RNG is Taking Off
How fast is RNG growing? According to a recent report from McKinsey, the supply of RNG increased by 400% from 2018 to 2023. While still a relatively small part of the fuel mix in use today, it’s exponential growth is exactly the kind of momentum needed to rapidly scale up and drive down emissions in one of the sectors most critical to the American economy.
Renewable natural gas (RNG) is a low-carbon fuel compatible with all existing natural gas infrastructure. It’s carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative and can be sourced from landfills, wastewater treatment plants, livestock farms, food production facilities and organic waste management operations, offering exciting opportunities to address some of America’s biggest logistical problems while achieving a cleaner energy future.
It’s worth putting this 400% growth in context with the broader energy system. Solar energy receives quite a bit of well-earned attention for the rapidly increasing pace of deployment. According to the Solar Energy Association, solar capacity increased by approximately 205% percent from 2018 to 2023, albeit from a somewhat higher base number. This impressive exponential growth has been enabled in significant part by the increased use of natural gas as a key partner for renewables to provide the necessary baseload and grid stability needed to allow more renewables to be deployed. (For more on how natural gas growth goes hand in hand with renewable growth, check out our piece on the latest energy system modeling by Princeton, which finds natural gas grows at the fastest pace in their net-zero projected scenario.)
So, considering that 205% growth in a five-year period is an impressive achievement, how have we been able to hit 400% RNG growth during that same period?
Much of it comes down to infrastructure. RNG is completely pipeline compatible. Chemically, it’s effectively identical to natural gas from traditional sources. The United States has 2.6 million miles of natural gas pipelines stretching across the country. RNG can be easily plugged in to this existing infrastructure.
Another advantage – many existing RNG resources were untapped but represented significant revenue sources for their owners on existing projects that were already worth doing on their own terms.
Take a family-owned dairy farm as an example. They make money selling milk, as they always have. An RNG company or their local utility comes to the owners and makes an offer – keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing, only now they’ll also be paid in exchange for what had previously been an emissions-creating byproduct of the dairy farm’s operations. Farmers make extra money, their regular operations are unaffected, their community gets a new source of reliable and affordable energy, and the farm owners get to rest easy knowing you’ve dramatically decreased the greenhouse gas emissions of their family dairy farm. Not bad for a day’s work!
Our industry is doing its part to lower emissions safely and affordably – without compromising the reliability of the energy system. We’ve come a long way in the last five years – and are excited to see what the next five years bring. Stay tuned for part two in this series, where we’ll do a deep dive on the factors enabling the exponential growth of RNG as a decarbonization tool.