Benzinga | Mar 31, 2021 07:33AM EDT

Aemetis Receives California Air Resources Board Approval Certification For LCFS Tier 2 Fuel Pathway For Aemetis Advanced Fuels Keyes Ethanol Production Plant Utilizing Dairy Biogas

Aemetis, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMTX), a renewable natural gas and renewable fuels company focused on negative carbon intensity products, announced today that it has received certification from the California Air Resources Board (CARB) for a new LCFS Tier 2 fuel pathway for the Aemetis Advanced Fuels Keyes ethanol production plant utilizing renewable dairy biogas as a process energy input. The new pathway reduces the carbon intensity (CI) of Aemetis' fuel ethanol from 67.3 to 65.6 utilizing dairy biogas from two dairies with an average CI score of negative 426 (-426).

Aemetis began operating two anaerobic dairy digesters and a 4-mile private pipeline in September 2020 near the company's ethanol biorefinery in Keyes, California. The new ethanol pathway certification from CARB is effective as of October 1, 2020.

The Aemetis Central Dairy Digester Project is a collection of dairy lagoon anerobic digesters that are built, owned, and operated by Aemetis Biogas LLC utilizing waste animal manure to generate renewable methane gas to produce negative carbon intensity RNG for transportation use to displace petroleum diesel fuel. An estimated 25% of methane emissions in California is produced by dairy waste lagoons.

Once complete, the Aemetis Central Dairy Digester Project is expected to include over 30 dairy digesters in the current phase (with plans to expand to more than 52 dairies), and utilize 36 miles of private pipeline owned by Aemetis, a centralized gas clean up unit located at the Aemetis Keyes ethanol biorefinery, a Renewable Natural Gas onsite fueling station, and an interconnection to PG&E's natural gas pipeline.

"This is another significant step in our multi-year plan to de-carbonize the Keyes ethanol production facility," said Eric McAfee, Chairman and CEO of Aemetis, Inc. "This CARB Pathway approval is our first utilization of negative CI dairy biogas to produce transportation fuel. The Aemetis Keyes biorefinery is expected to serve as the hub for the processing and distribution of our negative carbon intensity RNG and allow us to serve multiple markets with low or below zero CI liquid and gas renewable fuels. We'd like to thank the staff at CARB for their diligent and professional work. We look forward to working with them as we rapidly expand the deployment of our negative CI transportation fuel," added McAfee.

The Company plans to begin construction of the next five dairy digesters and the additional 32 miles of biogas pipeline in the second quarter of 2021, with five more dairy digesters set to begin construction in the third quarter of 2021 and five digesters beginning in Q1 2022, for a planned total of seventeen dairy digesters and a 35-mile biogas pipeline in operation by Q2 2022.