 Good afternoon everyone, welcome to our briefing this afternoon and my name is Carol Werner and I am the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. EESI is a non-profit organization that was formed back in the mid 80s by a bipartisan Congressional caucus for the whole purpose of providing solid, credible, timely information on key energy and environmental issues that are important to policy makers and their work. And the purpose then was to help make sure that that information got to those offices, to their staffs, to build relationships, to build networks across sectors. And to find ways to solve problems and to create multiple solutions in the whole process of doing that. And so our briefings are all part of that whole process that we've been doing for many, many years. So our topic today is an issue that I personally love. And I think it is such an important area in terms of thinking about biogas. And how it is pro-economy and pro-climate. That indeed it is all about finding ways to solve problems, create multiple benefits, and to really create, to really demonstrate in our communities and in all sectors, how everything is really connected together and how we can really create opportunities for role opportunities for economic development in our communities, for whole new businesses, for smart ways to do things so that we don't have waste. We only have resources that we use in ever better ways. So what are we talking about here? We're talking about the many benefits of renewable biogas. Biogas, if you don't already know, and I encourage you to learn as much as what you can today. Find other ways to learn as much as possible from the organizations that you're going to hear about today. But biogas is produced from the decomposition of organic waste. And this means agricultural residues, manure, one of my favorite topics, food waste and sewage. These are all things that are found all over the country. And as we know that if they're not dealt with, they can be problems. But we can deal with them in really creative, useful ways that create all sorts of other products. And revenue streams spawn all sorts of businesses and are a really, really smart way to do things. So we're going to hear from a whole variety of speakers today. We are very proud to be sponsoring this briefing today in conjunction with the American Biogas Council. And we are first going to hear this afternoon from Bernie Sheff, who is the Chairman of the American Biogas Council, Board of Directors. Bernie is also the Vice President of Engineering for Montrose Environmental Group. He has a very, very strong, long career in terms of doing engineering. And did his degrees in engineering from Michigan State, which is well known for the quality of the engineering graduates that they produce. But since early 2000, Bernie has focused on nutrient recovery, sand separation, and digestion in the agricultural market. And as I said, he is the Chairman of the Board for the American Biogas Council. And he's been Chairman since 2014. Bernie? Thank you so much. Appreciate that. Thank you for coming today. And so what I get to do is to start off and give you, basically I'm going to expose the top of the iceberg. And then everyone else here on this panel is going to fill in everything and all the pieces below it. So first slide. And that first line is very important. Because we are the only organization in the US that represents the entire biogas industry, and there's much more to biogas than just what was said as far as it's the byproduct of the anaerobic breakdown of organics. We, the best way to put it is that biogas checks all the boxes. We are your community recycling and energy recovery facility, right? I told someone yesterday that if you take a cherry pie and you throw it out on the field and if you wait three years that the phosphorus and the nutrients are in the cherry pie work down in the soil and then you can put a corn seed in there and grow something. But if you anaerobically digest the cherry pie and you take all of the energy off and then you take the biogas and then you take the phosphorus and the nitrogen and potassium that are left in the solids and then you put those on the field, you can put the corn seed in immediately. Well, that's what we do. We are a, and it looks a lot better than a field full of cherry pies. So I had to get somebody to laugh today, it was important. So we are the only group that represents the top to bottom. From building the digesters, our groups, our folks build digesters, operate digesters, finance digesters. We're the complete top to bottom on the digestion market. Okay, this is an important slide. The, right now, currently what you have is 253 on-farm facilities in the United States. What's the potential? 8,300, think about that alone. 8,300 facilities nationwide pumping out not only, not only energy, but also then covering those, those lagoons so that the, that the odors are then trapped inside the lagoons. Changing our air quality. One of our members yesterday made a comment that if I closed my digesters, 500,000 cubic feet a day of methane would be then released back up into the atmosphere and that's just one farm. That's just one facility in Iowa. So if you look, if you look down through here, you see that currently we have it water reclamation facilities in the United States, water resource reclamation facilities. We have around 1,300 potential to go to an additional 4,000 food scrap facilities, which we do a lot of food processing, waste management facilities. And those right now, currently you have 66, there's potential for 1,000 of these and it landfills. We still have room for 440 more additional energy facilities. And we have somebody here from Waste Management later on, you should go talk to him about that because he'll tell you all about it. So anyway, we have a tremendous potential in this market. So when we ask about why are we building this and what does this really mean as far as how we're protecting the climate? So as I said before, we check all the boxes. This is important, right? That the agriculture, right? The cow, you get the meat from the cow, you get the milk from the cow, but you also get the manure, right? You get the food waste and you also get the waste, the grease, the grease cooking waste from processing that. That all has to go somewhere. That waste then can go to the biogas plant. You can take that waste plus the manure from the raising the animal. That goes into the plant. We get then heat, electricity, and we can run the cars. We can run the trucks. We have a facility just south of the Illinois border right now that fuels 55 milk trucks a day, all running on the methane gas from the facility. Think about it. It's only all of these trucks run every day, only on the methane gas generated from the actual animals. But we all do something else. Again, when that cherry pie goes into the biogas plant, we not only get the methane gas that's generated, but then all of the phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium, sulfur is now all in that effluent. It's all there so that we can then turn around and make fertilizers from that, can go right back onto the land, which then grows the crop that the cow eats and we've made a circle. And in this world we all know circles are good, right? We have to have the circle. We have to close the circle. So it's very important to understand this and where anaerobic digestion sits in the middle of all this. Anaerobic digestion, just one thing. It's not new. God gave it to us, the Assyrians. He did the public baths long, long ago before Christ. It's a very, very well-known technology. I want to talk to you a little bit about carbon intensity, just real quick so you can understand a little better. But if you start to look at carbon intensity and CI scores, you see where methane or so biogas from anaerobic digestion, where it comes from, how low we can score there. And we actually just had a hog facility where we're taking the waste from hog operations and that brought us down to minus 370. So we have really a fantastic potential for going after greenhouse gas and reducing our carbon footprint by focusing more on this renewable source of energy and, again, keeping the fertilizers. Guess what happens when that food waste goes into the landfill? That phosphorus is there forever, right? That's the reason that you're seeing these bans. And folks like waste management are making huge steps in changing this around and are working on this piece and making huge impacts in the renewable energy field. But, again, that phosphorus, when it goes in that landfill, it's there forever. We want to keep it out so we don't have to bring phosphorus into this country. Phosphorus grows, right? That's the basis of most of our crops. Okay, talk to you a little bit about, I want to talk about what an anaerobic digestion facility, am I okay on time? Okay. So I want to talk to you a little bit about what an anaerobic digestion facility, what it actually brings to the community. So this is a facility in North Charlotte, North Carolina. And generally, what we're going to have here is we have 22 operators on the facility. And most of those folks are high school educated. We have high salary on that facility for the top person who are looking at around $100,000 a year. And we have people in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. And again, most of your staff at this facility is all high school educated. 22 people. In addition to that, we pumped $34 million into the local economy in construction and equipment costs for installing this facility. Plus that, we're going to manage, we're currently managing about 150 tons a day. We're going up to 400 tons a day of food waste that will be kept in the process, kept in the system. The small building off to the, you can just see the two small towers. That's actually where we dry all of the solids out of the effluent from the digester and turn that into fertilizer. So making gas, we're going to make around 5.2 megawatts per day in a continuous power for continuous power load into the grid and we're making fertilizer and then we treat our wastewater up at the very top and discharge into the Mecklenburg County. If you look at that, now think about the numbers I gave you before, right? 