A revolutionary environmental project in Putnam County moved a step closer to reality Monday night when the Eatonton City Council approved an agreement with a company planning to convert methane gas from dairy cow manure to commercial natural gas.
SRNG-T&W LLC is a joint venture of two Putnam dairy farms – T&W Farms and Sunrise, and SustainRNG – developer of a new method of capturing and processing methane gases for reuse as natural gas.
Since the project was first announced in May 2021, SustainRNG has been constructing a digester that will convert the methane under a large domed building on T&W Farm’s property near Lower Harmony and Dance roads.
T&W Owner Tim Camp told The Eatonton Messenger Monday that construction has been slower than expected.
“It’s been like everybody else,” Camp said. “The supply chain is so unpredictable. They aren’t going to be done until spring of next year now. It was scheduled to be done this fall – November, December.”
Basically, 12 times a day, a water tower on Camp’s land will flush manure from his 1,200 cows into a pit. From there, it is pumped through a filter, and the resulting water mixture, called slurry, will be sent to the digester and processed into renewable natural gas. Slurry from Sunrise Dairy’s cows will be piped three miles to T&W’s digester.
The final product will be compressed into specially designed tanker trucks and sold to the natural gas system in Dublin. The two Putnam County farms will get a percentage of the revenue.
All expenses for construction of the digester, lines and other equipment are being paid by SustainRNG, whose major financial backer is Duke Energy, a subsidiary of Duke Power in North Carolina. Officials say there will be no costs to the city.
Monday night’s agreement, approved with minor changes, allows the Eatonton Gas Authority to sell natural gas to SRNG-T&W to operate the digester at a discount of $1.50 per unit below the normal rate. The deal is for up to 10 years or until the company recovers all of its capital costs. At that point, Eatonton will take over ownership of the entire system built by SRNG-T&W.
Scott Tolleson, representing the Municipal Gas Authority of Georgia, helping to organize the deal, told councilmembers that things changed from the original plan where the Eatonton gas system would distribute the final product.
“We were trying a method where we were going to interconnect with the Tri-County system over in Greene County across the lake with some pipe,” he said. “Connect these systems and move gas back and forth. That became too expensive and hard to accomplish for the developer and engineers to solve.”
Tolleson says the project will be a good, new customer for the Eatonton Gas Department. The digester is expected to use the equivalent amount of natural gas as 50 residential homes or 10-12 restaurants.
Methane gas is considered a major detriment to the environment. SustainRNG will make money by selling government credits it receives for capturing and converting methane gas from dairy cow manure.