 Hi, good morning, folks. I think we're going to get started here momentarily. So thank you for joining us this morning. First of all, it's OK. First of all, I wanted to let you know we don't have the slide presentations today, unfortunately, but everything is available on our website. So if you just go to EESI.org, you can find all the slides for today's presentations. And so thanks for joining us today, and thanks for all of you watching online. I'm Jessie Stoller, I'm with the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and we're especially pleased to be here with the American Biogas Council and the Coalition for Renewable Natural Gas to hear about this important topic of how to manage our waste in this country and utilize them for energy. The United States produces 70 million tons of waste a year, including wastewater, manure, and agricultural wastes, landfills, and food wastes, and other organic wastes. These wastes can pose significant air and water quality issues, as well as disposal issues for facility owners, farmers, and communities. In harnessing the energy in these waste products, communities are turning a problem into a solution. The biogas and renewable natural gas industries are creating a clean, renewable, and flexible source of energy. Additionally, value added products such as fertilizers and soil amendments are created. As we'll see today, these projects are already happening across the country, providing local jobs and economic development. However, there is a huge potential still available to continue developing these projects, and we'll be hearing more about them today. And we're really excited because we actually have people who are going to be talking about local projects all across the country. So since we do have a lot of people talking today, we're going to just jump right in. Our first speaker is Bernie Sheff. He's the Vice President of Engineering at ES Engineering Services. He is also the Chairman of the American Biogas Council. Bernie holds both Bachelors and Masters of Science in Civil Engineering from Michigan State. Since early 2000, he has focused on nutrient recovery, sand separation, and digestion in agricultural market. In November 2014, he was elected as Chairman of the Board of the American Biogas Council, and in 2015, he became Vice President of Engineering for ES Engineering, Inc. Bernie, thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Everybody got, everybody write this down. There's no waste. There's only residuals and options. That's what we're here about. We're about those options with the waste. So I've got seven minutes to tell you about biogas, but I just probably told you the most important thing, that there's no waste. There's only residuals and options. This is the ABC. These are the folks behind the, these are our main companies, our largest companies. A little bit over 200 different members. Our federal policy team is the group that is most involved with what we're talking about today and in these federal, the federal programs. So Maureen Walsh and Amy Kessler. We're Turning Earth. Lauren Toretta, she is, CH4. And Patrick Surface, front. These folks do a fantastic job. Go to our website, engage, find out what we're doing and enjoy. Because if you're in this room, then biogas is important to you and then you should be part of us because we're gonna make a lot of things happen. Okay, I've been sent up here to tell you again to give you an overview of biogas. We're gonna talk about how it's made. We're gonna talk about the uses and then closing up on, let me move this over here. There we go, biomarket, where the market stands today. And so let me tell you, take good notes here on the end because when we start throwing up those numbers of where the potential is for this market and then you just, whatever number I give you at the end, right after there's no waste, residuals and options, just put down times $20 million, okay, as an average. And then that'll tell you, give you an idea of where this, where our industry has potential to go. Okay, we make biogas out of food scraps. It was one of our main sources. I've actually, I took several of these pictures or Patrick did. As you can see, we take stuff that's either, for example, bags of nacho cheese sauce that didn't get used at a St. Louis Cardinals game or tins of, those are frijoles, tins of beans that you buy and you dip the chips in that didn't get used. They got stripped, stripped the labels off and over they come to us. So we're not only dealing with packaged, unsuitable, sold or unused material. Maybe it was sent back from the factory, but we're also dealing with post-processing. This is interesting, the one down here in the corner, this comes from a, the back end of a grocery store. So you've got bread, cabbage, all different kinds of apples, everything else in there. Those are all the things that we process into food, into biogas. Wastewater solids, you don't wanna see the bottom of the clarifier, that's where the sludge is at, but there's a beautiful picture of a clarifier anyway. And then where I've spent a lot of my life is dealing with manure. And this is from a facility, and actually I took this picture also. This is out in California at one of the scrape dairy facilities. You got about 4,000 cows held in a facility and the manure then is brought in and then sent over to a digester for processing. This is, if you get, take anything home today, beyond the two things I told you to write down, find this online, this is something we put together with USDA, EPA, and it's a wonderful graphic that goes into great detail about what we do is we take this materials and we put them in a tank and we heat that tank and by bringing that tank up to essentially body temperature, because that's what we're doing, then the bacteria that we've seeded this facility with and this bacteria comes right from and comes from manure, for example, we start to break that material down. Goes through four stages, I won't talk about those, but what you get out of this is you get biogas and you get a digested material. That digested material is what's left, it's the nutrients. Very important, another thing down, the phosphorus. We control the phosphorus, right? He who controls the phosphorus, she who controls the phosphorus, controls the world. Is that good? I caught myself there. So, if you control the phosphorus, you do control the world and we control the phosphorus, because when it's brought to us, we can recover that phosphorus and we can make that into fertilizer, we can put it into soil amendments and we can do other things with it as opposed to tying it up or entombing it on landfill forever, because nobody's gonna start digging up landfills to get the phosphorus out. We're gonna get there next. So, these are a couple digesters. This is actually at Michigan State University. That's the end logger of the storage facility. Downstream, the digester sits just over behind it. That's the MSU Darry's up in front. This is up in Northern Wisconsin. This is Harvest Garden, which is down in Florida. And there's snow on the ground there. So, I know that's someplace in the north, but I don't know exactly where on the fourth one. But that's John Hackel up there with his orange codon. So, these are, this is a couple of digesters and we're gonna go into a lot more detail on the digesters here in a few seconds. Okay, what do we do with the gas? We can make it into energy. We can fuel trucks. We can even make plastics with it. Okay, other things we do is we have this digest state, which is, again, where the nutrients are held. There's a bag over here, a potting soil, which is magic dirt. You have other things that we can do because anything that doesn't digest, we can recover because it's in a tank. We took the gas off. We take the digest state. If we separate the water, which we can separate off is clean, then we're left with concentrated nutrients and undigested material, which then become the compost or become the soil amendments. These are several products right here. Again, the magic dirt, the brew material, potting mixes. Okay, a little bit about it. Now, this is where you, this is the last math you need to do today. Do you see this here? You see the food scrap facility potential. Right now you have 39 food scrap material digesters going on, 39. The potential is 931 in this country, 931. Multiply that by that $20 million number. Just set that over to the side. That's an awful lot of skilled trades, but on top of that, how many of these operator jobs, these are $40, $50,000 jobs for folks who got a high school education, okay? Very important. These are good paying technical jobs and we're doing things like operator training. This summer will be the first three-day operator training up in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. All of these things. Take that potential 1300, that 13,500 number. Just pick $10 million, multiply it out. That's a nice day. That's a nice day for this country. It's an awful lot of jobs, but not only we make energy, we recover nutrients, we put people to work. So for me, that's what biogas is. Probably that was a little bit more than you expected, right? Because you expect that I was just gonna talk about methane. Well, there's a lot of potential here. A lot of potential in what we do. So that's, I'm done. I think I ended on time. So I get that, I get a star. Thank you very much and thank you for putting up with me. Thanks for that great overview, Bernie. So next we're gonna hear from Johannes Esquiredo and he's gonna talk about renewable natural gas and kind of the difference between biogas and renewable natural gas. He's the CEO for the Coalition for Renewable Natural Gas. He's the founder and chief executive of the RNG Coalition which provides the public policy platform and advocacy and education voice for the renewable natural gas industry in North America. Their