13,000 US biogas systems. If you do the math, that's 40 billion in capital development that we'd be looking at an additional 330,000 short-term construction jobs and 23,000 permanent jobs for this country. And plus our environment, what we're doing for our quality and what we're doing for our soil health. Again, biogas and the renewable, this piece of renewable energy checks all the boxes. And if you walk out of here from anything else today, it's that we check all the boxes. Thank you. Okay, thanks so much, Bernie. And as you can see, this is really, really exciting, really, really exciting stuff. So we are now going to turn to Clark Pauley, who is a vice president in the Organics and Bioenergy Division of CR and our Environmental Services, which is a privately held waste and recycling company based in Southern California where they service over 3.5 million customers in that area. CRNR has developed, owns and operates the largest high solids anaerobic digestion facility in the world that converts its collected green waste and food scraps into renewable natural gas and compost. So that is a huge, huge achievement. So, Clark. Thanks for that introduction, Carol, I appreciate it. And thank you to ESI and American Biogas Council for having all of us here today. And all of you in the audience, it's great to have people that are actually interested in this topic. It's the lesser known topic in the all of the above renewable strategy, and we appreciate you all being here. And also those that review that are turning in, tuning in remotely. So, as Carol said, I'm not gonna, I'll spare you the infomercial on our company, but I think it's important to notice, note that our scale of our operation, we have about 50 cities. We serve three and a half million customers and we employ about 1500 people. Again, talk about jobs and the recycling economy. That's a lot of material handling. That's what that translates to. A lot of material handling, a lot of trucks. So, I'd like to share with you today some of the policy decisions that are really driving organic recycling and biofuels production in California. We have some special things going on in California. You know, we've crazy Californians. We've been really busy over the last few years, taking the charge and leading the charge on fundamentally changing the way that we look at recycling and greenhouse gas emissions. Then I'd like to share with you a little success story about our project. You know, there's a brief snapshot of our coupling good environmental policy with an innovative recycling solution. First on the policy side, our no policy discussion would be complete in California now if we don't talk about this new rule that was passed, Senate Bill, California Senate Bill, 1383. And it's driving really virtually all of the organics recycling decisions in California right now. As you can see, it's got very ambitious goals. It's pegged at our existing 2000, 2014 levels of disposal. You see the top line there. We have about 23 million tons of digestible compostable organics that are currently disposed in landfill. And we're calling for a 50% reduction of that of that level by 2020. Well, last time I checked, 2020 is seven months away. So that's, we got a lot of work ahead of us. 75% reduction of that level by 2025. So when I talk about organics here, I think Bernie explained, we're talking about the digestible components that are currently going into landfill. That would be all your yard waste, green waste, food waste, things that can make bioproducts. So what does that look like on the ground in terms of what we need to do in our state? Well, if you look at the graph here, it's kind of hard to see, but if we start at that level of the 2014 level, we have about 23 million tons and we need to get down to about six million tons. That means we have to get about 12 million tons of material in the middle there out of the landfills and that amount repurposed. So it might be hard for you guys to visualize what 13, that amount of material. So what does 13 million tons look like? That's about 650,000 trucks of material. So you can imagine that if you stretch the big trucks, not the small trucks, the trash trucks, end to end all the way from San Francisco to Boston and back. That's how much material that we need to start handling and getting out of landfill. So significant heavy lifting task for us that we'll have to be handling here. So it's really gonna create a huge strain on the organic recycling infrastructure in the state. In fact, our CalRecycle, our waste agency, estimated that we're gonna need to build somewhere in the neighborhood of about 100 new facilities, combination of composting and anaerobic digesters to accommodate that kind of material handling. So now the question becomes, how are we gonna, we have this law, we have some other laws that are supporting that, how are we gonna get there? So there have been some positive regulatory drivers that have been precursors to the organic recycling in California, but also some financial incentives that have been driving production of actual facilities. So I think if you look at 1383 as the mother of all organics recycling legislation, that's the biggest driver. Then we also have on the incentive side, the biggest driver has been California AB SB 32, which is better known as the Cap and Trade Program. So the Cap and Trade Program has proven to be a really big success in driving measurable greenhouse gas reductions with a sustainable funding mechanism that can provide funding to seed projects that are demonstrably reducing greenhouse gases. This would include organics recycling projects. So one of the key components to the Cap and Trade Program is that has been the low carbon fuel standard. A lot of you have maybe heard about this program, it's becoming spread around to several other states as well. It provides a renewable fuel carbon credits that's measured by how effectively a particular fuel production process is at removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. And that's an important leg of the California Cap and Trade Program. So our work's cut out for us, we have some incentives, we have some drivers, what are we gonna do about it? Well, what we did about it was we selected a technology and a solution. It's a high solids anaerobic digester and we have now rebranded it as the ROAR, the Regional Organics Anaerobic Recovery Facility and it's in Paris, California, that's the other Paris, in case you were wondering. And the facility was designed in four phases. You can see the phases are all lined up, we have two of the four phases that are up and running including on the far, near the top of the picture there, a state of the art organic receiving building where we take all of our loads and the trucks tip into the building and we clean up all the material, get it all processed and ready to go into our digester. So what does that look like on the ground in terms of numbers? Well, we size that California size or maybe even Texas size for that matter, so it's a big facility at full build out. We have about 320,000 tons per year in four equal phases. Again, the feedstocks are municipal source-separated yard waste and food waste. We started up our first phase in September, 2016 and our second phase in March, 2018. Right now we're producing about 80,000 gasoline gallon equivalents of renewable natural gas per month. So in terms of our other outputs, we have a high quality anaerobic compost that comes out the back end as well. It's basically a drop-in replacement for a green waste compost once we dry it out and screen it. We're also gonna be producing four million gasoline gallon equivalents a year of renewable natural gas. So that's quite a bit of fuel for our trucks. So just in terms of the schematics, it's tough to see this, but just generally speaking, if you just take away one picture, one idea of this is we basically built the world's largest cow stomach. So on the left side, what goes into a cow is grass clippings and a green material food scraps. On the left side of the diagram, they turn around for about 15 days with a high temperature to kill some of the pathogens and the bad bugs, but the good bugs eat all that material and turn it into biogas, which is about a 50-50 mixture of CO2 and methane. In this case, it's biomethane. In the middle of the diagram there, you see the solids removal, the solids drop out and so we create our anaerobic compost. You just need to take that out to dry it. And then it goes to the right side of the diagram where we get our gas upgrading. The gas has to meet pipeline specification standards, so we basically have to clean it up to about 99% purity in order to get it into the SoCal gas pipeline. So some of the benefits of our project, well, we're gonna be converting all of that organic yard waste and food waste into usable products. The program will keep organic waste out of the landfills where they would have naturally degrade and create, release more methane into the atmosphere. And methane is actually 84 times more destructive as a greenhouse gas as CO2. So that's very significant in the sense that we're destroying the methane in our trucks and then we're preventing that methane from going into the atmosphere. Renewable natural gas is a much lower carbon fuel than fossil gas. In fact, it has 90% plus lower emissions than a regular diesel engine would. So what does that look like on the ground? We actually have the two phases up and running. There's phase one on the left and phase two on the right with our gas cleanup system in the foreground. We have our state of the art control building where everything, just about every