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BFD Expert Voices - Climate Deals

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About 40 miles east of San Francisco, a $110 million plant is turning waste from a landfill into renewable natural gas, capable of powering everything from trucks to data centers.

Why it matters: The first-of-its-kind facility will play a role in bringing down the cost of factories to make the clean fuel.

Driving the news: Climate tech developer Ameresco, utility PG&E, and waste company Republic Services combined to build the plant, dubbed the Keller Canyon RNG facility.

The companies held an official ribbon cutting Wednesday in Pittsburg, Calif.

Officials and project developers gathered under a blazing hot sun, in front of snaking metal pipes and tanks taller than a street light, to celebrate the opening of a plant that took several years to develop.

During remarks, the head of the California Air Resources Board, Liane Randolph, said the project is "an important contribution to advancing the climate strategies that California has to meet our net zero target by 2045."

Behind the press conference, a sprawling valley of covered landfill waste was silently decaying and Class 8 trucks filled with trash rumbled by every few minutes.

Zoom in: The facility can inject 1 billion cubic feet of RNG per year into PG&E's pipeline, one-quarter of what the company expects to deliver by 2025.

Part of the landfill biogas is being used to run a power plant nearby that is powering the facility.

How it works: Republic Services sends trucks of waste from the community to the landfill.

The waste is covered and connected to a vacuum system. When it decays, methane is tapped and piped down to the RNG plant.

The plant cleans up the biogas, making it "pipeline ready," and sends it 3 miles to PG&E's testing site. The clean RNG is then injected into the utility's pipeline.

PG&E customers, like trucking fleets and industrial processing facilities, can buy the gas from the utility.

The big picture: RNG from landfills don't just create power, they're a solution for dealing with the pesky problem of waste emissions.

Landfills are the third largest source of human-caused methane emissions in the U.S. and the second largest in California, said CARB's Randolph at the event.

What's next: PG&E is planning other landfill-to-gas projects, and the utility says the Keller RNG plant will help lower costs and speed up future deployments.

The Keller plant is the 434th RNG project in North America, and there are another 450 under construction or in development, according to the nonprofit RNG Coalition.

A major landfill gas plant comes online in California

The first-of-its-kind facility will play a role in bringing down the cost of factories to make the clean fuel.

A plant that cleans up methane produced by landfill waste to be used in the natural gas pipeline

The Keller Canyon RNG facility cleans up methane produced by landfill waste to be used in PG&E's natural gas pipeline. Photo: Katie Fehrenbacher/Axios

Renewable energy

About 40 miles east of San Francisco, a $110 million plant is turning waste from a landfill into renewable natural gas, capable of powering everything from trucks to data centers.Why it matters: The first-of-its-kind facility will play a role in bringing down the cost of factories to make the clean fuel.

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A major landfill gas plant comes online in California

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