membership as international includes leading companies and organizations from each industry sector includes over 90% of the US market for RNG. Johannes? Thank you so much. And with that, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, or is it morning? I think I'm still on West Coast time. My body insists it's still breakfast but in any event, it's a pleasure to be with you today and hopefully share some valuable insight information that you can internalize, socialize, materialize. We certainly would appreciate that. Providing a brief overview regarding the renewable natural gas industry specifically. And I'll tell you a little bit about who we are, where renewable natural gas comes from, what it is and specifically how it is distinguished from biogas and share with you a production to give you a sense of the size of the industry in terms of what we're doing and the context of where we've been and the potential that still remains largely driven by policies including but not limited to the federal renewable fuel standard and perhaps challenge and leave all of us with a call to action. So again, as already mentioned, the Renewable Natural Gas Coalition was founded to provide the industry in North America with a policy platform and advocacy and education voice. We represent each sector of the industry, leading companies, almost 100 member companies now including producers, more than 90% of all renewable natural gas in North America and 98% of the RFS qualified cellulosic biofuel. We provide an umbrella and a banner opportunity for industry competitors to collaborate for the common good. There's a brief illustration of our leadership level members, many of whose executives are in the room with us today and those that aren't here are not because they are fearlessly charging the hill with some of our member delegations on both the House and Senate side today, advocating, propagating all things renewable natural gas or general membership and of course, a few of our DOE partners with clean fuels and clean cities, groups and organizations. Our mission is to advocate for the increased development deployment utilization of R&G so that present and future generations have access to this domestic renewable clean energy and fuel supply. Our advocacy philosophy, it comes from an understanding given our co-founder and myself come from a legislative background having served ranking members in the California State Assembly for nearly a decade that advocacy and education influences policy creation and public policies are ultimately what create, expand or in some cases even eliminate markets and it's those markets, however certain or uncertain they might be, is what drives demand that demand determines value and value of tax revenue and of course those of you with any business aspirations or experience understand the inextricable nexus between revenue and sustainability. Our priority through which we filter every advocacy and education opportunity is will our engagement here enable the industry to develop and effectively double the number of operating renewable natural gas projects in North America by 2025. And this is based on a baseline of 31, well closer to 56 rather operating projects. Our trajectory suggests we're well on our way but first I don't want to overlook the fact that perhaps some of you are here out of curiosity and may not already have an understanding of what renewable natural gas is. Renewable natural gas is a product gas that is derived from the, it's biogas derived but it's from the decomposition of organic materials as they break down naturally in organic waste streams. Renewable natural gas is commonly referred to as RNG or biomethane. It's biogas derived product gas that meets pipeline quality or transportation fuel grade. So it undergoes a significant process to meet that which requires heavy capital investment on average $16 million per project. We'll touch on that again here briefly to ensure that renewable natural gas as a finished product is interchangeable in the natural gas pipeline or as a drop in fuel as the case might be for CNG, LNG applications. Where does it come from? It's a great question. I'm glad you asked. Is there enough supply? There is. There's no shortage of feedstock in our great country especially when you consider food waste as a feedstock and the fact that we waste almost 70 million tons of the food every single year. Wastewater treatment, landfills, large agricultural dairy farms are significant stationary feedstock sources where renewable natural gas projects can and are increasingly being developed at. Some of the policies that are driving renewable natural gas production, we'll hear a bit more about that later including from Patrick Service and the American Biogas Council but I wanna give you a bit of historical context so as to better understand and appreciate where the industry is today, how far we've come in a relatively short amount of time and yet how much work there is to do and gas to be produced. In 1982, the first renewable natural gas project broke ground in the state of New York at the Fresh Kills landfill. Fast forward nearly 30 years and the Renewable Natural Gas Coalition was founded. At that point in history, there were 31 RNG projects operating across the country. Almost 100% of the RNG produced from those projects was dedicated to power markets driven largely by state's renewable portfolio standards requiring a certain amount of electricity to come from renewable resources. In the last six years, 26 new projects have been developed bringing our total in operation up to 57 and counting. We have projects currently operating or under development in 27 different states as well as two provinces in Canada. I mentioned already the historic production is driven by state RPS programs, utilizing RNG as a clean renewable electric power, displacement for coal or complement substitute or blend for geologic natural gas. But increasingly, due in large part to the federal renewable fuel standard as well as similar state programs like California's low carbon fuel standard, Oregon's clean fuels program. I might add that the province of Ontario has put forth rulemaking proceedings to implement a renewable fuel standard and a federal clean fuel standard for the country of Canada. Is driving production and utilization for renewable natural gas as an ultra low carbon, the lowest carbon intensity transportation fuel commercially available today, that's fantastic. Since 2014, renewable natural gas has comprised as I mentioned earlier 98% of all the cellulosic biofuel competing and qualifying under the RFS program. Between 2013 and 2015, industry supply quintupled and by the end of 2018, we expect production to triple yet again. Just this year, our members are on schedule to produce more than 375 million ethanol gallon equivalents of renewable natural gas. 81 million of that is still dedicated to renewable electric power generation leaving a balance of close to 300 million that's dedicated for the transportation and fuel market. Look at the percentage. Notice that in just three years time since we were able to effectively advocate US EPA and gain eligibility for RNG feedstock as a cellulosic biofuel, the percentages have changed from 100% to electric power to just about 24%. With 76%, three quarters going to the transportation fuel market. In 2018, our members are developing 22 new projects plus there's seven or 10 that are not included here that I can't speak to today, bringing our total projected production volume to north of 620 million ethanol gallon equivalents. Again, you do the math there. 16 times what the 2014 RFS volume was is what we're expecting to produce by the end of next year. That's significant enough to power two to three million homes per year to give you an idea or displace 15% of all the diesel that's consumed in large states like California. There's significant economic benefits to be realized geographically, regardless of the region, the country in, we're meeting with states all across the country today and representatives highlighting the fact that each renewable natural gas project attracts an average of $16 million investment. I mentioned 22 projects developed in a 25 year time span, 31 projects developed in the last five years, 22 additional projects currently under development, along with a capital investment to the states and regions that your members represent. There's also the opportunity to realize job creation. Renewable natural gas projects create more jobs than any other alternative energy sector with up to 173 jobs per project. That's significant with an average medium income of $61,820 per worker according to ICF International. That's significant and a lot of this is driven by federal and state policies and programs that you have the opportunity to through internalization, digestion, socialization with your offices, with your members, ensure the perpetuity of, including but not limited to US EPA's administration of the federal renewable fuel standard that is driving industry, project development, volume production, job creation. And we could go through a whole list here. We won't do so today. Don't want to monopolize more of your time. We realize that the mind can only absorb what the seat can endure. You have soft drinks and refreshments in front of you. Hopefully that will help. Patrick is gonna get to in a few moments some of the policy specifics and you're gonna hear a bit more about project specifics as well. So I'll leave you with this. You have a hard copy available or electronic also upon your request, but I wanna thank you for your attention today. I would be remiss if I didn't give your offices the opportunity to save the date to attend the industry's annual conference, the Renewable Natural Gas Conference, November 27 through 30. It is in Southern California. I realize in the late fall, it's tough to