and a distraction from real climate solutions. It\u2019s also having serious environmental and public health consequences for communities across the country,\u201d said Amanda Starbuck, the group\u2019s research director, in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n Last year the program accepted credits for the first time from dairy farms in Iowa, where state law allows dairy farms to exceed established herd limits<\/a> if they install methane capture devices on their manure lagoons. One Iowa farm that entered the program leaked over 375,000 gallons<\/a> of manure from a digester lagoon into a nearby creek in 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\n And 2025 was also the first time the program touched the epicenter of pork production\u2014North Carolina.\u00a0<\/p>\n Who Is Buying Biogas?<\/p>\n Years before the LCFS existed, utilities in North Carolina were required by a 2007 state law to source some of their power from renewable sources, including 0.2 percent from swine biogas by 2018. It\u2019s the only state in the country that mandates sourcing electricity from animal waste.<\/p>\n Since the law passed, a handful of North Carolina farmers and project developers have earned income from installing digesters, which look like domed tarps, over swine lagoons, and using the captured methane gas to power on-site generators to produce electricity. They sell the electricity to local utilities<\/a>, but several deadline extensions later, the utilities aren\u2019t even close<\/a> to reaching their biogas targets.<\/p>\n \u201cThat speaks to how expensive the technology is, how difficult it is to get off the ground,\u201d said Blakely Hildebrand, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center, or SELC, which has represented groups suing the state over digester permits.\u00a0<\/p>\n More recently, larger-scale projects<\/a> to collect methane gas from farms and refine it into renewable natural gas that can be injected directly into pipelines have garnered interest from developers and utilities. In 2018, a project called Optima KV<\/a> in Duplin County became the first in the area to do that, injecting RNG produced from a cluster of five Smithfield swine farms directly into a pipeline owned by Piedmont Natural Gas, a subsidiary of Duke Energy. Purchasing the gas to use in its power plants earns the utility renewable energy credits<\/a> that count toward its requirements under the 2007 law.<\/p>\n Around the same time, a company called Carbon Cycle Energy<\/a> was promoting its own partnership with Duke<\/a> to provide renewable energy credits for biogas made from swine and food waste in Warsaw, although the build-out was delayed several years. And Duke in 2023 signed a 15-year renewable energy credit agreement<\/a> with a project called Montauk Renewables in Sampson County that is currently under construction at the site of an old furniture factory in Turkey.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dominion and Duke did not answer questions about if and how the Align RNG project ties into their state-mandated renewable portfolio targets. But the project has another deep-pocketed funder\u2014California, which is directing subsidies towards biofuel production in North Carolina to help meet its transportation emissions targets.<\/p>\n Smithfield and Dominion did not respond to requests for comment as to how important the California credits are to their operation and whether or not they had them in mind when they began to develop their project as a joint venture in 2018<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n They first submitted paperwork to sell credits into California\u2019s transportation emissions trading market in August 2023, and their full application was finalized in March 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n But analysts and economists say the program has been integral to getting dairy and swine manure biogas projects off the ground nationwide.<\/p>\n \u201cThe cost of building and operating digesters is on the order of nine to ten times the cost of producing natural gas just by pulling it out of the ground. So it only is going to make economic sense with policy help,\u201d said Aaron Smith, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Berkeley.\u00a0<\/p>\n He said at the moment, the two main sources of policy help nationwide are the federal Renewable Fuel Standard, which credits farmers for producing biogas, and the LCFS in California, which contribute about equally to the subsidies producers can get.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn North Carolina, companies would be making a decision whether they\u2019re getting more value out of the LCFS versus out of the state program,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n A Civil Rights Complaint Against California-Backed Digesters\u00a0<\/p>\n The California-funded Align RNG project sits at the center of the biogas debate in eastern North Carolina.\u00a0<\/p>\n The project aims to connect 19 hog farms via 30 miles of pipeline to a central processing facility known as the Grady Road Project, which came online in November 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\n Six of the farms are already hooked up to the project.<\/p>\n Located in a 13-mile radius around the facility, the farms are all owned by or on contract with Smithfield, a Chinese-owned company that\u2019s the world\u2019s largest pork producer and processor and contracts with about 1,000 farms<\/a> in the state.