Rivalea have been a pork industry leader in developing and promoting covered anaerobic lagoons as an important emission reduction tool. Rivalea first installed a covered anaerobic lagoon in 2010 at a 9,500 head piggery in NSW as a research project in partnership with Australian Pork Limited.

This project provided valuable lessons in installation methods, equipment selection and the safe operation of covered lagoons. The first pond remains operating and is providing further innovation opportunities as the company is trialling delicate sludge management operation made more challenging by the very limited access through the gas tight polyethylene cover.

Following from the first project, Rivalea has incorporated many improvements into the second covered lagoon. This project included a 40 ML lagoon and automatic flaring of the gas.  Since commissioning in 2012, the flaring of gas has reduced the global warming impact by 80,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent.

In April 2017, Rivalea completed the Stage 2 of the project by installing the custom built 2G Avus500plus biogas cogeneration system in a 12-metre container.

This innovative system uses 2G German engineered cutting edge technology to treat and remove contaminants before combusting the high quality biogas to convert it to useful energy services of electricity and heat. All the electricity is consumed within the farm’s on site high voltage network.

Inclusion of the heat recovery equipment in the Avus500plus will allow extension projects to heat the lagoon and piggery sheds in the cold winter months.

This sophisticated system will generate around 25% of the sites power per year resulting in considerable energy reduction for Rivalea. The Rivalea biogas generator is also expected to offset over 28,000 tonnes per annum of CO2 equivalent emissions from avoided and grid offset emissions. These factors highly influenced Rivalea in going ahead with the biogas cogeneration project.