get out of DC to enjoy sunny Southern California, but should travel budgets allow, we encourage your participation engagement. So with that being said, thank you for your attention today. Thanks, Johannes. So we're next, we're gonna start diving into some of these projects and seeing what's actually happening. So first, we have Grant Zimmerman. Grant is CEO of AMP CNG and he has been CEO since February 2016. He joined AMP CNG as Senior Vice President of Business Development in 2015 and at AMP CNG, he is responsible for developing and executing their overall business strategy and operations business development and corporate development activities. Grant. That's a lot of responsibility. I actually, I'm so busy, I forget sometimes. So there we go. Well, first of all, thank you everybody for taking the time to learn more about this important topic. We're all quite passionate about it and we hope that some of the facts and examples that we present today will transfer some of that passion to yourselves as well. So AMP CNG or AMP Americas is two businesses. We're a producer of renewable natural gas and we're a distributor of renewable natural gas at 22 compressed natural gas stations where we fuel heavy duty trucks for customers such as the haulers that carry milk for our dairy customers, some of the largest dairies in the country as well as brand names like Frida Lay. We're a values-based organization. We think it's really important that for us to have the impact that we wanna have that we be profitable, we be sustainable, we create value for all of our stakeholders including cleaner air, jobs, especially in rural areas of the country. And we think it's really important that we be copied. And so we're always excited to tell our story and talk about the things that we think are most important. So first, starting with our partner, Faroq's Farm, one of the largest dairy farms in the country and without their partnership, our business wouldn't be what it is. They're a leading innovator in a number of different topics, including most importantly, dairy sustainability and new innovative commercial models for dairy but also for agriculture in general. About 18,000 head of milking cows that produce 150 pounds of waste each every day that has to be dealt with. They're an innovator in milk production, public education, sustainability, demonstration and commercialization of new topics. Some of the selected innovations, manure management, with that many cows and that much waste every day, you can imagine that there might be a smell problem. Trust me, there is. But the anaerobic digester that the farm installed back in 2003 and then grew in 2008 deals with the waste from these cows and not only takes away the odor problem for the community but turns it into a value add product that we've all just started talking about. In addition, the farm takes the manure after it's been digested and separates the material into water and solids and recovers nutrients from the water. They control the phosphorus so they must control that part of the world. But more importantly, they prevent runoff, unintended runoff from the farm so that the entire thing is a self-contained loop with value added every stage of the process. Water management, as I said, reduction, reuse, recycling are the mantra at the farm and sustainable energy production from electric to heat to fuel the process as well as transportation fuel. And the vision is transparent, carbon-neutral milk production and again a model that can be copied industry-wide. This is a bit of a visual of how it works at the farm with the cow. Eating, making waste, going into the digester to harvest usable, reusable energy and material. And Amprenu takes the gas from the digester and refines it to be used as vehicle fuel and some of it to be used to make electric generation. We fuel the milk trucks and until recently actually owned the milk trucks, about 50 million miles traveled on CNG in the last five years with those trucks hauling raw milk from the dairy to milk processing plants. Solids left over are turned into beneficial product. There's a fertilizer plant on site where the fiber solids are reused, the phosphorus goes into that production as well and of course the water goes back into lagoons to then be used to re-irrigate the fields. This is what 150 pounds per cow, 18,000 cows looks like. This is the digester. It's basically a big concrete box about 20 feet deep through which watery manure flows and takes about 18 to 20 days where bacteria inside the digester perform what's a normal process that would normally happen on the fields and release methane into the atmosphere. By putting it through this box, we capture that methane so that we can reuse it. This is our heat recapture system. You can see the coaxial heat exchangers here where we minimize the loss of heat. Bernie talked about we need to maintain a certain level of temperature in the digester and in the winter in Indiana that can be a tall order and so we make sure that we don't waste any of the energy that we're creating and using. This is what the solids look like after they're done digesting. It looks like dirt basically and goes to a pelletizing facility to make fertilizer. It's not magic dirt, but the same idea with another company that has just completed a new fertilizer plant about a mile away from this. This is the water treatment and processing to capture phosphorus and then putting the cleaned up water back on the fields. Electricity generation and this is Gus, our best friend and the refining plant where we make vehicle fuel. To fuel trucks that haul raw milk, tater chips, people and one of our CNG stations. Okay, so that's where we live. Why do we do all of this? Well, one of the big reasons is air quality. 153 counties in the US have serious air quality problems. Some with seemingly insurmountable difficulties. I used to live and work in Houston in a high rise office building downtown and I grew up in Texas, but I had never seen Houston from 31 floors up and asked one of my colleagues why there was three inches of brown in my horizon vision. And of course it's smog and a lot of that smog is caused by heavy duty trucks. Mobile sources on the right here are over half of our smog problem. Heavy trucks are half again that. They're 1,100 to the number of vehicles on the road and yet they cause a quarter of our smog. It's a huge problem but a huge opportunity to fix with a very concentrated effort. By using renewable natural gas with the best heavy duty engines we can reduce smog of the best diesel engine by 90%. That doesn't even count for the fact that a lot of what we're replacing are older trucks where the smog production is multiples of the best diesel engine and so we're talking about essentially eliminating smog causing pollutants by using near zero, coming near zero engines. Further, when we use renewable dairy gas, we're actually like taking not one truck off the road. This chart shows the carbon intensity in units that nobody but a PhD really understands but this is burning a gallon of diesel in a truck. So one truck is worth 100 points. When we use dairy gas it's actually negative 260 points so a 360 point improvement meaning it's like taking three and a half diesel trucks off the road. It creates enormous job opportunities, infrastructure investment. I've been ultra conservative in my number here just by using the example of Faroaks Farm and extrapolating it to an industry but you can see based on our experience there's tens if not hundreds of thousands of jobs out there and billions of dollars of infrastructure investment potential. So challenges for the industry, well R&G investment requires the renewable fuel standard and certainty. Renewable gas is a bit more expensive than fossil gas and programs like the renewable fuel standard and state programs such as those in California and Oregon help us make renewable natural gas but the renewable volume obligations to the amount of renewable fuel we need every year is uncertain from year to year as is the price which makes infrastructure investment more challenging because bankers like certainty. C&G trucks require fuel savings to justify the investment and with diesel prices as low as they are the alternative fuels excise tax credits necessary to make the spread large enough in most markets excluding the coasts but much of the country requires a little bit of extra help for the fuel savings to make up the equipment investment. So what do we do about it? There are a number of different things that are additive but two would be the most helpful. Number one, five year V-Tech with a five year sunset and this has nothing to do with ethanol. It's only alternative fuels such as compressed natural gas and a few others, clean burning compressed natural gas. There are a number of different ways to make this happen. It could be revenue neutral with less than a cent tax on other fuels. R&G, renewable fuel standard create a five year rolling RVO and price floor would give the certainty to developers to unlock demand and combined with compressed natural gas fueling policies create enough demand to displace a pretty significant portion of diesel in this country. Based on some modeling that my team has done we think 25 to 50% of the nation's heavy duty trucking could convert to renewable, clean, compressed natural gas. And so with stability and predictability for C&G, for RINs, the market could drive enormous air quality improvement, create thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of jobs and spur billions of dollars of infrastructure investment. Thank you everybody for your attention today and find me afterwards, I'd love to talk about this obviously so thank you again. Thank you Grant. Next we're going to be hearing from Carolyn Henry. Carolyn is the vice president for marketing at Quasar Energy Group, a leading Ohio based biogas firm specializing