Anaergia tapped to provide technology in California

Anaergia Inc. will provide technology to Monterey One Water, a wastewater utility in northern Monterey County, California, to make renewable energy from food waste and wastewater.

Anaergia, based in Burlington, Ontario, says the project will significantly expand anaerobic digestion (AD) capacity at Monterey One Water's Regional Treatment Plant (RTP) in Marina, California. The planned project also will put in place organic waste receiving and preprocessing equipment at the plant.

The modifications and additions will allow the utility to receive and co-digest food waste in existing digesters currently used to process wastewater biosolids. "When anaerobically digested, the waste produces renewable biogas, which is then used to generate electricity and heat at the Monterey One plant," Anaergia says.

The project will return a mothballed anaerobic digester to service and provide Anaergia digestion tank mixing technology to process food waste with biosolids "without impacting critical wastewater operations," the company adds.

The contract announcement comes at a helpful time for publicly traded Anaergia, which just last month announced the initiation of voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings at its Rialto Bioenergy Facility LLC subsidiary about 370 miles away in southern California.

In Monterey County, the planned new technology will simultaneously improve performance and save energy, Anaergia says. Along with the ability to co-digest food waste with biosolids, Monterey One will benefit from "a significant expansion of digester capacity to provide operational flexibility."

The project will increase biogas production from the plant's four digesters by more than 150 percent, designed to create up to 1.6 megawatts of electricity via onsite combined heat and power (CHP) engines, according to Aneargia,

Increased energy production will ideally provide more than 100 percent of the plant's power needs, thus reducing operating costs and supporting revenue generation via a joint microgrid that will be shared by Monterey One and regional solid waste agency ReGen.

"By upgrading its infrastructure to enable co-digestion of food waste along with its wastewater, Monterey One Water will now not only recycle water [and] it will also recycle organic waste that would have otherwise created methane emissions in landfills," Anaergia CEO Andrew Benedek says.

"This turns a big problem into a huge benefit and ultimately is what will make a net zero future possible for planet Earth. These proven technologies will eventually be implemented at hundreds of other wastewater treatment plants around the world, and Monterey One Water is leading the way."

The planned AD technologies and new waste receiving equipment have been designed to enable the diversion of food waste from regional landfills to attain compliance with California's Senate Bill 1383, which is designed to reduce methane emissions created when food and other organic wastes are landfilled.

The California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle), will provide more than $4.2 million in grant funding, reducing the impact on the utility's ratepayers by offsetting much of the project's cost. Work on the project is expected to begin mid-2023 and be completed by the third quarter of 2024.

"With support from CalRecycle, we have a unique opportunity to co-digest wastewater solids with food waste to produce more green energy, which will both reduce our operating costs and cut our carbon emissions," says Paul Sciuto, general manager of Monterey One Water. "This is a model solution for other wastewater utilities."