Archaea Energy completes Project Assai RNG facility

Archaea Energy Inc., a Houston-based renewable natural gas (RNG) company, has announced the successful startup of Project Assai—an RNG facility located at the Keystone Sanitary Landfill in Dunmore, Pennsylvania.

As the company states in a press release, pipeline-quality RNG has been produced and commercial operations were achieved Dec. 30, 2021, making Assai the “highest capacity operational RNG facility in the world.”

Assai was constructed, commissioned and completed within budget and in under two years, a timeline that Archaea says is materially shorter than industry averages for landfill gas (LFG) to RNG development projects.

Assai has an inlet capacity of 22,500 standard cubic feet per minute (SCFM) and combines landfill gas flows from the Keystone Sanitary Landfill and the Waste Management Alliance Landfill. Assai is expected to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by over 200,000 metric tons annually and significantly reduce air pollutants, says Archaea.

“Completion of Assai is a monumental moment for Archaea,” says Nick Stork, CEO of Archaea. “I would first like to thank our team. They worked day and night, overcame obstacles, and ignored many voices who said this couldn’t be done, let alone completed safely, under budget, and on an accelerated timeframe not seen before in our industry.

“… We self-performed many critical aspects of this project that most would have outsourced. The compounding effects of this knowledge will translate to lower costs and faster timelines for landfill owners and offtake partners across North America.”

Assai is expected to deliver more than 4 million metric million British thermal units (MMBtu) of RNG annually at projected flows, methane recovery and uptime, resulting in more than $40 million of annual projected earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. The project stands to benefit from long-term gas rights agreements at landfills with decades of capacity and strategically located within growing waste markets.

Approximately 80 percent of the total RNG volumes expected to be produced at Assai have been contracted on a long-term, fixed-fee basis with FortisBC Energy Inc., Énergir LP and The Regents of the University of California for periods of up to 20 years.