in the design, construction, ownership and operation of anaerobic digester systems across North America. She's been with the firm since 2008 and has secured approvals under EPA's renewable fuel standard for Quasar C&G fueling stations. She was also integral in the creation of renewable energy credits for C&G and for heat in Ohio. Carolyn. Hi, good afternoon. It's nice to be here and it's fun to be in Washington DC. It's a good break from being in Ohio. My name is Carolyn Henry and I'm from Quasar Energy Group. Quasar, oh, probably want the right slides up. There we are. Quasar is a Cleveland Ohio based renewable energy company. We design, build, own and operate anaerobic digestion systems. We have constructed 14 anaerobic digesters in Ohio, Massachusetts, Maine and New York, seven of those systems we operate. We have the capacity, combined capacity to manage 700,000 wet tons of organic residuals on an annual basis, which equates to approximately 100,000 megawatt hours of electricity a year. We manage agricultural waste, food waste, biosolids from municipal treatment plants and fat oils and greases. Quasar was founded in 2006 with about four employees. Our original plan was to bring over a technology from Europe and bring over components from Europe. We quickly learned that the European model is quite different than the US model and we decided to change that plan. We hired a team of engineers, US based engineers and we redesigned the system. We also worked with local companies to manufacture and fabricate components in Ohio in the United States. So today, almost 100% of our components are manufactured in the US. We also partnered with the Ohio State University to locate an anaerobic digestion lab at their OARDC, Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center campus in Worcester, Ohio. That's where we evaluate the health of our systems, we evaluate new technologies and we work closely with professors at OSU to envision the future of the industry. We recently hired two of those professors on full-time at Quasar to build our research and development initiatives. I think our approach to anaerobic digestion is a little bit different. We look at this as not only building a company but we're trying to help build an industry. So these are some of our facilities, industrial facility in Columbus, Ohio, an agricultural facility in Ashley, Ohio and a municipal facility in Worcester, Ohio. They asked me today to focus on the facility in Columbus which is industrial, so it's not at a farm, it is not at a wastewater treatment plant, it's located outside of both but it takes material from both biosolids from wastewater treatment plants and regional organics. So this is the Columbus facility. It was the third plant we built. We worked with the city of Columbus. They wanted to find a more environmentally conscious way to manage their waste. So we take about half of the biosolids from the city's wastewater treatment plant and regional organics could be brewers, waste, food waste, fat soils and greases and we produce one megawatt hour, sorry, one megawatt of electricity or we have the capacity to produce 2,800 gasoline gallon equivalents per day. Now that facility was kind of a test for us. Anyone in the industry understands it can be challenging to interconnect with the electric utility and that has been a challenge we've had at other facilities in Ohio. Columbus was a pretty good one but we wanted to test using our biogas to make CNG. So we installed a fueling station at this facility that is publicly available and is on site and so we didn't have the challenge of interconnecting with a natural gas grid. We sold it to fleets and customers in Columbus and we also used it to run our own fleet of 30 vehicles. This is, these are some additional photos of the plant that is a waste management truck, fueling and this is a photo from when Chevy rolled out their new bi-fuel impala. They featured Quasar's facility in the backdrop of a lot of their PR initiatives. This was the first facility we also used to apply, we applied for under the RFS. I think we were probably one of the first anaerobic digesters to be approved to generate RINs from the fuel at our facility. We sell our fuel at the Columbus plant for about 225 per gallon. It's about 114 BTU per gallon which equals 1.4 RINs per gallon. So it's been a very successful program for Quasar. It helps, the RFS helps to offset the cost of installing the CNG upgrade and compression equipment at a facility like this. It's new, you're trying to install fueling stations around the country and encourage people to convert their fleets. Without companies being bold enough to install these types of facilities, we're not going to have more industry converting their fleets. And that's where the RFS really helps this make more sense to a company like Quasar. I did also wanna mention, so at this facility, we have the unique opportunity to not only generate D5 RINs, but also D3 RINs. Our bio solids are approved for generating D3 RINs under the RFS. And then we take our food waste and our fog and we allocate those to generating D5 RINs. I did wanna talk a little bit about another program that's been very impactful to us. It's USDA's Rural Energy for America program, or REAP program. I think most people think of the REAP program as a farm program. It's to put a solar panel on a farm, it's to put a wind turbine on a farm, digester on a farm. What Quasar tried to do is use this program for infrastructure upgrades. And when I say infrastructure, I don't mean roads and tunnels and bridges. I mean essential infrastructure like wastewater treatment plant upgrades. The since 19, since the 1980s, funding for essential infrastructure like wastewater treatment plants has decreased, federal funding has decreased 90%. Meanwhile, most of the wastewater treatment plants in the US were constructed in the 60s and 70s. Doesn't make sense, does it? So what we've been able to do is in rural areas, we've been able to use the REAP program, which is available not only for agricultural producers, but also rural small businesses, and use it to invest private funding. In an anaerobic digester, you see it over in the corner there, next to a wastewater treatment plant. At this facility in Sheffield Village, Ohio, we're managing all of the biosolids from the city's wastewater treatment plant. We're selling back our electricity to the city at a predictable long-term rate. That means that people who live in Sheffield Village don't have to deal with the challenge of continuously rising costs for managing their sewage. It's a great program that if used creatively can help to address areas where there isn't federal funding for small rural communities that definitely need infrastructure upgrades. This is another example of using REAP program creatively. It's a wastewater treatment project in Worcester, Ohio. This project not only makes enough energy to power the digester and the treatment plant, but also the neighboring water treatment plant. Essentially, it's creating a micro grid that keeps the wastewater treatment plant and the water treatment plant off the grid. So if there was a homeland security issue, these essential services are still available to the people of the city of Worcester. An additional creative use of REAP funding. In 2006, Quasar applied for a REAP grant to install a gasifier and dryer at the Zanesville facility. Now the goal was to demonstrate that by concentrating nutrients in waste, we could divert them to areas where we didn't have nutrient management issues. In Ohio, we have the Grand Lake St. Mary's Watershed, we have Lake Erie, where we're constantly experiencing algae blooms. The goal was to take this equipment and illustrate how it can be used to divert those nutrients to areas where they're needed, natural nutrients, that now aren't going into the watershed. So this is a new project, we'll be doing this probably 2018, but it's another creative way to use REAP funds. All right. Thanks, Carolyn. So next we have Luke Moro. Luke is the managing director of Moro Renewables. And he's president of Moro Renewables as well and a board member of the Renewable Natural Gas Coalition. He has over 16 years experience in high BTU landfill gas treating, and Moro Renewables has built and operated seven high BTU landfill gas projects within other two projects under construction. Luke. Thank you. So from watery manure to vats, oils, graces and decomposing waste. Hope you're enjoying your lunch. This is good stuff. So I wanna talk to you specifically today about a project that happened in the city of Edinburgh which you can see from the map is right down on the border, a great little town. But I thought I'd stop by first by giving you a little background on our company. Moro Renewables is a company, it's a small family owned company. In fact, my brother is sitting in the back, he's the follically challenged guy back there. That looks a lot like me but a little less hair loss. So we are the sole owners of Moro Renewables, as I mentioned, a family owned company. We got our start in natural gas treating and kind of came across a landfill project in 98 and looked at a couple of options and we decided that eventually since our expertise is in gas treating, let's make a gas plant. So we built a gas plant and in 2001 started up our very first high BTU project. And that was kind of the beginning of where we are now. As she had mentioned, we've built and owned and operated seven facilities. We're building two more and would expect to have another two online in 2018 also but the two that we're currently building will be online in 2017. To give you a little bit of idea of what the RFS has meant to Moro Renewables. In 2013, we had about 25 employees. We run a very thin operation. Right now we have over 100 employees. We've expanded significantly. We have expanded our, if you'll take a look, the top