LOS ANGELES, June 22, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Southern California
Gas Co. (SoCalGas), Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E),
and Opus 12 today announced they have demonstrated further
advancement of a new electrochemical technology that converts the
carbon dioxide content in raw biogas to pipeline-quality renewable
natural gas, a critical improvement in the science of upgrading
waste emissions to renewable gas. The single-step process is
designed to use renewable electricity, and thus also provides a way
for long-term storage of excess wind and solar power. The
twelve-month research and development effort was funded by SoCalGas
and PG&E and builds on the success of an initial feasibility
study in 2018.
Raw biogas is produced from the anaerobic breakdown of waste
from sources like landfills, sewage, and dairy farms. It contains
roughly 60 percent methane (the main component of natural gas), and
40 percent carbon dioxide. While current biogas upgrading
technology removes the carbon dioxide from biogas, this new
technology captures the carbon dioxide and converts it into
additional renewable fuel.
The new demonstration shows that improved catalyst activity
could speed reactions by five times and nearly double
conversion efficiency, making the technology commercially
competitive with other new biogas upgrading methods. The core
technology was scaled up and tested using commercially available
electrolyzer hardware. The next step will be to test this
technology for longer periods at an existing biogas facility.
"This cutting-edge method of using renewable electricity to
convert carbon dioxide in biogas to renewable natural gas in a
single-step process is significant to SoCalGas," said Yuri Freedman, SoCalGas' senior director of
business development. "As we work to meet California's ambitious climate goals,
emissions-reducing innovations like these will help us protect the
environment by providing a reliable carbon-neutral fuel."
"PG&E is deeply committed to meeting California's bold vision for a sustainable
energy future in a reliable and cost-effective manner for
customers. We continue to work toward advancing innovation
that provides new possibilities in our quest to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions and find alternative sources of carbon-neutral fuel.
We are very proud to be part of this collaboration with Opus 12 and
SoCalGas," said PG&E's Manager of Innovation and Research and
Development, Francois Rongere.
"We achieved significant advances in reaction rate and
demonstrated the scalability of our approach by moving from lab
scale to commercial-grade components," said Dr. Etosha Cave, Opus 12 co-founder and chief
science officer. "We look forward to continuing to work with our
partners at SoCalGas and PG&E toward a field demonstration of
this technology."
"Our vision for deploying this technology in California is to recycle CO2
emissions from industry and agriculture before they reach the air,
and create valuable products such as renewable natural gas and
feedstocks for everyday materials, chemicals, and even liquid
fuels. They are compatible with existing infrastructure, and when
produced with renewable electricity, these products will have
significantly lower lifecycle emissions than conventional
products."
Opus 12, a clean-energy startup with its origins at Stanford University and the prestigious Cyclotron
Road program at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, has created a new
proprietary Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM) electrolyzer that
uses electricity to convert water and carbon dioxide into renewable
natural gas in one step. The technology differs from those that use
microorganisms.
The research is part of SoCalGas' and PG&E's respective
development of cutting-edge technologies for storing excess
renewable energy. Because gases can be easily stored for long
periods of time using existing infrastructure, these technologies
have distinct advantages over storing renewable electricity in
batteries.
About SoCalGas
Headquartered in Los
Angeles, SoCalGas® is the largest gas distribution
utility in the United
States. SoCalGas delivers affordable, reliable, clean and
increasingly renewable gas service to 21.8 million customers
across 24,000 square miles of Central and Southern
California, where more than 90 percent of residents use natural gas
for heating, hot water, cooking, drying clothes or other uses. Gas
delivered through the company's pipelines also plays a key role in
providing electricity to Californians— about 45 percent of
electric power generated in the state comes from gas-fired
power plants.
SoCalGas' vision is to be the cleanest gas utility in
North America, delivering
affordable and increasingly renewable energy to its customers. In
support of that vision, SoCalGas is committed to replacing 20
percent of its traditional natural gas supply with renewable
natural gas (RNG) by 2030. Renewable natural gas is made from
waste created by dairy farms, landfills and wastewater treatment
plants. SoCalGas is also committed to investing in its gas delivery
infrastructure while keeping bills affordable for our customers.
From 2014 through 2018, the company invested nearly $6.5
billion to upgrade and modernize its pipeline system to
enhance safety and reliability. SoCalGas is a subsidiary
of Sempra Energy (NYSE: SRE), an energy services holding
company based in San Diego. For more information
visit socalgas.com/newsroom or connect with SoCalGas
on Twitter (@SoCalGas), Instagram (@SoCalGas)
and Facebook.
About PG&E
Pacific Gas and Electric Company, a
subsidiary of PG&E Corporation (NYSE:PCG), is one of the
largest combined natural gas and electric energy companies in
the United States. Based in
San Francisco, with more than
23,000 employees, the company delivers some of the nation's
cleanest energy to 16 million people in Northern and Central California. For more information,
visit www.pge.com and www.pge.com/news.
About Opus 12
Opus 12, headquartered in
Berkeley, CA, has developed a
device that recycles CO2 into cost-competitive chemicals
and fuels. The company's technology bolts onto any source of
CO2 emissions, and with only water and electricity as
inputs, transforms that CO2 into some of the world's
most critical chemical and energy products.
Founded at Stanford in 2016,
Opus 12 launched during the prestigious Cyclotron Road fellowship
program at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. The company's founders
were featured in Rolling Stone's 25 People Shaping the Next
50 Years, Forbes 30 Under 30 in Energy, MIT
Technology Review's TR35 Innovators, and the
New York Times' Climate
Visionaries, and the company was recently featured in
Bill Gates's 2019 Netflix
documentary, Inside Bill's Brain.
For more information visit opus-12.com and
follow Opus 12 on Twitter (@Opus12CO2).
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SOURCE Southern California Gas Company