“We’ll be one of the first in the Midwest to be doing this,” she said.
Dayton City Commission this week approved a contract to sell biogas from the municipal wastewater treatment plant to Pinnacle Gas Producers LLC, which is a subsidiary of DTE Biomass Energy.
The wastewater treatment plant’s operations produce biogas, which is mostly a mix of methane and carbon dioxide, as part of the anaerobic digestion process.
Biogas can be “cleaned” or treated to be used as a renewable energy source.
The wastewater plant generates about 700,000 cubic feet of biogas each day that currently is being used as a fuel source to heat the facility and ancillary buildings on the campus, according to Patrick Ludwig, Dayton’s water reclamation plant engineer.
But Ludwig estimates that roughly 40% of the biogas produced at the plant is burned off as part of a flaring process.
City staff say this flaring process accounts for about half of the greenhouse gas emissions from city facilities.
Dayton plans to sell all of its biogas to Pinnacle Gas Producers, which will install a pipe line at the wastewater plant to transport the substance to its own facility a few miles away.
Pinnacle Gas will transport, clean and sell the gas, at no cost to the city.
The city anticipates it will receive about $1.3 million annually in royalties from the company — or about $26 million over the course of the 20-year agreement.
But the net revenue is expected to be about $800,000 per year, because of new heating costs at the treatment plant. The revenue will go into the city’s sanitary sewer fund.
The wastewater treatment facility plans to switch over to natural gas for its heating needs, which is a cheaper energy source than biogas.
Dayton could become one of a very small number of cities in the Midwest that have pursued selling biogas from wastewater operations for use as a renewable energy source.
Lincoln and Omaha in Nebraska have worked on similar kinds of biogas sustainability projects, and other U.S. cities have systems in place to turn food waste at landfills into biogas.
This project will generate revenue to help city maintain its infrastructure and facilities, ensuring that rate-payers are receiving quality services, said Maloney, the sustainability manager.
But there also is a major environmental benefit as well, she said.
“We now (should) have a huge reduction in our emissions, that is helping us further our sustainability goals, with our climate emergency,” she said. “It also improves air quality for residents, so that’s a big win too.”
Dayton’s wastewater treatment plant, which was built in 1929, started collecting biogas for energy use likely in the 1940s or 1950s, city staff said.
City leaders first talked about biogas as a potential revenue source more than a decade ago, but at that time it was determined that a project like this would not be profitable, said Chris Clark, Dayton’s water reclamation division manager.
But a facility masterplan in 2018 called for reevaluating the idea, and the city later issued a request for qualifications and a request for proposals.
Clark said the money could be used for capital improvements at the plant.
Residents who live near the wastewater treatment facility occasionally complain about smells from the plant. City staff said this additional revenue potentially could be used to pay for upgrades to try to address those kinds of concerns.
Michele Simmons, Dayton’s sustainability and environmental projects administrator, said the city is willing and eager to share this concept with any of the more than 1,200 wastewater facilities located across the nation.
“We can propose this concept for their consideration, in the hopes that they might be able to adopt something similar to this and reduce their carbon emission as well, in a cost-effective way for their communities,” she said.
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