Gold Rush: Daryl Maas Followed His Dreams to California

by Ron Kotrba (Biomass Magazine) Daryl Maas followed his dreams to California, where he is filling an important niche helping mitigate climate change and dairy farmers mine the lucrative rewards of cow manure. -- Daryl Maas was raised among the Dutch dairy farms of Northwest Washington. After joining the military and serving his country, Maas came home to the place he knew so well to further serve—but in a vastly different capacity. This time, he was to help those same dairy farmers around whom he was raised. Searching for a post-military career in his hometown, his radar picked up on dairy digesters and he never looked back.

“My brother Kevin went to graduate school, so we put a business plan together,” Maas says. “We started looking at funding, talking with good friends we grew up with who were now running their parents’ farms, and we began investigating technologies.”

The brothers Maas launched Farm Power Northwest in 2007. “I was the CEO, and Kevin was the CFO,” Maas says. “We raised local money and our first project came online in 2009—just a few miles from where we grew up.”

I began exploring the California market. It was a much more interesting market to me. There are more dairy cows there than any other state. And California has a lot of incentives for renewables that could be interwoven into the mix.

Founded in 2010, Maas Energy Works initially had one employee on the payroll—Daryl Maas. “My office was half of my master bedroom,” he says. Today, Maas Energy Works employs 26 full-time workers plus contractors. The company has 22 operating digesters online with another 41 in development. ..."

The beauty of Maas Energy Works’ offerings for dairy farmers is, he offers choices: producer- or developer-owned digesters. If a dairy farm chooses the former, then Maas Energy Works handles all design work, financial projections, grant financing, grid interconnections, regulatory permits, procurement, and construction management. When the project is online, Maas Energy Works operates the site for the dairy farm, with 24/7 monitoring and operations support.

After years of immersion studying the complex world of carbon credits, utility tariffs, design-build-operation and business nuances, Maas says, “After about 2013, we were delivering complete projects more or less ourselves. We still hired construction contractors, but we controlled the whole process, which is critical. This helped us truly understand how digesters get built, particularly in California, which is so difficult for permitting. Beginning to end—that’s what we provide now. Not an amazing, patented design, but a team that knows the entire process and can deliver the project through the end in this difficult state.”

The company has also transitioned from purchasing preassembled, turbocharged Siemens genset packages from vendors to assembling the gensets itself in Redding, California, where it shares a fabrication shop with its sister company, Electric Innovations Inc.

The emerging cluster concept between Maas and Schlyer (Lyle Schlyer, president of Calgren Renewable Fuels in Pixley, California) started taking shape in 2016. The idea was to secure as many dairy farmers with adjoining land surrounding the ethanol plant to agree to position digesters on their property and pipe the biogas to a central location—the Calgren Renewable Fuels ethanol plant—where a biogas cleanup plant and interconnection to the utility pipeline would be located.

Schlyer says a main driver for the rush to dairy digesters in California was the Air Resources Board’s expansion under the Compliance Offset Protocol Livestock Projects, which had previously relegated carbon credits to the cap-and-trade system. “Then they decided to expand it to the LCFS,” he says. “That was huge. We’re talking $18 vs. a couple hundred dollars. Then it all started to come together. As soon as we got approval, we were off and running.”

"... So, the way the livestock protocol works is, you get the biggest credit for capturing the most amount of manure [that would otherwise go uncaptured].”

Calgren Renewable Fuels is beyond cutting edge in its approach to bioenergy. It operates a true biorefinery in Pixley, California, making ethanol, cattle feed, biogas and a recently commissioned biodiesel production facility onsite. READ MORE