Why Clean Planet Innovations?
Exploring the Untapped Potential of Biogas
The U.S. has more than 2,300 sites producing biogas in all 50 states: 475 anaerobic digesters on farms, 1,269 water resource recovery facilities using an anaerobic digester, 97 stand-alone systems that digest food waste, and 549 landfill gas projects. For comparison, Germany has nearly 10,000 operating digesters and some communities are essentially fossil fuel free because of them
The potential for growth of the U.S. biogas industry is huge. We count more than 15,000 new sites ripe for development today: 8,600 dairy, poultry, and swine farms; 4,000 water resource recovery facilities, 2,000 food scrap-only systems, and utilizing the gas at 470 landfills who are flaring their gas.
American Biogas Council
While biogas may not completely replace natural gas, it does significantly reduce landfill waste, which natural gas and renewable electricity cannot do. Biogas systems offer giant opportunity in the U.S., which throws away 30-40% of all food. Wastewater treatment plants with anaerobic digestors account for less than 10% of all treatment plants in the US, most of those are large facilities, leaving tons of opportunities in the medium facility space.
Wastewater Sector emits nearly twice as much methane as previously thought.
Princeton University Engineering Study Feb 2023
If fully realized, these new biogas systems could produce 103 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity each year and reduce the emissions equivalent of removing 117 million passenger vehicles from the road. These new biogas systems would also catalyze an estimated $45 billion in capital deployment for construction activity which would result in approximately 374,000 short-term construction jobs to build the new systems and 25,000 permanent jobs to operate them. Indirect impacts along supply chains would be even greater
Investing in natural gas pipelines will aid the journey toward net-zero by preparing existing infrastructure for future clean fuels and, in the meantime, reducing harmful methane leaks from natural gas, according to a Columbia University report
American Biogas Council