San Diego Project Taps New England Fuel Cell Company to Generate Energy From Waste Methane Gas

A complicated financing deal led by New Energy Capital of Hanover, NH, has provided $23.5 million for a renewable energy project in San Diego that uses methane gas from a sewage treatment plant to generate electricity from advanced technology fuel cells.

Construction is scheduled to begin next month on a “biogas” purification system developed by BioFuels Energy, an Encintas, CA, startup founded in 2007 to process gas generated at landfills, sewage treatment plants, and at large livestock facilities into usable methane. The plan calls for installing the gas processing at the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant and the South Bay Water Reclamation Plant, which are both operated by the City of San Diego. The city currently flares methane gas generated during the sewage treatment process.

Molten carbonate fuel cells made by Danbury, CT-based FuelCell Energy (NASDAQ: [[ticker:FCEL]]) will be installed at the two treatment plants and on the campus of UC San Diego, according to Byron Washom, UCSD’s director of Strategic Energy Initiatives.

FuelCell Energy logo 2010The fuel cell power plants at the three locations will be configured to provide heat and electricity, and excess methane gas will be injected into the natural gas pipeline delivery system operated under an energy credit initiative approved by the California Public Utilities Commission.

Methane needed to operate the largest fuel cell, a 2.8 megawatt plant at UCSD, will be supplied by San Diego Gas & Electric under the arrangement. Washom said the energy credit scheme, which is a first in California and probably nationwide, is comparable to withdrawing cash from an ATM in San Diego after making a deposit elsewhere. In this case, methane gas from the sewage plant is being processed to meet utility standards and injected into a gas pipeline near the sewage treatment facility in Point Loma. Meanwhile UCSD is withdrawing a similar amount of gas elsewhere for its power plant in La Jolla. The City of San Diego also plans to withdraw gas to power a sewage pumping station in Otay Mesa.

“We’re taking a waste product that is currently being flared and using it to

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.