Bioenergy Devco Renewable Natural Gas Project

Bioenergy Devco’s Maryland Food Center Campus is revolutionizing the end use of waste. The first of its scale, the Jessup Bioenergy Center is able to recycle about 110,000 tons of organic matter through the process of anaerobic digestion each year, generating 312,000 MMBtu of renewable natural gas (RNG) that is injected into the common carrier pipeline network — enough to power over 7,600 homes annually. Truck loads of feedstock are collected and inspected, before being delivered to a pre-tank before its final destination: a completely enclosed digester where it’s broken down by microbes. The inputs can range drastically from protein processor misuse, litter and industrial food facility sludge, to fats, oils, greases and excess post-consumer organics and packaged food.

As the microbes do their work, they create biogas which rises to the top of the container, then pumped from the tank, filtered and scrubbed for impurities. From there, the pipeline-quality RNG is injected into the pipeline network. RNG is not only a renewable substitute for fossil natural gas, but, in many cases, also avoids potent methane emissions from being vented into the atmosphere. The Maryland Food Center Campus anaerobically digests food waste that otherwise would have been sent to a landfill and vented methane into the atmosphere. Third-party assessments of the lifecycle carbon emissions of the renewable natural gas generated by the Jessup facility therefore credit the facility for avoiding methane emissions, resulting in a negative carbon intensity of -16 gCO22/MJ. The system came online in 2022.

To learn more about the Bioenergy Devco anaerobic digestion project and how your organization can support this initiative and address its GHG emissions with renewable natural gas (RNG) certificates, Get in Touch.