2023 AIChE Annual Meeting
Renewable Natural Gas Feasibility Assessment for Hard-to-Decarbonize Sectors in New York State
Several manufacturing industries are significant contributors to the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as a result of the production process. Particularly, industries such as metals, minerals, and pulp/paper are known to be highly carbon-intensive due to high processing temperatures and reliance on fossil fuels. As a result, these three industries are classified as hard-to-decarbonize (HTD) sectors, indicating resistance to efforts made to reduce carbon emissions and transitions to more sustainable methods. Renewable natural gas (RNG) refers to âupgradedâ biogas interchangeable with conventional natural gas, a fossil fuel, due to similar chemical composition. RNG is unique in that it is derived from organic resources such as manure, food waste, and landfill gas and is produced through anaerobic digestion. The process of anaerobic digestion recycles carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which can be used as a strategy to achieve carbon-negative emissions. This case study evaluates RNG feasibility as an alternative to traditional natural gas used by New Yorkâs facilities in HTD sectors. This work extracts all active facilities categorized under each HTD sector (metals, minerals, pulp/paper) and their annual reported direct emissions (natural gas, coal, process emissions) from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) Flight Tool. From this data, the quantity of natural gas and coal consumed per sector can be computed by converting the reported metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MTCO2e) emitted to billion British thermal units (BBTU) consumed. This conversion is utilized to gauge the current demand for natural gas by assessing how much each sector consumes based on their reported emissions. Using the Organic Resource Locator tool by the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), the annual availability of RNG is determined from the identification of sites and the approximate yield of RNG derived from organic resources. This includes existing ADG projects, manure from confined animal feed operations (CAFOs), and food waste. With this data, RNG resource availability from identified sources can be compared to the natural gas demand based on the location of HTD facilities. The results comparing only estimated RNG produced from resources from CAFOs to natural gas demand vary by location where only some clusters had a high percentage of demand met. In future works, the same analysis will be conducted with different organic resources such as landfill gas and wastewater. With this, the demand for natural gas may be fulfilled or even be exceeded.