picture has, I took that this week. You can see where we're getting running to pour a whole bunch more concrete. We've actually expanded our shop and our assembly facilities six times in the last four years. We continue to expand. You see some other pictures of plants being put together in West Texas and those vessels down at the bottom those are actually almost 200,000 pounds, four and a half inches thick. So we built a lot of things and the RFS has really given us a giant kickstart in our business and it's created a whole lot of jobs. I'd also like to mention that the RFS for us has really driven technology. We've been issued two patents on methods of treating that increased efficiency and cut emissions in our plants. So we're very excited about that and excited about every time we build a plant we make another little tweak, try to find a new avenue. So it's been really fun to do. And so yes, over a hundred employees we've also done some international work. We've sold two large facilities to Brazil. We continue to get some interest from international. So let me tell you about the city of Edinburgh. There was a power project like there many are but power prices are terrible so the power project never happened. We took this over in the beginning of 2015, this project and started working on our permitting and building a plant and we manufactured the plant in Midland, Texas just like we do all of our plants. This one took a, you know, the construction of the plant projects can only go so fast because you have all these other things with permits to deal with. And this particular one was Ridaway. Ridaway was a lot of fun. We only had three landowners to deal with and it took us over eight months. And the funny one was the very last one. It was right on the highway and the guy said, this is prime real estate. And I said, well, you're across the street from two prisons. How is this prime real estate? And he said, well, I'm a bail bondsman. So, so we got to, we ended up actually buying the Ridaway in the name of his company was Tequesta which translate roughly as it's gonna cost you. And it cost us dearly. So we paid $50,000 for a 30 foot piece of land but it was in prime real estate for bail bondsman. So I will pass that on. And so we did not make a bad investment if we want to go into the bail bonds business. So anyway, this project came online in May of 2016 was when we first started selling gas and we waited our standard 60 days for the EPA to approve us as a renewable fuel generator. So the project has gone really well. The city has been very excited and I'll pass this on. So this particular city was spending about half a million dollars a year on gas gathering. And so we were able to come in, take that over for them, do all their drilling and handle a lot of their compliance for them. So that came right off the top of their expenses. On top of that, the first year they're making about $1.3 million in revenue from us as a royalty. And so this is an amazing amount that's gone right to their bottom line. This is a city of 80 to 100,000 people that has a good size landfill. And they've been very happy. The city manager has been very happy. They had a disconnect somewhere in the first check that we gave them. They thought that was for the whole year. And we said, no, this is the first quarter. And so they're very excited and they're able to expand their budget and cover areas that they didn't see coming. So they're very happy about that. And so when we go in to build a plant like this, what is great is we spend probably three, two, three, $4 million building a plant in our facilities. Then we spend several million dollars installing it. So this is creating jobs in operations, in construction, in welding, pipe fitting, in HVAC, building contractors with engineering firms to permit to handle building design. And one of the things that we've been most proud of is that going to the 100 employees, those are all middle class jobs and they're good solid middle class jobs. And we have of those 110 of those are engineers. And this summer, we're bringing on six engineers from Texas Tech to do intern projects. And we've got them assigned to specific areas. So we're been very excited about where this is going. So the job creation, we're seeing it, we're living proof of job creation of RFS and also benefits to local economies. That's been a very big thing. And so when you take a look at what are the annual emissions reductions from this type of project other than benefiting the city and benefiting us, of course, and creating jobs, by the EPA, this is the equivalent of over 226,000 acres of forest CO2 sequestration a year. Or it's equivalent to the CO2 emissions from 27 million gallons of gasoline just in this project. And this is a growing site. So every year, the site will continue to grow, will continue, these numbers will continue to increase every year. And so after sorting through all the fun South Tech's politics, which I don't know how many of you are familiar, but it's different world in South Texas, great people. But we have a great project that I think that we're very proud of. And in conclusion, as I mentioned before, manufacturing, trade, technical, operation, construction jobs, all made possible by the RFS. And also the RFS is driving new technology. We're seeing it where we are. We're seeing it from our suppliers. We're seeing it from our competitors. New technologies, new ways of doing things, putting people to work. And I think this is very important. And the beauty is, as our industry, what we face is natural gas prices are very low right now. There's a lot of fracking going on. There's a lot of oil coming on. There's a lot of gas associated. It's very hard for us when that market fluctuates and drops so low to innovate or even build a project. Well, I can tell you, we could not build a project on natural gas prices. But with the RFS, we have some stability and it's driving innovation and it's doing things for our environment and creating jobs. And so I would ask that take that into strong consideration and go and sing the praises of the RFS. And I wanna thank you for your time. Thank you, Luke. Now we're gonna go from Texas up to Minnesota. We have Brian. Brian is the director of plant operations at Avon Energy. He has 19 years of experience in electrical generation and water management. And his current role, he manages a portfolio of electrical generation facilities, including biogas, natural gas and wind. All right, good afternoon. So Bernie did a great job explaining what goes into a digester. And so I'm gonna spend most of my time talking about what goes out and as far as the electrical generation and what we can do with the electrical generation. So Avon Energy, we are a electrical consulting firm. We work primarily in municipal markets on the electrical side. We also work in wastewater and the biogas. So I'm looking at this a little differently for you today and that's how to manage the grid, right? Load versus demand in generation. This data that I put up here is an average daily profile from California of what renewable generation looks like, okay? This was April 6th of this year, but it's pretty typical for a spring day in California. Now, as you notice, we get solar when the sun shines, right? We also get wind primarily at night. And one of the detractors that you will hear people often say about renewables and grouping all renewables together is what do you do when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow? Well, I'm about to tell you. So keep this chart in mind for the end of my presentation when I reveal my answer. So just a little bit about our plants. So we're located in Les sewer, Minnesota, which is about an hour south of the Twin Cities. We use agricultural and food-based streams to power our facility, both solid and liquid streams. We get a variety of our products from manufacturers of salad mix or food products, and also from agricultural wastes. We generate eight megawatts, or we have the capacity to generate eight megawatts of electricity, which makes us the largest digester in the country that uses those supplies to make electrical generation. We also have 20 million gallons of storage capabilities for our byproduct, which we in turn work with our local farmers in the area to distribute them as soil amendments. So this is a map of what our plant looks like. Pretty small footprint, but you can see that the two large green tanks here are the digesters. Very large digesters, about one and a half million gallons of liquid each, so very large digesters. And the key to our process, and what I'm gonna talk about today are these three domes that you see in the back. That's where we store our gas that we produce. So we produce our gas, we clean it using some of these other processes here, and then we store it in those gas storage holders. So this is a picture of our facility taken in July in Minnesota, as you can see. No, actually it was May, and that's not a joke. But so that's what our facility looks like. We actually sit right in town who are across the street from the local airport, and we bring all of our material comes in from local farmers and local industry. So when it comes in, we receive it inside in a big receiving hall. This receiving hall has the ability to take in both liquids and solids. When we built the facility, we also designed it to be as modern and personnel efficient as possible. So we actually have an automated crane system. So when the drivers come in and bring their waste to us, the solid waste, they dump it into a pit, and then this crane knows how much is in that pit where to put it, whether it puts it in our process or whether it puts it into storage or a mixture of the two, reducing the amount of labor and work that our employees have to do. Then we have generators. So we have four two megawatt Cummins generators, and that's a picture