Behind the Renewable Energy Curtain in California

by James L. Stewart (Biofuels Digest/California’s BioEnergy Producers Association/Technikon Renewable Energy Solutions) ... With the most aggressive series of carbon emissions reduction benchmarks ever enacted by any government in North America, one would expect a concerted, cooperative effort by state government to meet these goals.

But what do you find if you look behind the curtain?

An empty stage where municipal solid waste (MSW) feedstocks have been concerned. During the past decade, the state has placed 340 million tons of solid waste in landfills. Throughout this time, its legislative/regulatory bureaucracy has obstructed the introduction of conversion technologies capable of producing power, biofuels, chemicals, renewable natural gas and other biobased products from MSW feedstocks–most particularly technologies using gasification.

For example, ever since its first publication in 2006, California’s annual BioEnergy Action Plan, the key document guiding the state’s Bioenergy Interagency Working Group, has included language directing CalRecycle “to work to promulgate changes to existing law to develop a regulatory framework for biomass waste conversion facilities, meeting environmental standards, that clearly distinguishes them from disposal, and provides clear permitting pathways for their development, as well as provides diversion credits to local jurisdictions for solid waste processed by these technologies.”

Have any of these goals been achieved?

And among other repressive provisions, the state’s legislative bureaucracy, for more than a decade, has blocked all efforts to amend or remove from statute a definition of gasification that is universally acknowledged to be scientifically inaccurate, and which leaves developers vulnerable to spurious legal challenges and possible shutdown due to lack of compliance.

The definition restricts the use of air or oxygen in the gasification process (a disqualifying element for most technologies), and requires zero emissions, not simply from the gasification step, but from the entire biorefining process. This is a physical impossibility and a standard that would shut down every power plant and petroleum refinery in the state, not to mention any gasification–and anaerobic digestion facilities, as well.

In contrast over the past five years, the administration, through regulatory decision-making alone, classified anaerobic digestion as composting, and as recycling rather than disposal, exempting these technologies from having to follow the same uncertain and time-consuming siting provisions and permitting pathways required of other conversion technologies, enabling them to receive landfill diversion credit, and to qualify the power they produce for the RPS.

Assembly Bill 341, passed in 2011, requires CalRecycle, the state’s integrated waste management agency, to adopt a mandatory program of commercial recycling and to pursue a new statewide goal of 75% recycling, to be achieved by 2020 through source reduction, recycling, and composting (including anaerobic digestion). Both the legislation and CalRecycle’s subsequent policy initiatives have specifically ignored the potential role of MSW conversion technologies in this effort.

What are the implications?

According to a March 2015 CalRecycle report, “In order for California to reach a statewide recycling rate of 75%, at least half of the solid waste that is currently being disposed would need to be recycled.”

Further, the state’s Air Resources Board has long recognized that organic waste is one of the only feedstocks that, on a life-cycle basis, will meet the emissions reduction objectives of California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard. As early as 2010, its staff declared that 24 waste-to-biofuels facilities would be required in the state by 2020—18 plants that produce biofuels from waste products and six new biodiesel/renewable diesel plants—to assist in meeting the goals of this program.

The state’s increased mandates for 50% renewable power and the reduction of organics going to landfills present a challenge for the renewable natural gas (RNG) industry. With the volume of organics reaching landfills in decline, producers will begin to see a reduction in landfill biogas output. For them, a major alternative will be to produce biomethane through gasification of the post-recycled organics that are being mandated for diversion from landfills. READ MORE