Largest U.S. Utility-Scale Biogas Facility Under Construction

Construction of the largest utility-scale biogas production facility in the United States – capable of generating power for 32,000 homes each year – is set to kick off on Dec. 15 in North Carolina, the future owner of the facility, Boulder, CO-based Carbon Cycle Energy (C2e), announced Wednesday.

Occupying 82 acres near Warsaw, NC, the $100 million facility is expected to be completed in 2017 and will process over 750,000 tons of organic waste annually. The company’s chief executive officer, James Powell, said in a press release that the facility will generate 290,000 MWH of electricity per year, a higher capacity than any other similar standalone facility in the U.S.

“The sheer size of this project means that it will have a huge environmental impact both by addressing the major pollution problem caused by greenhouse gas emissions from decomposing food and animal waste, and by producing an alternative to fossil fuels in commercially significant volumes,” said Powell.

When the plant reaches full capacity, the site will produce 6500 dekatherms of biomethane per day, the company said, which is the equivalent to about 50,000 gallons of diesel fuel. C2e said it has secured sources of a variety of organic waste streams, including industrial food processing waste. Food and animal waste will be converted into biogas through anaerobic digestion, and then upgraded on site and injected into the natural gas pipeline system.

“C2e chose North Carolina’s Duplin County as the location for its first project based on its proximity to a natural gas pipeline and its optimal access to large volumes of agricultural and food waste,” a company press release said. The county contains more than 530 hog farming operations, which provide a good feedstock for biogas.  

The Boulder company said it has signed contracts to supply 100% of the facility’s output to utility company Duke Energy and an unnamed Fortune 500 company. C2e’s North Carolina site is the first of several other large-scale anaerobic digestion and biogas treatment facilities that the company will construct.

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