of those there. They're natural gas reciprocating engines. So they're just like an engine that you have in your car, except they're a little bigger and they run off biogas, but that's a picture of those generators there. Okay, so now what you really wanna hear. So this is the same day in California, just shown a little differently where you can see the actual total load required of the grid, and that is the orange line. And then you can see that's the orange line there. And then you can see the green line. And what the green line is, is that's the load that's left after solar and wind and other renewables have been taken out of the picture. So you can see that as solar has increased in California, there's a bigger gap here, which is good, because in the middle of the day, then that solar is making up for that load that's required, thus reducing the amount of fossil fuels and fossil generation that has to be on. But what happens when the sun starts coming down is that load starts going up, right? So that's the problem that we've had to address in the industry. So from about this point and on this day in April, it'd be about two o'clock in the afternoon, you're gonna have fossil plants starting to ramp up their turbines. Now a typical fossil plant could take anywhere from one to three hours to start up, depending on a lot of different factors with the plant. But during that one to three hours, they're burning fuel, raising emissions, right? And they're also typically running not as efficiently because they're not gonna come right up to full power because the load isn't there yet, okay? And then until about seven o'clock or so on this night, that's where you hit the true peak, right? So at seven o'clock, that's where you need the most generation running at all the time. And then the wind starts to pick back up and you can see that it starts to come back down. So this is a typical example for what it's like today. But we all know what's going on with solar and wind, right? More and more, which is good, okay? So this is called the duck curve because it looks like a duck. That's the head and that's the belly and that's the tail. So what this is is that with the increase in solar and wind and mostly solar, we're gonna see this curve get larger and larger and larger every year. So what happens is that as these get larger and larger, base load power plants then either have to derate themselves or shut down in order to not over generate and put too much power onto the grid that's not being used. And then once you hit about four or five o'clock, you have a severe ramp rate going up. So fast that your larger assets like turbine generators can't keep up or you stress the systems which is hard on the plants themselves in order to meet that demand, okay? So what we can do with biogas and what we do at Avant Energy and at Hometown Bioenergy in Minnesota is we produce gas 24-7 but we store it in those gas storage holders. So then when this ramp starts to occur, we turn on all our generators and we run at eight megawatts and we'll run at eight megawatts until we see this peak start to come back down. It's good for us because as this ramp increases, so do electrical prices. So it creates the economic feasibility for our plant to be able to capture higher electrical prices during this ramp period. It's good for the consumers because you don't have more expensive and larger facilities that don't need to come online, coming online. So it helps the consumers and it helps the environment because we're using a renewable resource to fill this gap that we talked about at the beginning rather than a fossil plant. So it really benefits everybody in this situation, the producer of the electricity, the consumer and also the environment. With more facilities that can produce peak power like this, the more impact you can have to lower the cost of this duct curve, keep everybody's electric prices in check and use renewable energy instead of fossil energy when the sun's not shining and the wind's not blowing. So we're also efficient in other ways. Besides producing this on-peak electricity, we recover all our heat from our generation. We heat our process for our facility. We heat all of our building. So we don't have any fossil fuel or any electric heat in our building. It all comes from our process itself or in the entire plant. And then we also use our digestate, as I said earlier, as a soil amendment. So the local farmers get the benefit of having a readily available soil amendment for their fields right in their own backyard. That's all I have. Thank you. Thanks, Ryan. Not to wrap it up for us is gonna be Patrick Surface. Patrick is the executive director of the American Biogas Council. He has led the American Biogas Council since early 2010 when he helped 22 companies come together to form the only trade association representing the entire biogas industry in the United States. ABC now represents over 200 organizations and has a network of more than 11,000 stakeholders in the biogas industry. I'm gonna hand it over to Patrick. Thank you very much, Jesse. We're just so happy to be here and so happy that so many of you are here. And I hope that so far from all the presentations that you've seen so far, you care a little bit more about biogas. We certainly all do. We think it has a lot to offer. And what I'm hoping is that as you've absorbed this information that will give you a few tools right now that you can take back with you that you can use in your offices and hopefully contribute to some smart policy for biogas systems. Just to remind you, for those of you that have the agenda, or if you don't pick one up when you leave, this is actually a fact sheet. So to recap from what we've talked about so far, all the related industries to biogas systems are listed here. So if you're developing policy, there are a lot of related industries that you don't have to develop a biogas policy. You develop ag policies, waste management policies, water treatment policies, all of those things can help our industry. And we hope that you'll have biogas in mind when you do that. And the key benefits of biogas systems, we just heard from four different projects. And each one of those projects touched on different benefits that biogas systems can offer. And you heard a lot of them. Well, they're all listed here on the backside. So if there's something that you need, you have some constituent need that is looking to create jobs. They're looking for electricity. They're looking for new gas generation, soil and agriculture, soil amendments and things like that. Go back to your sheet here, remind yourself that biogas systems can help that as well. And there's our contact information. Finally, what I'm gonna talk to you about is the last part here. And I'm not gonna go into great depth on the policies because on the agenda here, you have a list of all the existing policies that help the biogas industry. So we don't even need to talk about new policies. There are lots of ideas that we have and we'd love to talk with you after this briefing about some of the new things that we'd like to do. But there's enough existing policy in the agencies and in terms of legislation and regulation that if you can just support that and keep those going, you're gonna be helping our industry. So the first on the list there, you heard a lot about biogas going to vehicle fuel and whether you're going biogas to a CNG vehicle or biogas to electric vehicles, which includes battery electric vehicles or fuel cell electric vehicles. We're hoping EPA is gonna activate the electric vehicle pathway for the RFS soon. Biogas to vehicle fuel is hugely important to the industry and it's real simple. Electricity prices are really low because of natural gas prices being really low and the renewable fuel standard is very helpful for our industry and you can see it right here. So fossil gas is about, let's talk about one unit of a million BTUs, a million BTUs of energy. Sell that as the gas, you're competing with natural gas and you're gonna sell the gas for about $3 for that million BTU. But if you can sell that as a D3, with the D3 RINs that are associated with that, you could be making $34 in addition to those $3. That's a game changer for our industry. And the D5 RINs, which are the advanced biofuel RINs, you could be getting $7 in addition to the $3 and that's what's really changing our industry. Please protect the RFS. We say don't mess with the RFS. It really helps us out a lot. Farm bill here, existing energy title programs especially. There are several programs that cover everything from electricity generation to fuels to bioproducts like some of the ones that you see in the front of the room from Digestate. Biogas systems can be bio refineries and a little conference language would help with that as well. We also do a lot for conservation of agricultural land. So a lot of the conservation title programs are really helpful as well to help biogas systems. If you can just, we kind of say that there aren't any roadblocks to developing projects in the industry but there are all these little speed bumps and each one of these programs can help to smooth out one or more of those speed bumps and help to encourage project development. The research title is also one that we really wanna highlight because not everyone knows about the biogas industry. Not everyone knows how well Digestate can help improve soil health. Not everyone knows how much biogas systems can help air quality solutions and how well biogas as a vehicle fuel compares to fossil fuel. There's still more research that could be done in collecting those data using some of our existing agencies and encouraging that research to continue will help provide the data that will then translate to policy makers whether they're federal or state or local to be able to create more favorable policy to encourage more biogas projects to