RNG NEWS
Stay up to date with the latest stories, insights, and announcements.Milwaukee Approves Plan for Second Landfill Gas Facility
By Don Behm, The Journal Sentinal.
The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District will spend $14.1 million in the next two years to build storm sewers and complete two storm water storage basins, as part of a flood control plan for the 30th St. industrial corridor north of W. Capitol Drive.
Super Excavators Inc. of Menomonee Falls will build more than one mile of new storm sewers to connect the two basins east of the Canadian Pacific Railway to existing storm sewers, under a contract approved Monday by the district's commission. Super Excavators was the low bidder among three companies competing for the work.
The City of Milwaukee will reimburse MMSD an estimated $8.5 million for costs of installing 5,400 feet of storm sewers, officials said.
U.S. EPA Moves to Regulate Climate-warming Airliner Pollution
By Michael Biesecker, Associated Press, via U.S. News & World Report.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The government has found that jet engine exhaust is adding to climate change and endangering human health, and needs to be regulated.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced Monday that it will use its authority under the Clean Air Act to impose limits on aircraft emissions.
Jet engines spew significant amounts of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, into the upper atmosphere, where they trap heat from the sun. But proposed rules such as imposing fuel-efficiency standards have faced stiff opposition from aircraft makers and commercial airlines.
What Happens to the Clean Power Plan Under Clinton or Trump?
By Jack Fitzpatrick, Morning Consult.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are miles apart on the greenhouse gas-cutting Clean Power Plan. She’s for it. He’s against it. No matter the polarized rhetoric, the plan’s future is much more convoluted than “live or die,” in part because its fate lies in the hands of the courts.
Outside observers and attorneys involved in the lawsuit say the federal government’s actions on greenhouse gases could go in a few different directions, depending on the outcome of the election and an eventual likely high court ruling.
Supporters of the plan, meanwhile, are debating two alternate routes a Clinton administration could take if the plan is struck down.
Stop & Shop turning food waste into energy
By Katrina Koerting, Newstimes.
About 95 tons of over-ripe bananas, pre-made sandwiches, dead flowers and other food waste that can’t be sold or donated are avoiding the landfill and instead being converted to energy using cutting-edge technology.
The waste is collected daily from all Stop & Shop stores in Connecticut and Rhode Island, as well as most of the company’s Massachusetts locations.
It is then converted to energy and compost at a new green facility next to the New England distribution center in Freetown, Mass., using a process called anaerobic digestion.
Clean energy advocates urge DNC to ban fracking, promote renewable fuels
By Jon Hurdle, NPR State Impact.
Thousands of campaigners for clean energy marched through the center of Philadelphia on the eve of the Democratic National Convention on Sunday, urging the party to adopt policies that would ban fracking and promote the use of renewable energy.
In an event that mixed national politics with local opposition to specific energy projects, some demonstrators called on the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, to step up her support for renewable energy, while others – many of them backers of Clinton’s former rival, Senator Bernie Sanders — vowed never to support Clinton even if that increased the chances of the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, becoming president.
Carrying signs such as “NeverHillary – Bernie or Bust” and “Fracking is Not a Bridge – Are You Listening Hillary?” demonstrators marched from City Hall down Market Street to Independence Mall on a sweltering day, in a peaceful but noisy event that called on state and national authorities to ban fracking and associated activities including pipelines and oil trains.
Local company spearheads biogas project on northern Missouri hog farms
By Bryce Gray, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Beginning next month, the manure of northern Missouri pigs will provide energy to far-flung power users connected to a national pipeline system for natural gas.
The biogas project — which relies on anaerobic digestion of animal waste to produce methane — is the culmination of a five-year partnership between St. Louis-based Roeslein Alternative Energy and Smithfield Hog Production, the state’s largest owner of pig farms.
But the gas production facility poised to come online next month at Ruckman Farm near Albany, Mo., is only the start of what is intended to be a much broader marriage of renewable energy and agribusiness. Plans are in place to gradually apply the same technology to Smithfield’s nine hog-finishing farms across northern Missouri — a $120 million endeavor that will eventually harness the waste of approximately 2 million pigs and is projected to be the largest biogas project in North America.
Driving Growth in Driving Green Together, RNG and natural gas vehicles are an affordable and proven long-term solution to reducing air pollution and carbon emissions.
By Marcus Gillette, Biomass Magazine.
Driving vehicles that run on natural gas reduces emissions and allows us to breathe cleaner air. But what many don’t realize is that this is rapidly becoming truer through the increasing use of renewable natural gas in North America’s natural gas vehicle (NGV) infrastructure.
Renewable natural gas (RNG) is derived from the methane that emits from organic waste as it decomposes. This methane is captured at agricultural facilities, landfills, wastewater treatment plants, and separated municipal solid waste digesters, and then cleaned in a treatment process to produce a product indistinguishable from natural gas. The resulting biomethane, or RNG, is then either injected into natural gas pipelines, compressed or liquefied to be used as transportation fuel in the form of renewable compressed natural gas (CNG) or renewable liquefied natural gas (LNG).
Regs and Bacon: North Carolina’s renewable energy mandate is advantageous to pork producers, if conditions are right.
By Anna Simet,
At one time not too long ago, North Carolina was populated with more pigs than people. While that’s no longer true, the state trails only Iowa among pork-producing states, and the industry employs roughly 46,000 North Carolinians, provides $3 billion in annual income and $7 billion in annual sales, and its 2,100 farms—80 percent of which are family-owned—are home to 8.8 million hogs, living on farms that range from 250 to 50,000 head.
For the past two decades, the industry has been increasingly regulated, as a way to manage hog waste and improve and preserve environmental quality. In 1997, a moratorium was placed on the expansion of existing hog farms and the development of new ones. Fast-forward 10 years later, and the moratorium became permanent, with a provision that new permits could be issued only to farms that meet five environmental performance standards: Elimination of discharge of animal waste to surface waters and groundwater through direct discharge, seepage or runoff, as well as substantial elimination of atmospheric emissions of ammonia, emissions of odor detectable beyond the boundaries of the parcel or tract of land on which the farm is located, the release of disease-transmitting vectors and airborne pathogens, and of nutrient and heavy metal contamination of soil or groundwater.
California to issue rules on methane leaks
By Timothy Cama, The Hill.
California regulations have agreed to develop a regulation limiting the amount of methane that oil and natural gas companies can emit.
The state’s Air Resources Board voted late Thursday to move forward on the rule after the months-long leak at an underground gas storage facility north of Los Angeles, Capital Public Radio reported.
"We did not have a regulation in place that covered the methane emissions," says Mary Nichols, the board's chairman, said at a meeting. "We worked with the company to try to get them to voluntarily mitigate for the impacts."
DOE to fund projects combining biofuel and engine research
By Erin Voegele, Biomass Magazine.
The U.S. Department of Energy has announced its intent to issue a funding opportunity announcement (FOA) entitled “Co-Optimization of Fuels and Engines.”
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