The City of Raleigh’s Neuse River Resource Recovery facility is not like your average wastewater treatment plant. In fact, they recently changed their name to include "resource" because it does so much more than treat the daily 44 million gallons of water used by the facility’s 500,000-person service area. The facility is LEED Silver certified, and after renovations focusing on the City’s new sustainability efforts, the facility started planning on mining resources from the wastewater itself. The plant is among several utilities seeking to have the 2nd operating thermal hydrolysis system in the country. This change is occurring in conjunction with a conversion from aerobic digestion to anaerobic digestion which is a major step for the plant to reduce energy demands and actually produce usable energy going forward. The anaerobic digestion process is expected to generate roughly 3,000 diesel gallon equivalents per day of usable renewable natural gas.

 

It is the City’s hope that this recovered gas can be used to fuel their transit bus fleet, which is making the transition to natural gas in the next couple of years. Another project the City is especially proud of is their Biodiesel facility, which takes the sludge from the wastewater and uses it as fertilizer for the City’s many acres of sunflower fields planted along the Neuse River Greenway trail. The sunflowers are planted to keep the nitrogen-rich soil from running off into the watershed and are then harvested and processed to produce biodiesel. T.J. Lynch, Assistant Public Utilities Director, is proud of the efforts the facility has made in recent years and notes they have already saved the plant around 20% in annual energy costs.  

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To learn more about Raleigh’s Sustainable Energy Leadership visit raleighnc.gov.