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The future of fuel

Exertis Almo works with Brightmark on a new biofuel initiative

As part of DCC’s sustainability journey, the Exertis Almo team - located in New York - began looking for a new way to fuel their office while reducing their environmental impact.

The team’s initial concern was to find a green alternative that was cost-efficient and could keep up with the demands of the business. Alongside exploring options such as solar and wind-powered energy, the North American team soon learned about biogas – the process of converting naturally occurring gases such as methane into energy – and decided that this was the right move for them. Once they agreed that biogas ticked all of their boxes, they reached out to their energy broker to connect them with a suitable biogas provider.

Working with Brightmark

Brightmark collaborates with farms across Western New York to convert waste into a green fuel alternative. By partnering with Brightmark, the Exertis Almo office now benefits from locally-sourced biogas that can singlehandedly power their entire facility, without any change to the level of energy efficiency, yet without needing to burn fossil fuels extracted from the ground – leading to a significant drop in negative environmental impact. This is made possible by the office’s close proximity to the dairy farms involved in the initiative, as transporting biogas can be difficult on a wide scale, making this partnership an especially unique beneficial opportunity for those in the Exertis Almo office.

How it happens

The production of energy sourced from biogas is a relatively straightforward process. Brightmark is estimated to process around 265,000 gallons of dairy manure daily, from which methane gas is extracted to be converted into renewable natural gas that is then collected for use as biogas and transported to the nearby Exertis Almo office as an energy source for essential functions, such as providing heating. Biogas is just one part of Exertis Almo's wider renewable energy transition, with solar arrays on 3 of their sites yielding energy both for self-consumption and to export to the grid.

Benefits of biogas

Finding a more sustainable way to power our business reduces our environmental impact, helping us to run our operations in a more green and less harmful way. On its own, Brightmark’s project is estimated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the manure processed at Brightmark’s facilities by 117,787 tonnes per year.