CleanWorld was awarded a grant in 2012 from the California Energy Commission to scale up the Sacramento BioDigester. The project increased the food waste diversion from landfills from 25 tons per day to 100 tons per day, as well as produced renewable natural gas for transportation fuel.
This project met the principal goals of the CEC by stimulating local economic development and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, petroleum demand, and the environmental impacts associated with disposal of organic waste in area landfills. The project directly supported the legislative and regulatory objectives of CalRecycle, the CPUC, and CARB.
For this demonstration project, tasks included: Preconstruction and Planning; Design Development and Cost Estimating; Procurement and Fabrication of System Components; Construction and Onsite Fabrication and Assembly; System Testing, Startup and Achieving Full Operational Status; and Data Collection and Analysis.
CleanWorld completed the scale-up of the facility and began loading feedstock in June 2015. Two tanks and two pumping and controls skids were added to the existing system. This quadrupled the system’s capacity and output. As of publication, the BioDigester was accepting 35-40 tons per day on the way to achieving full capacity. Biogas production was also over twice as high as its historical output, and the biogas yield was as high as required to achieve the projected full energy production (1,080 diesel gas equivalent per day of biomethane fuel) when the system reaches full capacity.
Due to the work performed under this grant, CleanWorld designed, fabricated, constructed, and commissioned a scale-up to an existing BioDigester system, demonstrating the scalability of the technology as well as providing a larger treatment system for Sacramento-area organic waste haulers. The lessons learned here will impact and enhance all CleanWorld’s currently operating BioDigesters, and should expand the customer base in the future, particularly for customers with expanding and/or uncertain waste volumes.