be built which is what we'd like. So here are the agency programs with EPA, DOE. A lot of the USDA programs are covered under the Farm Bill with the energy titles in there in the conservation title and the other parts of the Farm Bill. So we've covered those. These are the agency programs that are currently supporting the biogas and RNG industries. And now that some budgets have dropped today with some not great news for those of us that care about renewable energy, we need with appropriations to protect these programs more than ever. Here's a list of programs that are also in your agenda here. Let's make sure that funding stays in these programs to help our industries. And either even some cross agency programs between USDA and DOE on biomass R&D and between EPA, USDA and USGS to be able to do some work on nutrient management as being able to recycle nutrients both to keep farms in business, keep our watersheds clean and be able to promote the business of the biogas and RNG industries are really, really important. So for tax policy, the main thing that we're looking for for tax is we need to start, we don't even have a huge ask here. We just want a more equal playing field. We need a more equal playing field with the fossil energy industry and we need now, unfortunately, a more equal playing field with some of our friends in the renewables industry, especially the wind and solar industries that have gotten some tax credits and some tax breaks over the last year and a half that will continue while the tax credits for our industry have expired as recently as December. So here's one way. The solar and industry works well for us. We have solar arrays at our biogas facilities. So this is not a knock against solar and wind. This is just about equity. And so if you look at solar and wind and you look at the capacity factor for those, that's how often those wind turbines are turning and how often the sun is shining on those solar systems. The capacity factor for solar and wind are around 16 to 22%. Sometimes it can be a little bit higher for some systems, sometimes it's a little bit lower, but basically it's one sixth to one fifth of the time that biogas systems are operating, which is almost 24-7. You might turn down your engines to change your oil, maybe you do some maintenance, but basically your biogas systems are generating gas 24-7. And so you're running five to six times as often as our solar and wind folks. So if you look at the cost of these biogas systems, you really need to look at it compared to 5X for wind or 6X to solar because to put 100 megawatts of actual power, you need to build 600 megawatts of solar or 400 megawatts of wind to be able to do that. When you look at how much that actually costs using real numbers, that 100 megawatts will cost about $400 million for biogas and 2.2 billion for solar. And so when you look at those costs equally when you're developing policy, I think it helps to equalize the playing field a little bit and show that even on a dollars and cents basis, why biogas make sense, then you add in the nutrient benefits, the waste management and the environmental benefits and all those things onto it as well. And it's just a no brainer that we need to be building more biogas systems. So for tax policy, there are kind of two ways to do that. One is either extend some of the policies that the other folks have to biogas. So like give biogas and biomass the same credit that the solar industry has. And a new bill that was just introduced a couple of weeks ago by Senators Brown and Roberts that helps to develop biogas systems and nutrient recovery systems. So add a few more incentives or level the playing field with tax reform, do a technology neutral tax reform that actually notices the benefits that some of these technologies have, the different stages that they're out in terms of commercialization and the different benefits that they have in terms of reducing carbon emissions and creating jobs and creating energy and other benefits. So we can create tax policy parity a couple of different ways. And finally, I know that for some members in Congress, renewable energy is not really all that popular. We love it and there's a lot of reasons to love renewable energy. But you know what, we can make a really good argument for why anyone should care about biogas systems without even talking about renewable energy. And that's because we have to handle a lot of material as a country. We've got 66 million tons of food waste every year that we've got to find a way to handle better than we are today. Sludge from 23 trillion gallons of wastewater every day. How can we handle that better? How can we harvest the resources from that and generate energy and recycle nutrients better from that? And managing the manure and nutrients from eight trillion cows, chicken, turkeys and pigs. We have to do that anyway. That doesn't even have to do with renewable energy. We can create a lot of renewable energy when we manage that really well. And then we've got to talk about just supporting our agriculture industry. Where's all the nitrogen gonna come from and where's all the phosphorus gonna come from to be able to keep growing our crops, to feed our animals and all the food that we all need. Those nutrients need to come from somewhere. They're already here. We just need to recycle them better. And if we do all that and we develop the 13 and a half, the 13,500 new biogas and RNG systems that we could develop, we could be putting $40 billion of construction spending into our economy, creating 335,000 short-term construction jobs and 23,000 permanent jobs once the systems are built and they become operational. So there's a lot to gain here. I hope that you all have absorbed a lot today. I hope that you'll have some questions. These are, most of us, this is the contact information for myself. I'm in Johannes who lead the, I lead the American Biogas Council. Johannes leads the Coalition for Renewable Natural Gas and our main policy deputies with Marcus and Maureen. There are a few other folks as well who can help you. We hope you'll have questions and let's develop some smart policy for Biogas and RNG. Thank you. Thank you, Patrick, for that great recap. So we do have about 10 remaining minutes for questions. So if you have a question, please just raise your hand and wait for the microphone and identify yourself and we'll see if we can get your question answered. Right here in the front. Yeah, Howard Marks, Alternative Energy Consultants. So my question is for Bernie and maybe for Caroline. That deals with the food waste issue, which is huge. And I'm also lived in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. So I was glad to see that that was one of the locations for one of the food waste processing facilities. So what more needs to be done? I mean, obviously you've had great success the industry in taking fats and oils, restaurant greases to make them into biodiesel, renewable diesel. So what more needs to be done to take care of this restaurant south waste and et cetera? Well, certainly, Patrick, you should. How about now? Four square, good. First of all, the, you know, obviously your landfill bands are big to keep that landfill, to keep those organics out of the landfill. I mean, let's face it, the landfills, they don't want it either. I mean, it's liquid, it turns into more problems for them. So they want it out of the landfills just as much. So getting those landfill bands in place, certainly starts separation, that type of, and really what we need more than anything else is just some higher visibility. So folks know that, you know, starting to do some separation. Marine, the Senator Booker, right? He has a, he's bringing forward, he's proposing. So that's a good opportunity there. The, I guess the big thing, the big thing really is we can process an awful lot of food waste, but we need something to do. We've got to have more, we need better opportunities for the energy downstream is really where we're at. Because we can make that energy, we can make a lot of energy with food waste. And the digesters run well. It's, and the de-packaging runs well. We need those downstream to equalize that energy value downstream would really help those projects also. Patrick, you want to say anything else or Carolyn? I think I got it. Thanks. Any other questions? I had a question. So you, some of you touched on soil quality, air quality. Could you talk maybe about the impact, the potential impact on water quality to removing some of these nutrients? I'll take the first swing. Yeah, for example, we have a large facility that an American Biogas Council member just won the Lake Stewardship Award in Wisconsin for their facility where they're taking out, I don't remember the exact numbers, but it's clean fuel partners and they pull out phosphorus from food waste and from three large dairies that sit just upstream of Lake Mandoda in Madison, Wisconsin, and then take that phosphorus over the top out of the watershed. Anything where we're, again, where we're processing material and then can separate out those nutrients and Lake St. Mary's in Ohio is another great example where runoff from local farms has caused Lake St. Mary's to turn green and by what we can do is by pulling that phosphorus and pulling that nitrogen back and recovering it, going through a digester. A digester gives you control. It's the biggest thing to just think about it from that standpoint. From food waste, land application, it's giving you control and if you have control, then you can treat something and then you can make it better. Anybody else? I would just say that, so one of the things that happens at Faroaks is there's a separate process post-digester where there's an active recovery of phosphorus through innovative, what's a company called Trident that has a new system that helps the farmers recover this valuable resource that