\u00a0<\/p>\n Three of the farms\u2014the Kilpatrick farm, M&M-Waters farm and Goodson farm\u2014are owned by Murphy-Brown LLC, a subsidiary of Smithfield. The other three\u2014the Dell farm and two DM farms\u2014are owned by Ironside Investment Management, part of a trust<\/a> created by Murphy-Brown\u2019s founder, Wendell H. Murphy, which contracts with Murphy-Brown. Each farm has between about 10,000 to 20,000 hogs.\u00a0<\/p>\n The farms send their raw biogas via underground pipelines to a compression facility, where it\u2019s transformed into biomethane to meet utility pipeline specifications and injected into a Piedmont Natural Gas pipe. The fuel powers homes and businesses in the area, while the \u201cenvironmental attributes\u201d are sold separately to offset transportation emissions across the country in California.<\/p>\n The project claims it will eventually be able to capture 142,000 metric tons<\/a> of methane each year, the equivalent of taking 30,000 cars off the road.<\/p>\n But in 2021, as the Grady Road Project was being developed and farms were starting to install digesters over their manure lagoons, two groups, the Environmental Justice Community Action Network, or EJCAN, and Cape Fear River Watch, sued the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) over its permitting of digesters at four farms, three of which are currently selling credits into the LCFS.<\/p>\n As is common practice when installing digesters, the farms that participate in the Grady project cover their original manure lagoons to capture methane and then pump the remaining wastewater to other open lagoons built to store post-digester waste. That waste is ultimately sprayed onto fields.\u00a0<\/p>\n The groups alleged that digester waste produces more harmful ammonia emissions and contains phosphorus and nitrogen in more water-soluble forms than waste stored in conventional lagoons. They argued that the state failed to consider waste systems that would be less harmful to health and have fewer environmental impacts when they granted the digester water permits.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThese digesters leave in place the harmful lagoon and spray field system, and digesters, without doing anything else, can exacerbate the pollution problems associated with industrial animal agriculture,\u201d said Hildebrand, the lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center, or SELC, which represented the groups. \u201cThe state did nothing to address that.\u201d<\/p>\n This story is funded by readers like you.<\/p>\n Our nonprofit newsroom provides award-winning climate coverage free of charge and advertising. We rely on donations from readers like you to keep going. Please donate now to support our work.<\/p>\n Donate Now<\/a> <\/p>\n SELC also filed a Title VI Civil Rights Act complaint<\/a> with the Environmental Protection Agency against the DEQ on behalf of the Duplin County NAACP and the North Carolina Poor People\u2019s Campaign. They said that in granting the four permits, and then the following year<\/a> creating a statewide general permit<\/a> for digesters that streamlined approvals for similar projects, the state was discriminating against people of color.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s pretty ample evidence that industrial hog operations and the pollution disproportionately impact Black, Latino and Native American communities in eastern North Carolina,\u201d said Hildebrand. \u201cBased on our analysis, these new permits were also disproportionately harming communities of color.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2022, the state\u2019s chief administrative law judge, a former DEQ secretary, sided with the agency<\/a> in the legal case over the digester permits in the New Hanover County Superior Court. But the EPA decided to investigate the Title VI complaint<\/a>, and that probe remains open.<\/a> In 2022<\/a> the agency said it commenced \u201cinformal resolution agreement discussions\u201d with NC DEQ. The EPA press office declined to comment on the case.\u00a0<\/p>\n Kemp Burdette, the Cape Fear riverkeeper who was also involved in the lawsuits, said he no longer bothers testing the water quality in Stewart\u2019s Creek, which runs near the farms, because of how contaminated it is year after year. He said he wasn\u2019t aware until ICN reached out that California\u2019s LCFS program was one of the funding vehicles behind the digesters.<\/p>\n \u201cI guess they think they\u2019re doing the right thing by buying swine biogas credits in North Carolina,\u201d said Burdette. \u201cBut all they\u2019re doing is shifting the burden to the poorest, most desperate North Carolinians.\u201d<\/p>\n A spokesperson for the California Air Resources Board didn\u2019t answer the question of whether CARB knew about the civil rights complaints against digester permits for the Kilpatrick, Goodson and Waters farms when it certified the Align RNG project for credits. But she said that the agency could revoke the credits if the facility was found to be in violation of any laws.<\/p>\n \u201cCARB evaluated the LCFS pathway applications associated with the RNG project based on applicable LCFS pathway certification requirements,\u201d said spokesperson Lindsay Buckley. \u201cCARB may invalidate LCFS credits generated or transferred in violation of laws, statutes or regulations other than the LCFS itself.