StormFisher’s vice president of development and operations, Brandon Moffatt, has long been committed to sustainability. He grew up on a beef farm in southwestern Ontario, where, watching manure morph into fertilizer, he got his first lesson in the circular economy. The farm also taught him a deep respect for the environment, he says, something that he’s carried into his work at StormFisher. “For me, it’s making sure you try and make the world a better place than when you came into it,” Moffatt says.
Moffatt visited Europe five years ago and discovered yet another way to do that by producing RNG through a whole new method. In northern Germany, an Audi factory was using renewably generated electricity — wind and solar — to split water into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. It then took carbon dioxide (CO2) from a nearby waste biogas plant and combined it with the hydrogen in a chemical reactor to create synthetic methane. Once refined, that resulting methane was no different than the methane that comprises fossil natural gas or the RNG that Moffatt makes in his London biogas facility.
The technology made a lot of sense, so when Moffatt got back to Canada, he quickly set about figuring out how to make it work here. He calculated that he could make seven times more RNG from a so-called power-to-gas plant than from his London operation, which is one of the largest in North America. By converting off-peak wind and solar energy, neither of which generate emissions, the RNG would essentially be carbon-neutral. Using power-to-gas, Moffatt says, “I can make renewable natural gas at a much larger scale to help accelerate the decarbonization that we need to take.” More >>