Chevron Corp. on Aug. 24 announced the second expansion of its joint venture (JV) with Brightmark LLC to own projects across the U.S. to produce and market dairy biomethane, a renewable natural gas (RNG).

“This latest expansion with Brightmark advances our strategy of higher returns and lower carbon,” commented Andy Walz, president of Chevron’s Americas fuels and lubricants group, in a joint release from the companies. 

Similar to other major oil and gas producers, Chevron has come under pressure to address climate change and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions including at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in May. The expanded RNG partnership with Brightmark will help Chevron address this growing push by its investors to reduce its carbon footprint, according to Walz.

“Opportunities like these not only reaffirm our commitment to investing in ways that are good for the environment, our consumers and our stockholders, they also bolster our previously announced objective to increase RNG volumes tenfold by 2025 over 2020 volumes,” he said.

Based in San Francisco, Brightmark is a global waste solutions company with a mission to reimagine waste by transforming waste into RNG. The company currently own RNG projects in New York, Michigan, Florida, South Dakota and Arizona.

“Brightmark’s expanded partnership with Chevron is another positive step forward in the decarbonization of the farming industry,” Bob Powell, founder and CEO of Brightmark, added in the release. “Our carbon-negative projects are successfully reimagining waste and delivering significant environmental benefits while improving economics for our dairy farm partners.” 

As part of the expanded JV agreement, each company will make additional equity investments to fund the construction of infrastructure and commercial operation of 10 dairy biomethane projects, including new sites in Iowa and Wisconsin and additional sites in Michigan and South Dakota. Terms of the transaction weren’t disclosed.

Further, Chevron said it will purchase RNG produced from these projects and market the volumes for use in vehicles operating on compressed natural gas.

“We look forward to executing on these new RNG projects with Chevron and partnering with dairy farmers to expand our RNG footprint across the country,” Powell said.

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