Energy transition once again features in the Infra Dig podcast with this latest episode focusing on renewable natural gas (RNG) and the role being played by US-based Viridi Energy.

IJGlobal editorial director Angus Leslie Melville talks to Chet Benham, president and chief operating officer of Viridi Energy, who has been in the energy sector for more than 20 years and has specialised in RNG.

This podcast – which runs for 26 minutes – takes the listener through a fascinating technology, recent advancements and how Viridi is playing a significant role in its evolution.

This latest episode can be accessed on Spotify (embedded above) as well as through Apple Podcasts and the Amazon service. It is also hosted across a slew of other platforms and is open access on all of them.

Chet fist picked up on the appetite for alternative sources of energy in the early 2000s when people were looking for “innovative ways to extract energy value from waste resources”. And the rest is history.

“Energy transition wasn’t really a thing yet, but people were beginning to think about how to extract more value from waste,” says Chet. “So we took that same technology package that was used in traditional natural gas processing and applied it to biogas which is molecularly very similar.”

This evolved from technology sales into build-own-operate assets and Viridi has kept on going, building a reputation across this burgeoning sector.

“We have projects in the pipeline and in execution today, most of which are focused on landfills,” says Chet. “We have project in northern Wisconsin; down in the southern United States in Baldwin County, Alabama; and then another project that will be announced fairly soon in northern New England. So – 3 landfills in execution and more on the way.

“Probably our flagship project is American Organic Energy that was announced about a year ago when we took FID on the project. This is a project in Long Island, New York, that is taking 210,000 tonnes a year of food waste from Nassau County and Suffolk County on Long Island and the 5 boroughs of New York City – and turning that into the equivalent of 10 million gallons per year of gasoline.”

The conversation evolves from there for this latest episode that is a must listen for anyone who is interested in energy transition.