PENN VALLEY, PA — The key to energy in the future can be summed up in three words: renewable, reliable and sustainable.
Renewable natural gas fits the above criteria. Those in attendance at last week’s Shale Directories and the RNG Directory presented Southeast RNG Conference learned latest EPA developments among numerous RNG-related topics.
“The Southeast RNG Conference was very well managed and had a great agenda of speakers. In addition to connecting and reconnecting with RNG experts, I came away with some new contacts that are leading to new business opportunities and have already made some good referrals,” said conference presenter Gus Simmons, Chief Innovation Officer and Director of Bioenergy Services for Cavanaugh & Associates.
Among the many points presented at the conference:
- Purity of RNG produced and accurate tracking/reporting of product are key to maximizing a project’s profitability and ensuring compliance with RNG consumers and the Environmental Protection Agency.
- Profitable RNG deals involve a complex and transparent relationship with feedstock suppliers, offtake customers and investment partners.
- With much RNG coming from dairy and swine farms’ waste, hub and spoke projects, in which numerous farms are connected to a central processing site, allow the economics of scale to positively impact smaller farms. Those farms by themselves do not generate the volume of waste to be cost-efficient.
- Navigating the complexities of RINS (Renewable Identification Numbers), eRINS (Electric Renewable Identification Numbers), and the (California) LCFS (Low-Carbon Fuel Standard) is well worth the effort in unlocking/increasing a project’s profitability.
- Despite providing jobs, local investment, and helping solve the climate change dilemma, RNG proponents must take time to make the general public aware of the product’s benefits – before opponents slow the budding industry in its tracks.
“We feel we really educated and connected our registrants based on the feedback we’ve already received,” said Tom Gellrich, CEO and founder, RNG Directory.
One of the other benefits of attending last week’s conference was hearing about new, innovative projects underway.
Such a project is a 70-foot-high anaerobic digester – the tallest constructed or under construction to date.
While building higher is more expensive and slightly reduces digester performance, it maximizes capacity at footprint-constrained sights. More such projects are expected to be constructed in space-constrained cities looking to solve their food waste problem.
The one-day program even attracted a handful of students studying biology, agriculture and engineering at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, 130 miles from the program’s Charlotte location.
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