motor in the whole facility can be turned by electronically and controlled inside of this control building. So we went for as much automation as we possibly could in our system to keep things moving along in the system. There's our organics receiving facility. We've taken all of our loads there. We size that for all four phases. The trucks tip in there, other green loads. We do a combination of manual sorting and also mechanical sorting. We get all the metals out with a variety of magnets and turn it around in trommels to get it to the right size and then grind it up to the right size to get it into the digester. So we also have a non-site laboratory where we can evaluate new feedstocks and also test the health of the digester on a daily basis. We can also test the quality of our gas in-house. And then that soil product I was talking about, you can see it's a very high quality, bagged quality product that we're able to produce in a very short amount of time. This same material would take 90 days to compost. We can get that done in about 30 days, that same product. And it's bagged quality. We actually have customers that take that. And then one of our biggest achievements lately was getting into the SoCal gas pipeline. This was sort of a monumental task but we finally got in. Again, high purity standards and a lot of money but we got there. And now we're actually injecting all of our gas into the pipeline. And that allows us to yield our trucks. So our trucks pull up at night just like you would pull in your Tesla. You would be plugging in at night and then the trucks are all filled, ready to go the next morning. And then we're actually replacing all of our diesel engines as they retire with these high efficiency Cummins Westport diesel engines that actually are ultra low NOx engines. And we combined our renewable natural gas with that low carbon fuel with that engine. We're actually a lower carbon footprint than even an electric or a hydrogen vehicle would be. So in conclusion, I hope I've provided some examples of some real world success story, how good public policy and the right incentives and the right ingenuity can help solve some of the sustainability challenges that we're facing today. Thank you. Thanks so much, Clark. What a story that is really, really incredible. And I have several questions that I would love to ask you later. We're now going to turn to Charles Love, who has another very interesting story. Charles works on the Renewable Energy Acquisition Team for Trillium, which is a member of the Love's Travel Stops family of companies. So Love's is one of the largest privately held companies in the US with 450 plus locations in 41 states. Trillium, which is part of Love's, is focused on developing and building the infrastructure required to support a low carbon transportation future, including hydrogen fuel cells, battery, electric, solar and renewable natural gas technologies. So Charles is responsible for evaluating renewable natural gas development opportunities for dairy farms, municipal wastewater treatment facilities and landfill gas projects. So is all of this cool or what? So Charles. Thank you, Carol and EESI and American Bowel Gas Council for inviting me here today to speak. I was in at Clark's facility before he finished it and I told my wife recently I needed to go to Paris for business and she said, well, I'm going with you. And then I said, well, it's in Riverside, California. She said, you go, honey, that's okay. So as Carol mentioned, I work for Trillium Transportation Fuels and we focus on alternative energy solutions. We have, well, I guess I'll give you an overview of our entire organization. Love's Travel Stops is one of the largest privately held companies in America. We have 475 locations in 41 states. Gemini Transport is our trucking company. We have over 750 Class 8 semis delivering fuel to all 475 locations. Musket Corporation is our trading arm buying and selling all the refined products that Love's sells at the stores as well as other products such as ethanol and all sorts of things related to the traditional fuels industry. Trillium is focused on alternative fuels. So hydrogen, EV infrastructure, renewable natural gas, conventional compressed natural gas, variety of, anything related to alternative fuels that's Trillium's focus. We have really in the last two years started to focus on the renewable natural gas aspect of the business specifically because of its applications towards heavy duty transportation. The EV is great for your personal car but when it comes to the heavy duty market, the technology hasn't evolved yet. We support all technologies and we hope that they'll get there someday but if you have a transportation fleet today and you're hauling trucks, you're delivering freight from point A to point B, 40,000, 50,000, 60,000, 80,000 pounds of freight. Renewable natural gas is by far the most cost effective and environmentally friendly solution today. Just to give you an idea what renewable natural gas, as Bernie and mentioned earlier, renewable natural gas can be made from a variety of feedstocks but it's really the perfect transfer, it's the perfect alternative fuel because with renewable natural gas you can make renewable hydrogen through steam methane reforming. You can make 100% renewable hydrogen. You can make 100% renewable electricity that's available 24, 7, 365 versus wind and solar which do have limitations if the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, you're not producing electricity but a biogas plant like Clark's, they're making biogas 24 hours a day, seven days a week and so that's what's really unique about renewable natural gas. It provides American jobs, American energy independence and it's really transforming the heavy duty transportation market which is what I'm gonna talk about mainly. The renewable natural gas industry has grown dramatically in the last five years specifically because of the policies in place to promote that sort of growth. Clark is in California, so in California they have the low carbon fuel standard and if you're not familiar with it I'd be happy to answer questions or any of us could afterwards but it's really a policy that has promoted the development of lower and lower carbon fuels because they reward you the cleaner your fuel the more credits you can generate. The federal policy just treats all fuels equal but the California policy rewards the cleaner fuels. Renewable natural gas has a transportation fuel is really it's transformative. I mean it's equivalent in the last five years to removing 1.5 million cars off the road responsible for displacing over 800 million gasoline gallon equivalents, planting over 119 million saplings or preserving 8.5 million acres of forest. So it's really a fantastic, in terms of its overall life cycle it's amazing but this is really what I wanna talk about today, this particular engine because the development of this engine has transformed the entire industry. So years and years ago if you wanted to use renewable natural gas you would, there was a variety of engine technologies and most of them didn't work and they failed so if you're convincing a trucking fleet to switch over to renewable natural gas or just CNG back in the day, compressed natural gas they would do it and then their engines would fail and they'd have problems with reliability but those problems have been solved by the partnership between Cummins and Westport. Their engine is so clean that you can't even really see this on the bottom but the 1994 standards, the 1998 standards down to today, the technology today 1,000 trucks from 2019 using this technology emit the same amount of NOx as one truck from 1987. That's how clean this technology is and really when you compare it to electric because we work in all fuels so we're constantly dealing with electric or hydrogen this technology is so clean that 1,000 trucks today emit the same amount as one truck from 1987 and when you look at the cost benefit so as employees in the government realm you have to weigh the cost and the benefit and so when you look at the cost to reduce the greenhouse gas footprint and you look at the life cycle from the well to the wheel this is by far the most cost effective solution with the greatest environmental benefit. Benefits in the market. This is something we talked about earlier the carbon intensity of fuels so the carbon intensity of the fuels to measure the greenhouse gas emissions are measured by the grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per megajoule I know we don't really think in those terms but it's basically like a golf score so the lower the number the cleaner the fuel so ultra low sulfur diesel has a score of around 100 biodiesel a little bit less conventional compressed natural gas that's what CNG stands for it's a little bit cleaner and then when you get into landfill gas it's a little bit cleaner and then you get into electric so electric is this is based on the California electric grid so if you had a bus that you're charging off the California electric grid some of that comes from coal power in Utah some of it comes from natural gas powered plants some of it comes from wind some solar geothermal hydro when you take all of those fuels and they mix them together the average carbon intensity for the California electric grid is around 40 so when you look at a wastewater treatment plant they're around 15 when you look at a dairy operation it's minus 250 so it's a negative it's a carbon sink because greenhouse gas methane CH4 is a very potent greenhouse gas so removing as Clark said one ton of methane is equivalent to removing between 20 to 80 tons of CO2 which is in the atmosphere for hundreds of years so that's why it's so important to remove that and that's why the California Air Resources Board through the Greek model has rewarded people who are actually doing something to proactively prevent global warming and I think that might be it yes, any questions you can ask me afterwards? Thank you. Thanks so much and that is quite a story and one of the points that I think has been brought up by each of the speakers so far is that you can also see how policy does matter it really does make a difference in terms of how it has propelled these kinds of changes which are doing so many positive things all at the same time. Our next speaker, I'm very very pleased that Olga Brejanele is here with us today and Olga is executive director and a partner at GESS International which is a biogas systems and projects developer and in this role Olga leads the strategy for the company and directs its investment programs but another thing that is important to understand that Olga about Olga's activities are that in 2015 she joined with the United Nations Development Program, UNDP as a coordinator of an initiative targeted to support local economic recovery and to improve living conditions by creating employment and income generation opportunities for internally displaced persons that have been triggered by Russia's annexation of Crimea and the armed conflict in the eastern part of Ukraine and she is continuing to study at the Harvard Business School and just last month participated in the Global Women's Leadership Forum at the Harvard Business School so Olga. