Powered by Trash: Enabling Customer Sustainability

At Caterpillar, we are “champions for our customers’ enduring success”. When it comes to sustainability projects, often times our customers are focused on their customers’ success. That is precisely the case for Caterpillar customer, Montauk Energy, and their work at the Bowerman Landfill in Orange County, California.

The Bowerman Landfill, covering 725 acres just outside of Irvine, California, is one of the largest operations on the West Coast. And, now – thanks to Caterpillar’s Electric Power, Marine and Oil & Gas Division and Cat Financial – the Bowerman Power Project is the largest renewable energy project of its kind in the United States.

As solid waste in landfills decomposes a natural by-product, landfill gas, is released and contains high amounts of methane – a potent greenhouse gas. Instead of allowing this gas to be emitted into the atmosphere, the new $60 million, 113,000 sq. ft. state-of-the-art facility commissioned this week will generate electric power by capturing the landfill gas created by the millions of tons of waste buried at the landfill. The power is generated using Cat® reciprocating engine generators equipped to run on bio-fuels such as landfill gas.

This project involves:

• Seven Cat CG260 gas gensets from Mannheim, Germany with gas clean-up and emissions reduction technologies, meeting all local-state-federal air quality requirements.
• Generation of an estimated 160,000 megawatt hours of electricity, sufficient to serve the equivalent of 26,000 homes, sold to Anaheim Public Utilities to power residences, schools and businesses.
• Prevention of approximately 53,000 tons of CO2 emissions annually.
• A collaboration of two Cat Dealers: Cleveland Brothers, who delivered the genset sale to their Pittsburgh-based customer, Montauk Energy; and Quinn, who will deliver the service contract for the Southern California-based Bowerman Power Project, owned and operated by Montauk Energy (Also, Quinn has been supporting this landfill site for many years with Cat machines).
• The support of Cat Financial, who provided $41 million in financing to Montauk Energy for the $60 million project.  

For the Bowerman renewable power project, Caterpillar brought all of our efforts together to support our customer, Montauk Energy. And Montauk is focused on delivering renewable power in order to enable the energy targets of their customer, the government of Orange County.  By focusing on the end user, Caterpillar is living our sustainability commitment and empowering sustainability success throughout our value chain.  

Read the news release from Caterpillar customer, Montauk Energy.