The Sacramento Biodigester, which began operations in December 2012, is expanding by 300 percent from a 10,000-tons-per-year facility to a 40,000-tons-per-year facility. Upon completion of the expansion in December 2013, the commercial high-solids food waste digester will convert 100 tons per day of food waste into renewable energy in the forms of heat, electricity, natural gas, and fertilizer enhancements.
CleanWorld’s anaerobic digester converts food waste from area food processing companies, restaurants and supermarkets.
This month, the Sacramento Biodigester began providing renewable compressed natural gas (CNG) to the adjacent Fueling Station operated by Atlas Disposal, providing fuel for the company’s waste hauling fleet. When fully complete, the biodigester will produce about 300,000 standard cubic feet per day of methane, or the equivalent of approximately 700,000 diesel gallons per year of CNG, according to a spokesman for CleanWorld.
When complete, the CleanWorld facility will produce 8 million gallons a year of organic soils and fertilizer products for Sacramento area farms and agriculture and generate 1 million kW to power the facility and the adjacent Fueling Station.
CleanWorld’s proprietary anaerobic digestion technology, developed at the University of California, Davis, and fabricated and constructed in California, utilizes natural microbes to break down organic waste, generating biogas and other forms of renewable energy. CleanWorld’s biodigesters are pre-fabricated and modular-by-design, and require no additional water.
“As to system cost, that’s proprietary in this case because we have multiple financial partners for various elements of the facility,” said the CleanWorld spokesman.
In other biodigester news, the Weltec Biopower plant in Arneburg, Germany, has been supplying the public grid since May. With four digesters of 4,900-cubic-meters, six digestate storage units and a liquid reservoir, the plant produces 1,650 standard cubic meters of raw biogas an hour, 250 cubic meters of which are used for the heat needs of the plant. The feedstocks of the plant include maize silage, whole-plant grain, sugar beets as well as dry chicken dung, chicken manure, liquid manure and water. In total, the substrates delivered by local farmers amount to more than 70,000 tons a year.