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n More Pipelines Could Be Coming<\/p>\n On a rainy day, Sherri White-Williamson drives east from her office in an old armory in the town of Clinton, in Sampson County, and down Highway 24 to point out some of the biogas buildout in the area.<\/p>\n White-Williamson, executive director of the EJCAN group that sued the state over digester permits in 2021, has been organizing against biogas for the past six years, since around the time when Align RNG\u2019s first air permit hearings were announced in 2020.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe went out to get people engaged to be on that public comment call, especially people that were right across the road and down the road from the Align facility,\u201d said White-Williamson, who was working for the North Carolina Conservation Network at the time. \u201cWhat we learned was that no one realized what it was.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond concerns about pollution from manure lagoons and digesters on farms, White-Williamson says residents are worried about pollution from the biogas pipeline and processing infrastructure itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n According to the Align RNG\u2019s air quality permit, the Turkey facility plant could emit 64 tons to 220 tons of pollutants each year. Last year, when White-Williamson brought a group of EPA officials to tour the area, they stood in front of the processing plant for about 10 minutes while gas flared from the facility, releasing pollutants like sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which can cause respiratory issues, into the air.\u00a0<\/p>\n Behind a chain link fence five miles down the road loom the three towers of Carbon Cycle Energy biogas facility, which had a spill<\/a> two summers ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n As climate change intensifies storms and makes them more frequent, the chances of accidents increase.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you\u2019re concentrating that much methane in pipelines and storage tanks, there are risks of fires and explosions,\u201d said Kim, the researcher at Johns Hopkins.<\/p>\n EJCAN has limited resources to learn more about the digester and biogas projects in Sampson and Duplin counties, especially after the Trump administration cut a $417,000 research grant <\/a>the nonprofit was a part of to study the health impacts of biogas production in the state.<\/p>\n And the funding for the projects cropping up in the region is opaque. Utilities in North Carolina report to the North Carolina Utilities Commission on their plans for biogas sourcing<\/a> but the details are redacted from public documents. And while CARB posts new LCFS fuels pathways<\/a> on its website, it shares limited information about what the other subsidies and credits projects might be receiving.<\/p>\n The LCFS application<\/a> for the Align RNG Grady Road project notes the project earns credits from the federal Renewable Fuels Standard Program, which sets minimum volumes of renewables in transportation fuel and pays developers for delivering it.<\/p>\n The project also sells North Carolina renewable energy credits and carbon credits for electricity production, and the application says the gas used to make electricity is accounted for separately from the gas sent to the refining facility that gets credited by California\u2019s program.<\/p>\n Ruby, the Dominion spokesperson, said the amount and cost of the credits, as well as what buyers might be purchasing from the facility, is \u201cproprietary business information.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Dominion and Smithfield didn\u2019t respond to a request for comments as to whether they were seeking additional certifications from the LCFS as they look to connect 13 more farms to the Align RNG project. They also didn\u2019t say what funding streams they plan to use as they look to build a second processing facility in Bowdens, just north of Warsaw, that would serve 35 more farms, according to the Align RNG website<\/a>.<\/p>\n CARB didn\u2019t say whether it was working on certifying any more fuel pathways from North Carolina swine farms.<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Align-RNG-zoomed-in_w.jpg\"\/)
The Align RNG biogas plant will process methane gas piped in from 19 swine farms and inject it into a Piedmont Natural Gas pipeline. The small silver cylinders of the facility sit to the left of the Smithfield feed silos in Turkey, N.C. Credit: Blanca Begert\/Inside Climate News<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/AnaerobicBiodigester750px.png\"\/)
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Several biogas processing plants have been built or are under construction in Sampson and Duplin counties. The Carbon Cycle Energy facility outside Warsaw is just three miles away from the Align RNG plant. Credit: Blanca Begert\/Inside Climate News<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/NorthCarolinaCAFOsPipeline850px.png\"\/)
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An aerial view of a Kilpatrick hog farm involved with the California-funded Align RNG project. Credit: Kemp Burdette<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/EJCAN-hog-farm-map-1024x683.jpg\"\/)
A map in the Environmental Justice Community Action Network office shows industrial poultry and swine farms in eastern North Carolina. Credit: Blanca Begert\/Inside Climate News<\/p>\n
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