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen it's a great pleasure for me to be here today and I represent GESS International our company GESS Green Energy Sustainable Solutions is one of the fastest growing and biggest biogas project development companies in the United States. Currently our portfolio consists of 20 biogas plans that will be ready for construction this year we are preparing everything for that and 20 more biogas plans under design under development right now. Our biogas plans all based in use on urban digestion technologies that allows us to recycle about 270,000 tons of organic agricultural waste a swine manure, dairy manure and green crop residues and with that process as a result of this process each biogas plan will generate 550,000 MMBT use of renewable natural gas per plant per year. This is equivalent of five and a half megawatt of electricity that can power about 25 Walmart supermarkets. Oops. So I would like also to mention the potential of United States the biogas industry in the United States. I spent most of my life in Europe, I'm Ukrainian still and in Europe, the countries in Europe they don't have so much of fossil fuels as United States. America is a great country, it's such a great it's a luxury to have so much resources as United States have. European countries, they were always forced to create alternative fuels and renewable fuels. Every farm in European countries, for example, in Austria or Germany, they have about 500 hogs but they already built building the anaerobic digester because they would like to have their own farm to be independent and sustainable. In United States, as earlier Bernie mentioned, more than 8,200 dairy and swine farms are ready for development today. Right now currently in United States only 2,200 biogas plants are in operation out of which only 250 plants are located on the farms. It is our 40 projects will be able to facilitate at least about 20% growth in this sector alone. And again, why biogas? You're talking about it many times and as Bernie mentioned earlier, it checks all the boxes and I would like to stop on some of them because we are working with the farmers and some of these benefits are really, really important for farmers and for their operations. For example, environmental benefits, dramatic adore reduction. Just recently in the summer of last year, one of the biggest North Carolina hog producer, he was sued by his six neighbors for the odor from the open-air lagoons that animal waste is stored in. And the jury imposed punitive damages for 473 million dollars. So the reduction of the odor from the farms and open-air lagoons, it's very important and very beneficial for farmers. Each of our biogas plants will be removing approximately 2 million cubic feet of greenhouse gas emissions. One more benefit that I would like to expand more is economic benefits. All our projects, they are similar in size. They are similar in technologies, capacity. They're producing about same amount of biogas, renewable natural gas, and they're similar in capital costs. The capex of each of our projects is 40 million dollars. In such way, this first 20 projects will be bringing at least $800 million in local communities. Basically, it's investment. In our office in Raleigh, North Carolina, it's our headquarters, we already employed this year, 35 people. Each of the plants will generate at least 100 construction works, 16 permanent jobs. It helps to turn all their cost items into revenue-generating items. All the farmers, they have right now additional opportunities to increase their income and cash flow. Farmers, they're hardworking people and conservative and the toughest negotiators. When we are talking to them, they know what they want and they hardly believe anyone unless you show them. That's why my next slide I call show me the money. And this is one of the biggest achievements that I think in our company we have is we developed great long-term and trustworthy relations with the farmers. It's very important for us because farmers, they are important part of our projects because they're supplying most of their feedstock to our biogas plants. In our, with our biogas plants, we generate at least three sources of additional revenue for the farmers. We are leasing the land from the farmers because we would like to construct the biogas plants on the farm. We are purchasing brown biomass. It's basically swine and dairy manure. And we purchase in green biomass. With all this revenue generating opportunities, farmers get approximately from four to five million dollars of additional income annually. And it's very important actually, our projects are located, this first 20 projects in North Carolina, Idaho and Missouri. And in Idaho, actually, dairy farmers, they're struggling because of the lower price for the milk. They can hardly sustain their farms, but with this additional revenue stream, they will be able to keep up with their operations. And as a commercial company, we always look in for the opportunities, new market opportunities. And recently, we started our exposure to the Indica racing. And for us, it's a very natural fit because one of the goals for us to partner with Indica racing is every racing team, they have a big number of transportation tracks. And right now, they're diesel fueled. We would like to convert all those diesel trucks into renewable natural gas trucks. And we have a great support of American Biogas Council in doing that. Another reason, it's a great business to business platform. And the third, it's a wonderful marketing tool. We are sponsoring the team of Colton Hurte. He is the youngest driver, a racing driver. He's 18 year old, just probably months ago, he turned 19, but he's youngest, he's fastest. And we didn't expect, but we also got a very huge social feedback because we are supporting his team and young people, lots of young people, thousands feedback, positive feedback to us, to the about they're cheering for the renewable energies, they're cheering for the biogas industry. And we feel responsible to hand our planet to younger generations, clean, green and healthy. And that's why let's use biogas to power the future. Thank you. Thanks so much, Olga. And I must say, I think it is really good that you've got the youngest driver in terms of your team because I think we all know how important it is in terms of the generation that is coming up now and that is so concerned and aware and they are all about making change for these terrific concerns that are facing our planet and also in terms of seeing the opportunities to really create all sorts of innovative approaches. So to round out our panel this afternoon, we're going to hear from Patrick Surface, who has led the American Biogas Council since early 2010 when he helped to bring together about 22 companies to form the only trade association that is representing the entire biogas industry in the US. And today there are more than 200 organizations that are part of the American Biogas Council or ABC and it has a network of more than 14,000 stakeholders in the biogas industry. And we need to see that number just continue to grow because I think as you've heard, this is so important and there's still so much opportunity that needs to be developed. Patrick also serves as a director on the board of the World Biogas Association and Patrick also brings a lot of experience in terms of looking at other renewable technologies and he's worked with fuel cells, with hydrogen and solar and other clean energy industries certainly prior to his work in terms of recognizing how critical it was to bring biogas opportunities together. So Patrick. Yeah, just one hop away, that's great. Thank you so much Carol and to the whole ESI team for helping to pull this together and thank you all for coming here and spending time with us to talk about biogas today. It's one of my favorite topics as you might imagine, being the executive director of the American Biogas Council and I'm really happy that we've got so many great members here. There's some more in the audience as well. So for those of you that are just learning about biogas, I hope that you'll ask questions during our Q and A but also engage with some of the other folks that are also here. I'm gonna put up this slide again that you've seen but I'm gonna give you a little bit more different information about it. So we have 2000 operational biogas systems around the country. There's biogas system in every state. Why? You've already heard there's tons and tons of what most people consider to be waste. Tons of wastewater sludge. It's proportional to where all the people are. So every place you've got people, there's