Berq RNG has acquired the 1,000-ton-per-day Rialto Bioenergy Facility from Sevana Bioenergy, completing a sell-down that leaves the Idaho-based anaerobic digestion developer with a single operating digester in its home state.

The transaction, announced Tuesday via the American Biogas Council, transfers the Anaergia-designed plant in San Bernardino County, California, to a Connecticut-backed operator with prior landfill-gas-to-RNG work. It comes one week after California Bioenergy acquired Sevana's stake in South Dakota Biogas LLC, a joint venture created to build dairy manure digesters.

What does the deal change for Rialto?

The Rialto facility, opened in 2020, was built to process up to 1,000 tons of organic material per day and to produce up to 1 million mmBtus of renewable natural gas annually. It has operated at a financial loss for most of its life.

The plant was sized for California's SB 1383 law mandating source-separated organic waste collection. The Los Angeles sanitation agency RecycLA delayed enforcement, and the facility never received the feedstock volumes its developers modeled.

Anaergia spun the site into a standalone LLC in 2023, and that entity filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy that May. Sevana Bioenergy bought the site out of bankruptcy for $20 million in 2024, with Anaergia contracted to continue operating it. The new owner announced plans to invest $5 million in deferred maintenance and capital improvements.

Under Sevana, the facility reached a peak run rate of 70% of nameplate capacity, Sevana CEO Steve Compton confirmed. He declined to comment on Sevana's future but said he was "happy for Rialto's new owners."

How thin is the feedstock pipeline?

The throughput ceiling reflects a feed problem rather than a digestion problem. WM has operated an Anaergia organics extrusion machine since 2020, sending organic slurry to Rialto. Universal Waste Systems brought a second extrusion unit online in recent months and is waiting for Los Angeles hauling contracts to be finalized before commissioning a third machine, according to Anaergia Chief Operating Officer Yaniv Scherson.

Key Rialto operating facts:

• Nameplate throughput: 1,000 tons per day of organic material
• Peak run rate under Sevana: 70% of capacity
• Annual RNG production capacity: up to 1 million mmBtus
• Sevana bankruptcy-purchase price: $20 million (2024)
• Capital earmarked by Sevana for deferred maintenance: $5 million

"They bought a site that was not making money, and they probably had a budget of how much capital they were willing to invest until profitability," Scherson said. "It must have taken longer than their plan."

Who is the buyer?

Berq RNG operates as a portfolio company of Lotus Infrastructure Partners, a Connecticut private equity firm. The acquirer previously developed and divested landfill-gas-to-RNG projects in Kentucky and New York, and secured $110 million in bond financing in Michigan to develop four dairy manure digester projects.

Bas van Berkel, CEO of Berq RNG, said the company looks forward to "applying our operating expertise to optimize performance at Rialto, working closely with the City of Rialto, our feedstock partners and the local community." Scherson said Anaergia plans to continue operating the site under the new ownership.

What does this mean for Sevana's California exit?

Founded in 2017, Sevana had deployed more than 20 digester tanks across agricultural projects in Oregon, Idaho and South Dakota by the time the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board took a majority stake in 2023 and pledged $250 million toward RNG development in North America. The Rialto asset was an outlier in that portfolio: a high-throughput urban facility in a market where feedstock aggregation has lagged policy targets.

After the Berq sale and the prior-week divestiture of South Dakota Biogas, Sevana retains one digester in Idaho, per Compton.

What decides what happens next?

Two regulatory and contract milestones will set the plant's near-term trajectory:

• SoCalGas offtake approval. The facility's gas offtake agreement with Southern California Gas still awaits regulatory approval, a development that would materially bolster plant economics.
• RecycLA franchise rollout. The Los Angeles sanitation agency is scheduled to phase in new commercial and multifamily hauling contracts in the first half of 2027.

"That event should be a catalyst for more feedstock incremental to the market," Scherson said. "But how much, of course, is speculative."

For Berq, the bet is that RecycLA's enforcement plus the SoCalGas interconnection will finally push Rialto toward the 1,000-ton-day run rate Anaergia originally sold to investors in 2020.