Philadelphia Energy Solutions Refinery and RNG Energy team to set up a biomethane plant in a refining complex

Type of post: NEWS.

An interesting example of cooperation between an oil and gas company and a player of the renewable energy arena was unveiled at the end of the last month. On the one hand, Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) which owns and operates the Point Breeze and Girard Point oil refineries located on an integrated complex in Philadelphia. Their 335,000 barrels per day of combined capacity makes PES the largest refining complex on the US Eastern Seaboard. On the other hand, RNG Energy (RNG) which develops, finances, owns and manages the operations of anaerobic digester projects that produce renewable natural gas. RNG built in Colorado what it says is the world's largest codigester (Heartland Project) which converts food waste and cattle manure into methane.

Figure 1. The Heartland Project in Colorado was built by RNG (extracted from RNG website)

Both companies announced on August 27 that they have completed and executed several contracts including a long-term renewable natural gas sales agreement and site lease agreement to build a state-of-the-art anaerobic digester facility (see press release, 27/8/2018).

Project name	Point Breeze Renewable Energy (PBRE).
Location	PES Refining Complex.
Feedstocks	1,100 tons per day of diverted organic waste (grocery, restaurant and food processing wastes). The waste would be concentrated at two or three satellite plants located at trash-transfer stations. There, they would be converted into a slurry to be delivered in fully enclosed tanker trucks to the PBRE facility.
Products	- 3 million cubic feet of Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) per day. It will be injected into the interstate pipeline and sold as a transportation fuel for bus and truck fleets. - A high-value agricultural fertilizer. It will be marketed as a soil amendment and landscaping material.
Cost	120 M$.
Timeline	Permitting and construction of the project is estimated to take two to three years.

PES, which recently emerged from bankruptcy protection, is supplying land and steam energy to the project and will buy and market the renewable gas produced. PES will retain the renewable energy credits generated from the sale of biogas, which will reduce its need to buy the credits on the open market. The high cost of those credits (RINs or Renewable Identification Numbers) was one of the main financial reasons that sent the refinery into bankruptcy.

RNG is developing similar systems in Seattle, Boston and Linden, aimed at capturing food waste in metropolitan areas to reduce the distance that the raw material needs to be transported.