WM opens $55M RNG facility in Dallas area

WM has officially opened a new renewable natural gas (RNG) plant in Lewisville, Texas, outside of Dallas.

The nearly $55 million WM Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) RNG facility is expected to generate about 1.2 million MMBtu per year of RNG, which serves the equivalent of nearly 55,000 households annually, or the ability to fuel up to 1,100 heavy-duty vehicles per day.

This is WM’s second RNG facility in the DFW area that will provide renewable energy to north Texans at this scale, with the first facility opening in 2020 in Ferris, Texas, as WM’s Skyline RNG facility. It is also part of WM’s broader planned investments in renewable energy, which are expected to be more than $1 billion from 2022 through 2026.

“When you think about landfill gas, I love to talk about landfill gas as a Swiss Army knife of the renewable energy revolution,” says Tara Hemmer, WM’s chief sustainability officer. “It can be used to produce electricity, it can be used to produce renewable natural gas. It’s readily available, and it’s typically located in most communities because most communities have a regional landfill. … Taking landfill gas and converting it to renewable natural gas really does displace the production of fossil fuels—it’s a resource that otherwise would be there, and it’s important that we access it. … There’s really no greater circularity story than that.”

RELATED: Circular strides: John Morris and Tara Hemmer are leading WM’s efforts to invest in sustainable initiatives.

Houston-based WM has one of the largest landfill gas-to-energy platforms in North America, according to the company, and has been investing in renewable energy by converting landfill gas into electricity for nearly 40 years, moving into RNG within the last decade. The DFW RNG facility processes landfill gas captured from the WM DFW Landfill as organic material decomposes to create RNG, a pipeline-quality natural gas.

“We’re excited to have the potential opportunity to double our renewable natural gas output in the Dallas area by adding a second RNG facility in Lewisville,” says Domenica Farmer, area vice president of WM Texas Oklahoma. “Together with the WM Skyline RNG facility in Ferris, this new facility will provide renewable energy to the community and beyond for years to come.”

Today, WM owns or hosts 22 RNG facilities that convert landfill gas into pipeline-quality RNG. WM’s RNG is pushed directly into natural gas pipelines, providing a lower-emission energy source for communities across North America. The RNG facilities expected to be included in WM’s 2022-2026 investment plan could power up to 1.7 million homes and support WM maximizing the allocation of RNG to its natural gas collection fleet. Today, nearly half of the fuel allocated to WM’s natural gas fleet comes from renewable sources.

In response to a report from Reuters that WM is working with JPMorgan Chase & Co. to explore options to sell its landfill gas-to-energy operations, Hemmer says, “We believe in the significant value of our renewable energy platform. We’re investing in it aggressively to build out these 20 plants. And we believe in the sustainability story and also the economic value that these assets will drive. Our CEO Jim Fish has also said that we’re always looking for ways to maximize the renewable energy business and the value of that. And that’s something that’s important to us.”