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To cut carbon footprint, gas utilities exploring renewable natural gas potential

From Manhattan to the Pacific Northwest, gas utilities are exploring the role that so-called renewable natural gas could play in reducing their emissions profiles and supplementing gas supplies.

Renewable natural gas is gas from waste water treatment, landfills, dairy farms or other biological processes that has been purified and turned into pipeline-quality gas. Although more expensive than low-cost shale supplies, renewable gas could be more attractive if carbon credits and other types of regulatory support are considered.

For Southwest Gas Corp., the fuel is part of the company's broader sustainability initiatives. The company is working with dairy farms and sewage treatment plants to get more renewable gas into its system, John Hester, Southwest Gas Holdings Inc.'s president and CEO, said at the American Gas Association's Financial Forum in Phoenix.

"Sewage treatment plants not uncommonly have methane to just be flared off, so there's no productive use of that. We want to capture that, scrub it clean to pipeline quality and deliver it to our customers, to help make our distribution system as carbon-friendly as possible," Hester said May 21.

Hester said the companies' regulators — which span Arizona, Nevada and California — are supportive of sustainability programs. Southwest Gas is still in the early days of incorporating renewable gas into the mainstream, he said on the sidelines of the conference, and cost will be a consideration as the company moves forward. "We're going to work with them to make sure that that gets treated as a normal gas supply and helps to reduce the carbon footprint for the company," Hester said.

At Consolidated Edison Co. of New York Inc., renewable gas could be a piece of a larger puzzle in trying to bring the region's supply and demand into better alignment, Marc Huestis, ConEd's senior vice president of gas operations, said on the sidelines of the Financial Forum.

ConEd is looking for what the company terms "non-pipe solutions" to supply and demand issues, given the complexity of building new pipeline infrastructure in the Northeast. Renewable natural gas projects are one possible outcome from a non-pipe solutions request for proposals issued in late 2017, Huestis said.

"It's something that we are more than willing to evaluate if someone comes forth with a project that's viable," Huestis said. "It's something that could be used on a small scale. ... It's a step in the right direction."

He acknowledged that the nature and size of the company's service territory, which includes New York City, could be an obstacle to getting the necessary infrastructure in place, and any viable proposal would have to address the technical challenge of improving the gas quality to be acceptable for pipeline use.

Some companies have already taken concrete steps towards incorporating renewable natural gas into their systems.

Northwest Natural Gas Co. has signed an agreement with the city of Portland, Ore., to make use of methane released during the wastewater treatment process, and the company is working to further "decarbonize" its operations through renewable natural gas.

"It's actually the largest climate reduction program the city of Portland has ever done, so we're very excited about [it]," David Anderson, the company's president and CEO, said May 21. The project includes a renewable natural gas production facility that recovers and cleans biogas for injection into NW Natural's pipeline system, as well as a natural gas vehicle fueling station.

NW Natural is also assessing power-to-gas technology to take advantage of excess power sometimes generated in the Northwest when high volumes of wind and hydro energy outstrip local demand. That power could be used, Anderson said, to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, freeing up the hydrogen to be burned as fuel.

Hydrogen has a lower energy content than methane — the primary constituent of natural gas — but the hydrogen could be blended into NW Natural's normal pipeline gas stream, Anderson said. When blended, hydrogen could comprise as much as 10% of the fuel moving through the pipe, according to Anderson. NW Natural hopes to launch a pilot project this year.

"This is all kind of new right now. We've obviously described all of this to [the regulators]," Anderson said. "We've been talking to the legislature, governor, everybody saying: 'This is the path we're going down.' I think, in the Northwest, environmentally we should be able to do these kinds of things."