in the wrong application or in unintended applications causes problems outside of the farm. And one of the things that the milk producers and other ag interests in this country are working on is creating the right incentives for farmers to take out and control water runoff and nutrient recovery by helping recognize the value that they're creating and incentivizing the people that can be most efficient at doing that. And so part of our operation is to provide an example for that, but that's another very important project that's going on that can help solve some of these issues with runoff that we're talking about. And a key way to do that, as Johannes talked about, is creating markets for those things that allow farmers who can be efficient and add value through that process to reap some value from it. Great. Anyone else? Any other questions? There's one in the back here. I'll just repeat your question for the... So we have two questions here. The first was on sort of what impact federal efforts in terms of reducing food waste. There's a goal of 50% reduction in overall food waste in this country from EPA and USDA. And the second question was on the solar capacity issue. I think those were both for Patrick. Thanks. So the 50% reduction by 2030, the agreement that USDA and EPA came together with last year is great for our industry. And there are a lot of things that we didn't discuss today. There's so many good things to talk about with biogas, right? And that's certainly one of them. I think what we would say from the industry perspective is that's a great start for the federal agencies to focus on food waste reduction. Remember with food waste, if you look at the EPA food recovery hierarchy, step one is feed people. Well, step one is try to reduce food waste to begin with. Reduce waste. Then feed people, feed animals, and then recycle food waste. And then you get to disposal. So we're in the recycle part here. And so if we think, now we spend a lot of time, not everyone knows about biogas, now you all do. Not everyone knows about biogas. And so we spend a lot of time trying to get people to care about biogas. How do you get people to care about biogas when they're not gonna have a biogas system right next door to them? It might be in their community someplace, but it's not gonna be right there like you might see a solar array or you'll see a big wind turbine. And so we have to get people to care about food waste or get people to care about biogas. And personally, I think the way that we're gonna get people to care about biogas is to get them to care about making sure that food waste is recycled. So those policies are really important, but then they need to be translated into actual action that can impact project development. And that's like encouraging states to then say, okay, well, how are we going to encourage food waste recycling in our state? Or how are we going to increase the impacts of food waste recycling federally? Can we get federal agencies to make sure that we're cycling all the food waste? I know how many of you guys were in one of the cafeterias today. We had lunch here today, but I'm sure most of you have been in the cafeteria. Look at the, when you're on the house side or Senate side, look at what they say goes to the landfill is disposed and what is recycled. They say food waste goes to the landfill here. That shouldn't be the case. Food waste, at best, should at least be sent down a garbage disposal in the back of the kitchen and sent over to DC Water that has a biogas system here. So there's lots of opportunities to turn that policy with USDA and NEPA into real action. And I think that's what we'd like to see. With the capacity factor, I was actually just double-checking my numbers last night. You can look at EIA. The numbers go from 10% up to 25%, depending upon where you are, whether you're residential or utility. The 16% that I put in my slide is the EIA number from New Jersey. I think the actual number is 16.7%. That's an annual average in New Jersey. That's just the one I happen to pick, but there's a range there and that's a real number. I think we have time for one last question if there are any. We have one over here. Aida Awad, Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow. You're asking, how do we get people to care about biogas? And I would suggest that from the viewpoint of a STEM educator, we hear a lot about recycling and solar and wind. We never hear about biogas. So how do we leverage the great stories that you guys are telling and bring those to the attention of curriculum developers? I'll start, no? Did it again. I'll start with that. We're currently, the American Biogas Council is currently working hard down that road. We're looking at a starting, and believe it or not starting with a coloring book and starting, look, if the kid sits in colors on it every night, the parents are gonna read it also and then they're gonna take it forward. And then they're gonna understand that this facility sitting on the outside of town, where these trucks are going, what's actually going on out there? And then they start to then say, wait a minute, don't throw that food waste away. Let's make sure it goes in the right receptacle and it goes out. So we're starting down that path right now. And we're gonna have a kid's book, but then secondly is looking at that seventh and eighth grade. How do we get to them? Because we want, some of those kids that aren't gonna go to college, but certainly can come out and run the waste treatment facility. I mean, that's what we are. We're waste management. We're waste treatment. So coming out to run those facilities and making those important. So that can't be that someone looks at that as if that's not a dead end, that that's a real career opportunity where you can have a real viable career and move forward. So those are the things we're working on right now. Anybody else wanna? I would just add that I think our industry is learning. We've got a lot of engineers and technical folks in our industry. We don't have a lot of communicators and marketing folks. There are some communicating and marketing folks who are great, but it's not the majority of the industry. So I think as an industry, we also need to learn how to tell our stories better. We try to tell at least four stories here for you today. Love some feedback on what resonated with you. What do you think is repeatable and what stories will you then share with other people that you talk to next? So I think there's a maturing of the industry and that's we're at an early stage of commercialization for the industry. The technology's not new, but we're at an early stage of commercialization and implementing that. And the marketing, you need your industry to be thriving so that in making profit, so that you can be siphoning some of that money into marketing and education. And as the industry grows, more of that will happen. We need more of it, that's for sure. Just as a quick plug, the farm where we're a partner at Faroaks Farm in Indiana has a dedicated visitor center. It hosts, I don't know, I think it's like the third largest destination, tourist destination in Indiana, half a million visitors a year. There's school buses there every time I go to visit our plant and they've got a number of different educational centers from crops to hogs, dairy, I'm missing some, but, and they're also in doing partnerships with local universities around specific, nutrient, specific initiatives, nutrient recovery, energy, et cetera. So, come visit the farm and that would be a great starting point. I don't think we have any time for any more questions. I think the panelists might have a few minutes afterwards. We did have one comment, I think, from a panelist. I did, you've had the opportunity to ask us questions so I wanted to ask you one in conclusion. If you would be so kind, those of you that are staff representatives of different districts, would you mind standing for us? And if so, could you, if you're not comfortable acknowledging your representative's name, at least shout out for us what state you represent just so we can kind of get that sense. That would be fantastic. And not everyone stand at once. They might have run off to go back to their offices. Members of the public that are here. We have one here. We have a fantastic, okay, would you stand? All right, we've been preaching to the choir the last 15 minutes, this is great. I just thank you for your participation, your attendance today, your engagement. Again, socialization of what you've heard today is fantastic. The Coalition for Renewable Natural Gas, this also indirectly responds to the last question that was posed. And that is consider the American Biogas Council is coming up on their seventh anniversary. The RNG Coalition in July will celebrate our sixth anniversary. Our first project broke down in 1982. And so we're still in many respects, Patrick mentioned commercialization, coalescing fringe industry stakeholders and telling our story. So absolutely there's room for improvement. We're committed to that. You can help us with that. The RNG Coalition was started with a phone call. And that was to a energy trader at the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. And I asked him a question. I said, do you know anything about biogas? He said, it's funny you ask. I just closed a $300 million contract. And it was from a landfill across the country in Dallas, Texas. And under that conversation was born the idea for coalescing the industry. So don't underestimate the power of sharing even over lunch, conversation, cup of coffee, what you've heard today. That can go a long way to amplifying the story that really provides both economic and environmental benefits to better our communities and our world together. And on that note, I just thank our speakers for coming in and thank you all for being here today. Thank you.