![]() ![]() Vehicles wait to refuel at the Persigo Wastewater Treatment Plant in Colorado. So the infrastructure was already there, they just switched the natural gas to RNG.Īpproximately 460 gasoline gallon equivalents (GGEs) are produced on-site daily. Grand Junction had installed a compressed natural gas fueling station in 2011. Fleet vehicles fill their tanks with RNG during the night – and by morning they’re ready to go. The underground pipeline is nearly six miles long and carries the RNG (in compressed form, not liquid) from the wastewater plant to the city’s fueling station. “The project will pay for itself in around seven years,” Guillory said. The cost to produce and compress the RNG is around 80 cents per GGE, while it’s sold to the fleet department for $1.50 per GGE. According to Bret Guillory, utility engineer for the city, “we may be reducing greenhouse gases by as much as 60% to 80% … This is compared to the old process of flaring off the raw gas at the plant, and burning diesel and gasoline in some of our larger fleet equipment.”ĭeveloped over 10 years, the project is worth $2.8m. The environmental benefits are abundant for Grand Junction. “Now, instead of letting it go to the flare, it goes to conditioning equipment that scrubs and cleans the gas and puts it into a pipeline,” Tonello said. Tonello said their old method involved simply flaring off the raw gas into the atmosphere. “But as far as we know, we are the only municipal wastewater facility in the nation producing biogas used as vehicle fuel,” said Dan Tonello, wastewater services manager for Grand Junction. For decades, biogas has been used for heating or to power generators and micro-turbines to produce electricity. Turning wastewater into biogas is not new in the US. The biogas is then collected and upgraded to RNG – at pipeline quality – and can be used as electricity, heat or transportation fuel. It’s possible through a process called anaerobic digestion, which breaks down organic matter into something called raw biogas.
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