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The Portland Bureau of Environmental Services has hired an engineer to design a facility that will convert methane biogas produced by the city’s Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant into vehicle fuel.

The Portland City Council recently approved a contract with Omaha, Neb.-based architecture and engineering firm HDR, which has a Portland office, to design a biogas processing and storage facility and vehicle fueling station at the North Portland sewage treatment plant.

The estimated $10.5 million facility will allow the city to reuse nearly all of the biogas produced at the plant as a byproduct of solid waste treatment, said Vu Han, a BES engineer. Much of the 600 million cubic feet of biogas produced there annually either fuels steam boilers at plant buildings, helps produce on-site electricity or is sold to Malarkey Roofing Products to power part of its nearby manufacturing facility. About 20 percent of the plant’s biogas output is still burned away instead of being reused, Han said.

鈥淲e’re working on this project to find the most beneficial use for the remaining biogas,鈥� he said.

BES staffers had originally considered expanding a co-generation plant that produces electricity with biogas, Han said. They eventually decided that the most economical option would be to build a facility that compresses the biogas into fuel for large trucks that are either rigged or manufactured to run on compressed natural gas. BES may use the fuel for city vehicles and sell it to a utility or Portland-area waste companies for fueling garbage trucks, he said.

Final design of the new facility is scheduled to finish this year, and city officials will likely seek bids for a general contractor early next year, Han said. Construction is scheduled to start in 2016 and wrap up by early 2017.