U.S. utilities are increasingly looking to farms, landfills and even food waste as a way to capture substitutes for the fossil fuel while at the same time reducing their own greenhouse-gas emissions. Capturing methane is particularly desirable since it’s more than 80 times as potent as a global warming agent in its first 20 years in the atmosphere compared with carbon dioxide.

Farmers will be partial owners of the systems installed by SustainRNG on their land to gather and process the manure and methane, which will “create a revenue stream or at the very least minimize their costs” from managing waste, Weintraub said in an interview. He declined to disclose terms of the deal, but said Duke will have the opportunity to invest in specific projects.