Anaergia expands RNG production to Italy

Anaergia Inc., a renewable natural gas (RNG) company based in Burlington, Ontario, has announced it commissioned a new biomethane facility called the Calimera Bio plant in the Province of Lecce, Italy. The facility is the second of seven facilities Anaergia is building which the company says will form one of the largest food waste to biomethane platforms in Europe.

The Calimera Bio facility has the capacity to anaerobically digest 24,000 metric tons of landfill-diverted food scraps and other organic waste each year. The company will convert this waste into about 2.1 million cubic meters of RNG that will be injected into the region’s natural gas pipelines. The new plant will also treat the digestate that remains after the anaerobic digestion process to create 9,000 tons per year of high-quality natural fertilizer. Anaergia was the technology provider for the project and owns 60 percent of the facility. Anaergia’s partner in this plant is a regional waste management company.

“With six biomethane plants opening in Italy, Anaergia is well-positioned to help meet the growing demand in Europe for biomethane, the European term for renewable natural gas,” says Andrew Benedek, chairperson and CEO of Anaergia. “We are proud of these facilities because they will help Europe meet its ambitious climate change goals, as well as its energy security objectives. Given these drivers, we hope to build many more such plants.” 

The commissioning of the new Calimera plant comes on the heels of the European Commission’s pledge of €37 billion to increase biomethane production in the EU, as part of its €300 billion RePowerEU plan to stop Russian energy imports and move to green energy by the end of the decade. The commission is proposing an action plan to achieve 35 billion cubic meters of annual biomethane production by 2030.

Additionally, the G7 Ministers of Climate, Energy and the Environment highlighted the importance of cutting methane emissions, citing “opportunities to mitigate methane emissions from the waste sector, primarily by diversion of organic waste from landfills…and waste-to-fuel technologies to produce renewable methane from organic waste, agricultural residues and biomass.”