Carbon Cycle Energy Breaks Ground on $100-Million Biogas Facility in North Carolina

The largest utility-scale biogas facility in the U.S., capable of transforming animal and food waste into clean-burning renewable natural gas, broke ground on December 15, near Warsaw, North Carolina.

The $100-million facility, located on 82 acres in southeastern North Carolina, is the first in a pipeline of large-scale anaerobic digestion and biogas treatment facilities planned by Carbon Cycle Energy (C2e), a renewable energy development company based in Boulder, Colorado.

Upon completion in late 2017, the biogas facility, known as C2e Renewables NC, will process more than 750,000 tons of organic waste per year. At full capacity, the plant will generate 6,500 dekatherms of biomethane per day, equivalent to roughly 50,000 gallons of diesel fuel.

C2e has already signed contracts to supply 100 percent of the plant’s output of biomethane to the utility giant Duke Energy and a second, unnamed Fortune 500 company.

“The sheer size of this project means that it will have a huge environmental impact both by addressing the major pollution problem caused by greenhouse gas emissions from decomposing food and animal waste, and by producing an alternative to fossil fuels in commercially significant volumes,” said C2e CEO James Powell.

C2e has secured access to a variety of organic waste streams, comprised of manure and other agricultural waste as well as industrial food processing waste, which will be converted by anaerobic digesters into raw biogas, upgraded on site, and injected directly into the natural gas pipeline system.