wastewater sludge that needs to be managed. There are lots and lots of food waste, also proportional to where the people are. So urban waste, wastewater sludge and food waste, there's waste everywhere, that's an opportunity for us. And then you look at all the rest of the country and the rural areas and areas in between. We have a huge agriculture industry and it's not just the manure, it's the products from processing, animal products and it's even things like when you make yogurt from milk, it's the way wastewater that comes out of making yogurt that you still have to deal with also. So there's tons and tons of opportunity. Clark's project is the largest high solids digester in the country producing R&G. And that's massive and that's awesome. His waste management company investing in the biogas system, they did that because it made economic sense because it's a chance for them to generate a lot of new revenue. It's a chance for them to save money because they've already taken in all this material anyway from all their hauling trucks and it's a chance to make sure that their company is doing the right thing in terms of the climate, which is something that more and more companies are planning to do. You look at August company, they are looking to make 20 of Clark's projects, maybe a little bit less this year and another 20 in the next couple of years to come. And we just saw today that there was an announcement on the fueling side, which is where Charles company works. The largest R&G deal between UPS and Clean Energy Renewable fuels was just announced today. And I just found out by email, I can't give away the company names yet, but I just found out that the deal is just close to the largest biogas and R&G deal with a university today. And so what you're starting to see is the industry here has been growing. Obviously we have 22,000 projects. The industry will continue to grow. There's tons of ways. But the opportunity that we have here is to help put a little bit of pushes into our policy, to treat our policy a little bit in a way that allows the biogas industry to play on an equal playing field with other renewable energy technologies, and also to recognize that the biogas industry isn't just about renewable energy. We have all these other values associated with us. I think when you look at that, it's worth putting some policy in place to help this industry to grow because of all the benefits that it offers. And it's also something that, if your boss is interested in getting behind economic growth, agriculture, waste materials in urban settings, or climate related issues, and there's a lot of interest in all of those, get behind our industry, help us grow a little bit more, reap some of the benefits of seeing our industry grow really fast because we're going to do that. So here's another way to look at this. So we talked about the amount of waste. These are the numbers behind those three categories of waste. 66 and a half million tons of food waste, million tons of food waste every year. I bet that's a lot of trash trucks going back and forth across the country, maybe a couple hundred times. For wastewater, we generate 31 billion gallons of wastewater every day in our country. And all the sludge that you pull out of that wastewater so you can return clean water into our watersheds has to be handled somehow, and biogas systems are one of the best ways to do it. Incidentally, these are all organic materials. If you want to recycle organic material, there's only two options, composting systems and biogas systems. They actually work well together. But biogas systems, obviously, which we have a preference for, take the energy out. So why not digest the organic material in a biogas system and then take the digested material that you're left with and then compost that like Clark's project is doing in Cell The Compost, you can do both. And then we've got eight billion cows, chickens, turkeys and pigs. What are we gonna do with all that manure? Just to give you one stat, this is kind of maybe a little bit gross, but I think it's also a little bit funny. Every full-sized dairy cow produces 120 to 150 pounds of manure every day. So think about a person of poop out of every dairy cow every day. We've got to manage that. And but luckily there's a real great way to be able to manage it with biogas systems, manage that manure, manage the odor, take the energy out of it, recycle the nutrients so that we're not using fossil fuels to make new nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers. And let's do this the right way. So biogas and 80 systems are worth it. As Carol said, I worked in the solar industry, I worked in the hydrogen industry. We don't dislike any renewable energy industries. I think the renewable energy industry is competing. Sometimes we're working with the oil and gas industry but in many cases we're really all trying to work together to make sure that we have more renewable fuel options, more renewable electricity options. But if you like a biogas compared to wind and solar, I mentioned this in particular because wind and solar have gotten very favorable treatment since 2015 in our tax code due to the actions that Congress has taken. And those industries have really grown and that's great for them. It actually kind of proves that if the biogas industry were given those same tax credits that we could grow just as much. But look at the value that we offer. Solar, if you look at the capacity that they have in New Jersey just to pick one state, it's available 17% of the time. Wind across the world, 22% availability. Biogas and AD is worth 95% of the time. And the only reason it's not 100% is because occasionally you have to do some maintenance on the facility. Occasionally if you're making electricity, you've got to do an oil change on your engine. Occasionally in your tank, you've got to clean it out and just get some of the gunk that's built up on the sides because these systems are running for over a decade or more. So we, if you want to have the same amount of energy, just looking at it on an energy basis, you have to build basically four to five times more solar than you do for biogas systems to get the same amount of energy and you're not getting all these other benefits. Waste management, nutrient recycling, reduced our negative greenhouse gases. How awesome was that? You use RNG and biogas from a dairy or swine facility, the California government has shown that you're taking carbon out of the atmosphere because you're not only eliminating the methane emissions from the manure that would otherwise be admitted if you did not have a biogas system, but you're also displacing fossil fuels when you use it in transportation. So you get to double count and it goes negative. That's why and it's a really great thing. Revenue insurance for farmers. We have a member who's been telling us that they had a couple of good years that with commodity prices and selling their crops that allowed them to build their biogas system. But now that they have it, it's actually protected them because the commodity prices, you're not familiar in a lot of agriculture, part of the agriculture sectors has really fallen quite a bit over the last couple of years, but they've got revenue coming from their biogas system and that means resilience for our farming community. Odor reduction when you spread our digested material rather than raw food waste or raw manure, it doesn't smells, you're reducing odor, and soil health, which is incredibly important, not only for sustainable agriculture, but as you've seen, especially recently, some studies have come out that our soil health is critical to actually capturing carbon and making sure that carbon stays in our soil and is used in our soil. Soil health is important, not just for growing things. So here's one other statistic I wanna leave with you to make the point that, yes, greening our electricity grid is super duper important and there's a lot of interest in California, there's a lot of interest that's been growing in the house, especially this year with the new Congress and the new majority and likes to make our electric grid greener and we should absolutely do that and doing that helps the biogas industry because biogas, as our other speakers have told us, biogas, you can use it to make renewable fuel for transportation, you can use it for renewable electricity, that works. But did you know that the energy delivered in our country here in the United States from the gas grid is one and a quarter times greater than the total energy delivered from the entire electric grid? And who's talking about greening our gas grid? We need to do that. There's a huge opportunity. Obviously biogas is a central part of that. Hydrogen can be a part of it as well but for right now, let's make sure that we're not just talking about electricity and renewable energy from electricity, let's talk about renewable gas to the opportunity is massive. So I'm not gonna go into these policies. We could talk to any of you in detail about them quite a bit but I do wanna flag for you the topics policy-wise that are most relevant today to the biogas industry although we would argue that we can be as an industry be relevant to just about any policy that's developing. Renewable fuel standard is driving the industry right now. It is an incredibly important program to us. There are some ways that EPA is administering it that we would like to improve but it is critical for our industry and we want that to continue. The infrastructure discussions right now, we provide all kinds of infrastructure from waste management to fertilizer to energy. It's all there. Climate discussion, you know that that's something that we obviously provide a major benefit to in terms of managing our carbon emissions and even helping to reduce climate emissions by going negative or carbon emissions by going negative. Watershed protection. Most of the times that watersheds are polluted is because