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BioCycle June 2016, Vol. 57, No. 5, p. 13
American Biogas Council RIN Calculator
Washington, DC: New Tools From ABC
The American Biogas Council (ABC) recently posted two new tools at www.AmericanBiogasCouncil.org: The Biogas Research Database, and the RIN Calculator. The biogas research page is a clearinghouse for completed biogas-related research projects culled from the USDA Research, Education, and Economics Information System (REEIS) database. ABC staff, with support from ABC member BIOFerm, divided the 1,246 funded and completed projects into 13 categories, and created 315 keywords.
The RIN Calculator for Biogas Projects was developed by the ABC’s Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) Working Group. It is an online tool that calculates how many RINs (Renewable Identification Numbers) can be earned from biogas utilized as an advanced biofuel. The RINs are available under the U.S. EPA’s Renewable Portfolio Standard.
Durham, Oregon: Wastewater Codigestion Plant Gets Engine Boost
The 22 million gallons/day Durham Advanced Wastewater Treatment Facility services the nearly 250,000 residents of Beaverton, Tigard, Sherwood, Tualatin, Durham, King City, and portions of Clackamas and Multnomah Counties. It is operated by Clean Water Services (CWS), the water resources management utility in the region. Since 1993, the plant has operated a 500-kilowatt (kW) cogeneration system using biogas from its anaerobic digester to offset its own energy usage. Recently, the 500 kW engine was replaced with two new engines with a combined cogeneration capacity of 1.7-megawatts (MW). In addition to biosolids, Durham’s AD facility processes fats, oils and grease (FOG) from Washington County restaurants, commercial food processors and others. The new system triples Durham’s renewable energy generation, producing 60 percent of the electricity needed to run the water resource recovery facility when coupled with its existing 403-kW solar electric system. Renewable electricity — 12,800 MW hours/year — and heat produced will be used onsite, reducing CWS’s energy costs by nearly $800,000 annually.
The agency received cash incentives from Energy Trust of Oregon and tax credits from the Oregon Department of Energy. Energy Trust is an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to helping utility customers benefit from saving energy and generating renewable power. “Clean Water Services is turning a liability into an asset by harnessing energy that was literally going down the drain and using it to generate clean power,” said Betsy Kauffman, renewable energy sector lead, Energy Trust. “That’s smart leadership and a cost-effective investment.”
Madison, Wisconsin: Energy Office Releases Biogas Survey Results
The Wisconsin Office of Energy Innovation (OEI) recently released the results of its Wisconsin Biogas Survey, which provides a comprehensive look into the state’s biogas industry. The goal of the survey was to identify primary operational challenges, key financial barriers to project development and opportunities for future industry development. OEI surveyed representatives from 146 facilities, including those in the following four industry sectors: Agricultural with digester; Municipal wastewater with digester; Industrial wastewater with digester; and Landfill with gas capture. Biogas produced by the installations surveyed is converted in millions of Btu in heat, and power 140 MW of electrical generation capacity.
Among the challenges cited by operators are the failure of AD system design to protect electrical generation equipment from impurities in biogas; unfavorable Power Purchase Agreements with utilities for renewable power generation; proper system maintenance; and lack of a forum for information sharing. See “Moving Wisconsin’s Biogas Industry Forward,” September 2015, for a summary of the survey findings.
Deerfield, Massachusetts: Bar-Way Farm To Build AD Codigestion Facility
Bar-Way Farm, which has a 500-head dairy herd on its fourth-generation farm in Deerfield, is building a $4 million anaerobic digester to manage 25 tons/day of dairy manure along with 45 tons/day of food scraps. The AD system will use the CH Four Biogas technology, and utilize the biogas to generate electricity using a combined heat and power generator. The farm will use about 10 percent of the electricity; the remainder will be sold into the grid. The facility will also produce 3 million BTUs of thermal energy an hour; 25 percent will heat the digester and the rest used to heat the farm’s buildings. Digestate will be dewatered, with the solids recycled as animal bedding and the liquid effluent going to land application.
The CH Four Biogas technology uses a separate hydrolyzer ahead of the acidogenesis-acetogenesis-methanogenesis digestion phases, which, according to the vendor, produces a more homogenous digestible slurry, allows some accommodation for variation in feedstock constituents, facilitates removal of contaminants after the hydrolysis step, and can increase biogas production.
Bar-Way Farm has formed a separate company, Bar-Way Gas LLC. It is working with Vanguard Renewables of Wellesley on the project development. Funding includes a $400,000 grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and a $335,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service. Start-up is expected in December 2016. Vanguard Renewables will operate the facility, working with Casella Resource Solutions to source the food wastes.
London, England : UK Changes Feed-In Tariffs For AD Plants
The United Kingdom’s Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC) has modified the Feed-In Tariff (FIT) program for renewable energy installations in the UK, including anaerobic digestion facilities. The Feed-in Tariffs (FIT) scheme, a government program designed to promote a range of small-scale renewable and low carbon electricity generation technologies, is available through licensed electricity suppliers. It requires some suppliers to make tariff payments on both generation and export of renewable and low carbon electricity.
