Dubuque, Iowa-based Unison Technologies started up one of the nation’s few biomethane-for-vehicles project at the Rodefeld Landfill in Dane County, Wisc. late in December, company president Jan Scott reported at the Green Truck Summit here yesterday.
The small-scale, dairy-based facility is designed to produce about 100 GGE (gasoline gallons equivalents) daily.
In part because its use offsets emissions of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, biomethane has often been described as the cleanest by far of all fuels. Biogas can be drawn from municipal waste, landfills, food or agricultural waste. For all of them the challenge is in the removal of moisture, carbon dioxide and other contaminants to make biomethane of a quality suitable for pipeline injection or vehicle use.
Gas purification hardware for the Unison installation cost about eight times as much as the associated compressed natural gas fueling installation, Scott said.
Tax regulations also favor the use of biogas to make electricity over upgrading to biomethane.
Green Truck Summit organizer Calstart has been a long-time promoter of biomethane, hosting conferences on the fuel and tours of successful facilities as far afield as Sweden.
Calstart helped write the grant applications for two projects out of five just proposed for a total of $26 million in California Energy Commission funding:
CR&R Incorporated is to receive a proposed $4.5 million to apply anaerobic digestion to make biomethane from municipal garbage in Perris (south of Riverside, Calif.). CR&R operates some 150 LNG and compressed natural gas trucks, but prefers pipeline injection for the Perris biomethane, with arrangements for fleets to buy the green fuel on an offset basis.
Northstate Rendering is to receive just shy of $3.96 million in CEC grant money, plus $1,500,000 in loan funding with a $3,958,150 match, to construct an anaerobic digestion facility in Oroville, north of Sacramento. “We’re taking the more troublesome waste that Northstate Rendering takes in, mostly grease and food waste, and diverting that material to digesters and making it into CNG for Northstate to run its trucks,” says Brian Gannon, president of project partner BioGas Energy.
Calstart is forming a Renewable Natural Gas Industry Action Group (RNG-IAG) to help advance the use of RNG-biomethane as a transportation fuel. The organization “wants to help this industry get the funds, recognition and support it needs,” says clean transportation solutions director Mike Ippoliti.
“We see RNG as a win-win,” he says. “It takes waste streams and creates a fuel that displaces petroleum. It solves a problem while creating a solution. And it does this with proven technology, no breakthroughs needed, and is ready to scale-up today.
“[California Air Resources Board] analysis has shown that RNG has the lowest greenhouse gas impact of any vehicle fuel they’ve examined,”
Ippoliti says, “lower even than an EV running on California grid electricity.”
System startup for Unison biomethane unit at the Rodefeld Landfill in Dane County, Wisc. took place on December 28
some say biomethane is to cleanest fuel of all, its also known as RNG-renewable natural gas or, as this logo would have it, BioCNG (compressed natural gas)