too many nutrients are getting into the watershed. Let's make sure those nutrients are recycled using biogas systems. You can even extract the nitrogen and phosphorus from the digestive material. If for example, you're in this area in the Chesapeake Bay watershed where there's too much phosphorus, extract the phosphorus. You sell that now as a product in another watershed that doesn't have too much phosphorus. And now you're helping this watershed as well and soil health. The Farm Bill is a hugely important program to us, especially the energy title. Tax extenders, you heard my comment about that earlier. We have an uneven playing field for tax as compared to some of the other renewable energy industries and I think there's an opportunity to fix that. And agriculture appropriations. Let's make sure we fund those projects in the Farm Bill or fund those programs in the Farm Bill that can really help. So thank you very much for your time today. I know Carol, do you wanna? Thank you very much for your time. We look forward to your questions. Okay, thanks very, very much, Patrick. And I think that it is really important as we learn more and more about this whole industry and the opportunities that are provided to just remember what those policy drivers have been here on the hill and where there is a lot of interest in one thing that I learned earlier this week in talking to a hill staffer was that since January, there have already been about 35 congressional hearings on climate and that have been looking across sectors yesterday in terms of looking at ag. There's a lot going on with regard to infrastructure and all of this deals with all of those issues as well. So if we're really smart, we'll see how all of those relationships can all be dealt with at the same time to hopefully make things better all the way around. So let's open it up for your questions. And if any of our panelists have particular issues that they wanted to raise our other comments. Okay, we'll start over here and wait for the microphone. Okay. I'd just like to ask a sort of a commerce question to Mr. Lover, are you the owner of your entity? No. Because he happens to have your name, that's what I thought. There's a relation. He might wish, but anyway. But I'll bet you love your business. Definitely. I want to ask you in your travels, is there competition for what you do or is what you do sort of unique in its way, a proprietary even perhaps. It sounds like you have a very strong competitive edge and what do you see possibilities out in the East Coast versus West Coast and differences and the way you've been interacting or the answers that you've been getting from your peers West Coast versus East Coast? Sure. So there's a lot of competition for projects, but there's really no other company that I'm aware of that does everything that we do. So we deliver all fuels. So if you want your electric bus infrastructure built out, we can do that. If you want a hydrogen fueling station, we can do that. If you want biodiesel, we can do that. Renewable diesel, we do that as well. But my particular specialty is working with renewable natural gas. Well, I think the question was, what's the difference between the East Coast and the West Coast specifically to competition? Most of the focus right now has been primarily on the West Coast. California has the low carbon fuel standard. Oregon has a low carbon fuel standard. Washington State tried to pass a low carbon fuel standard and it failed last a few weeks ago. We hear that there's some states on the, New York is looking at potentially a low carbon fuel standard. And that policy really drives the competition. That policy really drives the effort because there's a federal policy, the renewable fuel standard, and then there's a state policy. Well, if you can provide your fuel if you can sell your renewable natural gas in California, you're adding additional value to the farmers or to the landfill gas owners. You're providing additional value and additional revenue stream to the farmer. So most people that are producing, for example, dairy manure or as Olga was mentioning, swine manure projects, those projects are specifically going into California because of the added value for the low carbon fuel standard credits. Does that answer your question? Maybe I don't understand your question then, okay, yeah. I was just gonna ask what kind of policy you would recommend that might get markets across the country to be as enticing as California? National low carbon fuel standard? I mean, the thing that really, and for all of our members here who are actually working in using these policies, I think the renewable fuel standard is working really well for us because it allows that environmental attribute to also be sold in addition to the gas. But the reason why the LCFS policy has become a more lucrative policy for the biogas industry is because the LCFS values how low your carbon intensity is. The more environmentally friendly you are, the more valuable your credit is. And so we're obviously very, very environmentally friendly. And so that makes those credits incredibly lucrative. And if that were to, if we were able to have a policy like that nationwide, it's also not technology specific. It allows whatever technologies might be out there. It doesn't matter what it is. Every project gets evaluated on how carbon intents the individual project is. And then you can compete a lot more equitably and the best projects get a little bit more value and the mediocre projects still get value, but just not as much. It's much more proportional and fair. Yeah, AB 32 is the legislation in California than if you want to Google in. Okay, great. So much of the focus on the incentive side has been on the use as vehicle fuel. Do you guys see the potential to expand that and start to look at renewable thermal applications for heating, cooling, other things outside of transportation that RNG could be used for? So I think policy wise, obviously the renewable fuel standard is all for transportation. For renewable heat, I think we have an opportunity to be able to sell gas into the pipeline for utilities. A lot of the gas utilities in our country, their largest customers are buying gas for heat to make whatever your widget is. There's a company, Acme company is making a widget and that widget takes heat to make and Acme company wants to make their widgets more environmentally friendly because more customers these days will probably buy a product that's more responsibly made. And now these Acme company is going to their gas utility and saying, how do I buy renewable gas instead of conventional natural gas? And so I think the opportunity there is to help to make sure that gas is able to get into the pipelines and that utilities when they can use it and they can sell the gas for heat there's a benefit there as well. On the electricity side, there's two plays right now for policy and then we can get creative and make lots more. One is on the tax side, we need to extend the section 45 tax credits for not just biomass, which is where the biogas credit is, but there are three other base load renewable energy technologies lumped in with us, hydro, waste to energy and biomass as a part of that. So biomass, biogas, waste energy and hydro. We've been expired since the end of 2017. Wind and solar had theirs extended in 2015 to 2022 and solar still continues. They have a permanent credit, that's not level. So extend the section 45 tax credits, give us the same, now it's so much time has passed since wind and solar have had their deal, give us the same treatment that solar did in 2015, some long-term certainty and then a phase down, not a phase out. Also on the electricity side with the renewable fuel standard, this wouldn't be a congressional action, but Congress has created a renewable electricity pathway that allows you to use biogas and transportation, but not for CNG vehicles, for electric vehicles. So think biogas to electricity to a battery electric vehicle or biogas to hydrogen to a fuel cell electric vehicle. That pathway exists, it's been approved, but EPA hasn't approved any of the registration sitting on their desk right now to be able to utilize that credit. That would boost electricity projects all across the country, getting that electricity into electric vehicles. It would also green our transportation industry and it would probably double the size of the renewable fuel standard where we are. We are a small category, but it would increase it so much that it would create a lot of opportunity across the country to develop new projects. I would just add that for Chris, North Carolina has a poultry wreck for heat. Iowa has a wreck for heat, but the poultry wreck is very unique because it's giving an incentive for recycling all of the poultry waste that's generated in the state, which has a big impact on our national poultry supply. So, and that's a renewable electricity credit? Right, it's a wreck for heat. Not only for electricity, but for heat. Okay. And I just would like to add that definitely because we are staying in North Carolina and North Carolina state, they do introduced regs, swine regs, and poultry regs. And simply because in North Carolina, they also introduced moratoria on expansion and construction of new hog farms because of the environmental crisis in the state. So, it's already introduced, it's working. I really appreciate the question about heat because as I mentioned in my point earlier, we wanna make sure that we're doing renewable electricity, we wanna make sure that we're doing renewable gas. Well, part of that renewable gas is transportation, the other part of that is heat. And renewable heat is definitely overlooked, whether it's from biogas or biomass. There's a lot of opportunity there because the discussion is so heavily focused around electricity, which is fine. I think it's just too heavily focused in one direction. There's a big opportunity for gas and heat. Yeah, I'm really