DECC’s main changes include the introduction of deployment caps, reintroduction of preliminary accreditation, and changes to FIT payments for photovoltaic, wind and solar. Changes were made due to budgetary concerns. Deployment caps were introduced in February 2016 to limit the amount of capacity that can be accredited under the FIT scheme. Each deployment cap is set for a 3-month period, with different caps for different technologies. For AD, the deployment cap is 5,000 kW of new installations during the 3-month period, or 20 MW/year. If a cap is reached before the end of a period, no more installations will be accredited during that time. An application for a plant which breaches the cap is counted towards the next quarter — but any capacity unused is simply lost. As of May 2016, new AD accreditation applications have consumed the available capacity through mid-2017.
The UK Anaerobic Digestion and Biogas Association took issue with the government’s decision. Charlotte Morton, ADBA’s chief executive, told Waste Management World:
“The FIT deployment cap of 20 MW/year for AD is already constraining much needed baseload capacity, failing to recognize our industry’s ambition. Not rolling over unused capacity from one tariff period to the next is salt in the wound and a shocking waste of MWs worth of renewable electricity, which DECC has already accounted for. The figures released by the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets show the scale of wasted capacity but future quarters could see far more MW of wasted potential.” ADBA is asking DECC to allow the industry to continue to develop at least up to the 20 MW cap carved out for AD.
The incentives for AD plants in the U.K. include:
• Electricity generation – for plants under 5MW, the FIT varies depending on electrical production capacity from 9.49p/kWh to 12.46p/kWh ($0.14 – $0.18/kWh) for 20 years
• Renewable Heat Incentive – 7.5p/kWh ($0.11/kWh) for heat produced from biogas combustion (up to 200 kWth limit) for 20 years or 7.5p/kWh ($0.11/kWh) for injecting biomethane into the natural gas pipeline grid
• Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation – Two Renewable Transport Fuels Certificates (RTFCs) per kilogram of biomethane if the feedstock is from waste sources, and one RTFC otherwise. The price of a RTFC is approximately 20p/kg ($0.29 per pound).
Waunakee, Wisconsin: Clean Fuel Partners Buys Farm AD Facility
Clean Fuel Partners, LLC (Madison, WI) purchased the Dane County (WI) anaerobic digestion facility near Waunakee from Clear Horizons — the original developer and operator — in late 2015. The facility, which includes three digester tanks, treats 100,000 gallons/day of manure from 2,400 cows on three nearby farms that is pumped through underground pipes to a receiving tank. Dane County owns the land and the water quality equipment but the facility is privately operated on a lease from the county. It was built in 2010 to help Dane County manage water quality impacts in the Yahara River watershed from land application of manure. The digesters remove 3,000 lbs/year of phosphorus from the watershed.
Under Clear Horizon’s management contract, the digester facility reported three spills of manure totaling 457,000 gallons; the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources cited the facility almost 90 times for air pollution violations. Clean Fuel Partners financed substantial upgrades prior to closing the sale, including health and safety and site improvements, new infrastructure and repairs to the digesters, and new digestate dewatering equipment. The facility has a power purchase agreement to sell the electricity.
Pullman, Washington: Economic Feasibility Of Dairy Waste Management Systems
Two Washington State University (WSU) researchers, Gregory Astill and Richard Shumway, have investigated the economic feasibility of on-farm waste management systems for dairy manure. They focused on two technology groups: An anaerobic digestion (AD) system that includes either animal waste input or combination animal/off-farm organic waste codigestion input and either compressed natural gas (CNG) or combined heat and power (CHP) output; and a filtration system that includes fiber separation, nutrient separation, and/or water recovery. The two technology groups interconnect through their use of methane and nutrients, which were modelled structurally to examine economies of scope.
As reported in their paper from the WSU School of Economic Sciences, “Profits from Pollutants: Economic Feasibility of Integrated Anaerobic Digester Systems,” Astill and Shumway concluded that AD setups without codigestion are only economically feasible under a limited set of conditions, but the most profitable scenarios that use codigestion have the potential to contribute to nutrient over-application via land application of digestate without nutrient separation. Trends for CNG and CHP match closely. Net present value (NPV) is greatest for AD with CNG scenarios. With environmental credits such as RINs (derived from EPA Renewable Fuel Standard), estimated NPV is $2 million to $42 million for dairies with 1,600 wet cow equivalents (WCE) and 15,000 WCE, respectively. For these farm sizes, codigestion contributes an additional $5 million and $49 million, respectively, in estimated NPV, and fiber separation an additional $2.4 million and $22.8 million, respectively. “Integrated AD systems that include nutrient separation generally produce positive NPVs when combined with energy creation and fiber separation, but it modestly decreases overall NPV with codigestion,” note Astill and Shumway. “Water recovery technology is currently sufficiently expensive to plunge NPV into the negative range for nearly half of the scenarios that include it.”
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