glad for that question too because I think so many times when we think about energy, the attention, and certainly in the Congress has been so focused on electricity. And yet when we think about how much time we spend in our buildings and how much energy our buildings use, it's that space heating and cooling that is this gigantic energy user. So, it's really, really important to address. There was a question, okay, over here. Thanks, Shalom Flank, microgrid architect. Clark, a question for you. We've been talking about the incentives, but I was hoping you could give us a picture for your project in particular, the economic impact of the various components and revenue streams. So, the RIN, the state level incentives, but also the tipping fees and just the energy sales. What are the most important, how do they compare to each other? Yeah, yeah, great question. So, a component of our economics, it comes in maybe three legs, primarily on the revenue side. One is the tipping fee. So, we would go to our cities and we say, there's these new recycling laws that you need to comply with. Guess what? We have a turnkey solution for you. We can start accepting all of your organic waste, you'll fully comply, and it's only gonna cost you, let's say, two, three dollars per household per month to fully comply. And they sign on the dotted line and the way starts coming in. So, we get a little bit extra revenue to subsidize the cost of the project that way. Revenue stream number two is what we're making the commodity gas value for ourselves. That's sort of energy and price security there. Revenue stream three and four would be the renewable fuel standard revenue and also RFS. So, we're able to commoditize the value of those fuel credits. And then of course, we have our compost as well. So, we have to do minimal processing on our compost and then we're getting a monetary value of that. So, it's kind of, those are the different legs of the revenue. And are they all roughly comparable? Not necessarily, no, they all have their own values and then of course, the price of the renewable fuel credits go up and down with the markets. So, there's some price uncertainty built into that but it does provide some diversity in terms of income whereas other recycling streams don't necessarily have that kind of flexibility. Did anybody else on the panel want to add to that? Okay, all right. Other questions back here? Are there any federal R&D still needed for your industry? So, I think that the opportunities are in a lot of the different parts of the biogas system. So, if you look at a biogas system, it's really a bunch of different pieces that all come together and the center part of it is the anaerobic digester itself but then there's other systems. So, I think there's opportunity in the pre-processing side of things. You know, most people like a pre-processing and they think of just grinding up the material before it goes in the digester but there's other things that you can do, thermal hydrolysis, that break cellular walls for the material going in and other things to help increase the amount of biogas that's produced. It helps kill pathogens and it can process the material. Well, it has several different advantages. So, there's pre-processing R&D that could be done. There's certainly R&D that can be done on the gas upgrading side. So, the raw biogas that comes out, I think one of you, what's Clark, you were saying is about 50-50 methane CO2. Most biogas is about 60% methane, 40% CO2. So, you always process it and you take that the non-methane gases out to make it natural gas quality. That's when you call it renewable natural gas when it's pipeline quality. So, there's all kinds of R&D that can happen on the post-processing side and then there's other things that can be done agronomically. Like, what is the right mix of nutrients and micronutrients coming out of the digest aid that really promotes soil health? And finally, and the Department of Energy is starting to look into this just a little bit, I think based on RFP I saw a little bit earlier, but there's still a lot of opportunity. The process of anaerobic digestion actually has four steps in it and the process, you're taking organic material, breaking it down into volatile fatty acids. I'm looking at my professor here, he teaches our operator training. Volatile fatty acids, you're making hydrogen, you're making CO2, you're making other bugs. Hydrolysis to acidification, to acidification, to methanogenesis. And in that process, thank you. And in that process, you can interrupt that. And the different, the way the organic material is transforming by those microbes, you can interrupt it and then create other materials and other products. For example, one of the things that happens is you end up actually producing hydrogen in the middle of the process and that hydrogen gets eaten up by some of the other microbes that you produce. And it's only because you run out of hydrogen that carbon dioxide gets generated. So one thing that could happen if you add a extra source of like let's say renewable electricity from like wind blowing in the middle of the night, you could electrolyze water, make hydrogen, store the hydrogen in a digester, boost the biogas yield, and reduce the CO2. So there's all kinds of interesting things that you can do in the anaerobic digestion process. So yes, there's plenty of opportunity for R&D in the biogas industry. I thought you were a young advocate. I only had to go to your training six times. And I'll add a, I'll just say I'll add a need and a need for federal funding for those types of research projects for sure, definitely. Great, other comments, questions? Okay, clear to the back and then we'll go to Chris. I don't know very much. So I'm often persuaded by the last thing I've read or heard. And I've been hearing and reading for a year at least that biofuels however clean they might be are not to be preferred. And maybe in the future, yes, I could have a debate between proponents of not utilizing biofuels. But in any event, I presume there's always going to be biomass of forest and farm detritus that's available to make renewable natural gas, phrase I'm not all that familiar with. But I've heard twice today and I don't know where. Where does the methane go? Methane is eliminated, but where does it go? So those two questions I appreciate an answer to. I'm glad you brought that up. So it's a common topic and I hear primarily on the West Coast that there are folks who are against anything related to natural gas period. They want to electrify everything. And my comment back to those critics are, it's very simple comment. What are we supposed to do with your waste? Everyone in this room has a carbon footprint. And so our solution is to take that waste and turn it into a usable energy, whether that's a transportation fuel, which is what we're focused on, or you can use it for heating value. Socal gas, the largest gas utility in the country has announced that they want to have 20% of their entire demand met by renewable natural gas by 2030. It's a huge, huge number. And so I think that's the first part of your question. The second part was, what was the second part of your question? Where does it go? So it's burned in an engine. And the engine, the knocks that is emitted in that process is a fraction of what it would be if it went through a conventional turbine to create electricity. Because those transportation engines, the Cummins-Westport engine, is so it has a catalytic converter that takes the exhaust and runs it through an SCR that basically burns up that emission and you have to clean those out from time to time. But it takes the exhaust and it recycles it and burns it. Simple answer is just the methane is the fuel. So that's what actually gets burned and then destroyed in the process of burning it. Maybe just to clarify, the RKM, the bacteria, the RKM that made the natural gas that we pump out of the ground now or we frack to get out, those are the same bacteria that are in the anaerobic digester. We're making the same molecule, the same methane molecule. It's just we're making it above ground in a tank as opposed to being trapped underground from swamps from a million years ago. So while you might have some emissions from using the biogas, the important part is to have the larger picture of how much and how potent emissions are that you're eliminating from the atmosphere by recycling the material in the first place. If you didn't have biogas systems in place recycling the organic material, we'd be pumping methane way more harmful than carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at large rates. We're preventing that super bad greenhouse gas from going into the atmosphere. We're now using it to displace fossil fuels. And yes, there's some CO2 that comes out of it. But as you've seen with those net carbon negative evaluations from the California Resources Board, the overall benefit is significantly beneficial and so it's worth it. Okay, Chris, go ahead. Oh, go ahead. Well, I'm persuaded. Okay, great. Except that I don't know anything. And it would be useful, not just for me, but certainly for me. I sort of suggested earlier that EES, I might want to schedule a discussion of debate between those people who are proponents of wind and solar, renewable, renewable. I guess they would say, I don't know. As opposed to the much cleaner, but not preferred biofuels alternative to what? Okay, I think you, go ahead. But we're, there's no one sitting up here is going to tell you that we shouldn't have solar, we shouldn't have wind, but we need it all. When you look at, she's shaking her head here, Louisa from the Danish, the Danish consulate, they have, they have weeks in the fall where between their solar and their wind and their natural gas, that renewable natural gas that comes from the digestion of food waste, they're completely, they're completely renewable with their power, 100%. 100%, when you land in the Copenhagen airport, you fly right over the top of a digester that's taken food waste from Copenhagen with farm waste and they're generating molecule electrons that go back on the grid. The reason for picking on wind and solar today as I did is not because we don't like them, we love them, we need to embrace them. It's because they're being treated in the tax code very differently than our biogas industry is. And also in general, as we're talking about climate and energy policy, I think that our biogas industry is undervalued and understood. And that's what we're trying to increase here. The value that we offer beyond energy is so significant. I think if that were fairly valued, then we would see our industry growing a lot faster. You would all see the ability to reap the benefits of that and there'd be a lot more economic prosperity as a result. And we're building solar projects all over the country. That's part of our business plan. And I can tell you several projects that take solar power and use it for their parasitic load, for their biogas operation, so they lower their carbon intensity. So this is a holistic approach to taking our waste and using it as a resource. It's really a renewable portfolio. Absolutely. So I took us away from transportation before, but I want to bring it back. I know one of the things happening in California is the supply of RNG is going to overshot or overtake the demand on the natural gas vehicle side. Is there something at the national level that's incentivizing fleet conversion to natural gas so that that can keep up with the great supply that you all are going to provide here? That's a tough one. So one of the tax, the alternative fuel vehicle tax credit, did I get that right? Alternative fuel vehicle excise tax credit is one of those that can help with the conversion of vehicles. And we need that renew. That has expired along with a bunch of other credits. So there's basically like a few renewable energy credits that have gotten favorable treatment, good for them, but those of us that are now at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace need to get those tax credits extended. So the same thing that we said about section 45 tax credits, which includes biogas, needs to be extended for the alternative fuel vehicle excise credit as well. Just to add to that, just in California, just to give you guys some creative ideas about how to do this, and part of our cap and trade program, there's a program to retire diesel engines. So every time we take a diesel and retire it out of the system and replace it with a compressed natural gas vehicle, we get a grant form from the California Air Resources Board for $100,000, and that's all funded through the cap and trade program and through the carbon investment. So why is investment, because each diesel on the road is admitting a lot of carbon compared to the alternative of the CNG? Thank you. In the interest of full disclosure, Brian Severs, I'm a member of the ABC Board, and so I've been hanging with these folks and a number of others here in the audience for all of this week. But I did want to maybe address the R&D question earlier and how we have a difficult time monetizing the soil health, water quality, air quality benefits that AD brings to our farm. We have an on-farm digester in Iowa, and that's where more research and development needs to come from. Federally funded, REAP is a great tool to use in that particular opportunity, but to monetize the soil health benefits we get by taking and sequestering that carbon and then being able to process the manures, the food waste, all of the organic waste streams that we do process in our digesters. I think that's a real key to helping to not only provide some reason for funding research and development, but also then monetizing that value so that we can then clearly demonstrate to the rest of the renewable energy sector how we really are a check all of the above box industry and how we can not only provide renewable energy, but also improve soil, health, water quality, and air quality, but R&D in that area is really needed right now, and REAP is one way to do that. Thank you, Brian. And I would just mention REAP is the rural energy across America program and at USDA, and it was reauthorized in terms of the Farm Bill, and it is a combination grant loan, loan guarantee program in which any participant has to put up a fair amount of money of themselves in terms of getting assistance. So it is proved very, very effective and popular across the country with regard to a whole variety of different technologies. So, and one question I guess that I would have to follow up on that is in terms of thinking about soil health, what do you feel is sort of the best way to get state departments of ag and others involved so that we can really address the values of soil health and therefore also take better use of all of the material that you guys have all been talking about this afternoon. Go ahead. I hate to keep tooting California's horn, but we do have a program through the California Department of Food and Agriculture. It's all the Healthy Soils Program, and again it's funded by the very well-funded cap and trade program, and it does actually reward and provide grants, funding for soil research and also carbon sequestration projects that are related to soil health as well. Great. Okay, and last question over here. Yeah, I'm someone who actually goes out and talks to the farms. I've been doing it for five years now internationally in the Northeast US, work for PlanET Biogas now, and prior to that I worked for RCM with Martin. And first of all, with this gentleman I had to say, typically I have importance to me right now, to be able to put something on the pro forma to say here is the value as far as the benefit to water or the benefit of the soil, and so on. That would be very helpful. And the other thing is a selfish thing, and that is Olga, where are your projects? Sure, I can start with the first question, and definitely it's very important, especially when we are dealing with the farmers. It's one of the first questions they ask the nutrients runoff. And what we are doing is, in different states are different, like in North Carolina they have huge access of water, they don't need that digested that comes out after the anaerobic digestor process. So basically we are just taking it and we are either converting it because it's pure organic fertilizer. It's very valuable, and we're just extracting those, fertilizer and either selling it, drying, selling and however in other states, like Missouri and Idaho, the farmers they would like to take all that digested back to their fields, because it's clean, it's rich of all the NPK level, almost the same as it was before, because they're using their manure for their soils, but actually the digested that comes out, it's almost the same level of NPK as it was before. Do you have any interest in Ukraine or in former Soviet Union as far as biogas goes? Sure, and actually our company GAS, we have branches in Ukraine, it's a company as well, we're working building solar power plants and biogas plants. It's very interesting, I want you to speak a little bit. Great, we can of course talk. That's my other great interest, I'm a conversational Russian speaker and we've tried with the Lubbino and Khababa. Okay, yes. All right, first of all, it's really hard to hear and we should probably kind of move on if your question basically got answered. So I just wanted to check and see whether there were any other closing comments that any of you on the panel wanted to make or? I just would like to make a comment to gentlemen that really in comparison to other renewable energy technologies and projects like solar, wind, biogas has significant merit. It addresses at least four major problems. It's environmental safety, it's waste management, it's energy shortage and it's economic growth. And for example, when you build, because we're building also solar projects, the solar projects once you build, you can basically create more construction jobs, but once construction is done, it's only one or two people operate those farms, those solar fields, that's it. These biogas plants, you still create those big, huge economic opportunities for farmers and it's sustainable. You have at least 16 people who work on the farm, on the biogas plant, you have drivers who are bringing back and forth the feedstock, if it's a virtual pipeline, then they're working on those. It creates lots of great economic benefits. Much more than any other renewable energy projects. And it's also economically feasible. I just wanted to say, so Ogre talked about the partnership that her company and the American Biogas Council and some of the other folks have with IndyCar. The Indianapolis 500 is the Sunday. And I'm heading to Indianapolis tomorrow. I'm hoping that there's going to be some really fun news to share. So keep on top of our Twitter account and some of the IndyCar stuff. There's going to be, I think, some big stuff happening. It's not just about a sponsorship of a car. There's a lot of interest in how biogas can even help IndyCar as a sport and as the other teams. And it's just kind of fun. So keep your eyes out for that and some news coming up this week and make sure you cheer for the number 88 biogas RNG car. Well, that will be terrific. We will all be waiting and watching to see what happens. And I hope that everybody learned something this afternoon and that there, and I think an important takeaway as far as I was concerned too, is that not only are we seeing such important developments in the whole industry, but that there is still so much opportunity and so much material that needs to be dealt with that will solve a lot of problems and create lots of jobs in economic development across the country and places where that kind of development is really, really needed. So thank you all. Terrific job. Thank you, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.