In the San Francisco Bay Area, hundreds of garbage trucks are running on LNG: liquefied natural gas, made right at the dump. It turns out that next to all that trash sits the world’s largest biofuel plant and it is recycling landfill gas into something beneficial.

“We are closing the loop,” says Linde LLC Business Development Chief Steven Eckhardt. “We’re taking methane and turning into a clean, renewable fuel for the trucks that bring that trash right back to the landfill. We think that’s a key story here. We’re tapping an unused resource.”

Harvesting that methane also keeps thousands of tons of greenhouse gas from being released into the atmosphere. Waste Management Landfill Operations Director Ken Lewis showed us how wells placed around the dump work like a vacuum deep underground, where organic material is rotting away, producing methane in the process.

“We have over 200 gas wells at the Altamont Landfill. We drill into the waste mass, place a well down deep in there, and extract from that well the landfill gas which we then convey over to the LNG plant.” Right next door, the methane is transformed into LNG, which is cheaper and cleaner than diesel.

Trash truck collectors give it a thumb’s up. “The natural gas that we run has basically the same horsepower. It’s clean burning. Our drivers love it, it’s good for the environment, I mean, it’s great,” says Waste Management Foreman Mike Keele.

The Altamont facility isn’t the only methane conversion plant of its kind, but it’s the biggest. Every day, it produces 10,000 gallons of liquefied natural gas — enough to fuel 300 trash trucks. Each year, it’s projected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 30,000 tons a year. Since opening in the fall of 2009, it’s produced 2 million gallons of LNG and has won several significant environmental awards.

Perhaps the only drawback is the cost. The initial investment to build the Altamont facility was $15 million. The conversion process is also pricey. “It is expensive because we have to put it through a multistep purification system to remove all the impurities in the landfill gas,” explains Linde’s Eckhardt. “But we expect this plant to be profitable once we’re able to participate in carbon and renewable trading markets, which we expect will happen in the next several months.” http://landfill-site.com http://landfill-gas.com

Supporters say as the technology improves, costs will come down, and more trash heaps will be recycled into fuel depots, with trucks filling up on LNG as they leave the dump to go out and collect more trash.

“We’re turning a dirty landfill from a disposal facility  into a clean energy production facility,” says Lewis.

A second facility in Southern California is in the planning stages, and other large landfills are looking at how they can “close the loop” by turning garbage into gas.

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The doors are open at Collier County’s gas to energy plant. Inside, generators are making money by turning the methane gas from trash at the landfill into electricity.

“We receive revenue based on the gas that’s consumed in the engines,” Solid Waste Management Director Dan Rodriguez said.

The plant is a public-private partnership between the county and Waste Management. They’ve struck a deal that brings in cash for Collier.

“We’ve received our first payment of $30,000,” Rodriguez said.

Waste Management sells the electricity to Florida Power & Light, then turns around and pays the county for the methane gas. Garbage will bring in almost half a million dollars every year, offsetting costs for consumers.

“By infusing an additional $480,000 into the program, we hope to drive down the cost and keep the disposal rates as low as possible,” Rodriguez said.

We asked Rodriguez if customers could see a decrease on their tax bill for garbage collection.

“Potentially. It just depends on how much waste we bury,” he said. “The best way to reduce your tax bill is to recycle more, because if it doesn’t come to the landfill we don’t need to bury it.”

The plant has been online since the beginning of May. Since then, it has produced more than 3.5 million kilowatt hours of electricity. Transformers outside the facility take the electricity produced inside the plant and put it on the grid.

“As the price of electricity increases, the county will potentially see more revenue and value for its gas,” Rodriguez said.

Waste Management covered the cost of building the facility, $8.5 million. The company operates 119 landfill gas to energy facilities across the country. The Collier facility is the first in Southwest Florida.

There is enough gas to keep the plant going, and money coming into the county, for at least 20 years. After that, Waste Management will return the site to its original state.

“As part of our contract with Waste Management, it’s their responsibility to remove the structure, engines, things like that and return it back to its natural state,” Rodriguez said.

The money generated goes into the Solid Waste fund.

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Another $300,000 is likely to be sunk into Palmerston North’s old Awapuni landfill, New Zealand, to rescue gas generation and recycling projects.

The redevelopment of the city’s dump, closed in 2007, has already run $4.1 million over budget.

City council water and waste manager Chris Pepper resigned when the overspending scandal broke in March.

The council’s Audit and Risk Committee met yesterday for an update on whether the gas generation project could be saved.

It has recommended spending $150,000 in an attempt to increase the production and capture of methane gas from the landfill, and another $150,000 on a pre-sorting area to make the recycling process work better. The gas project is the one needing most urgent attention.

At the current rate, it is not going to produce enough gas to generate electricity to satisfy a carbon credits deal under the Kyoto Protocol with the Austrian Government. The penalty for failing to get to within 80 per cent of its target by the end of next year could be $600,000.

The council set up a separate review panel chaired by Ross Linklater to analyse what went wrong, to make in-house improvements to ensure such overspending did not happen again, and recommend a way out of the fiasco.

Cr Linklater said the immediate issue was how to increase methane production. Consultants Tonkin and Taylor had suggested several improvements that were starting to be put in place.

“I don’t think it’s a lost cause,” said project director Simonne Eldridge.

Methane collection was still more of an art than a science, she said, and it had proven to be consistently harder to achieve than optimistic assessments dating back to 2002.

But a lot had been learnt about how to manage landfill gas fields better in the years in between.

She said the council should appoint a site manager to closely monitor its condition. It should plan to reduce the liquid content of some areas of the landfill to help gas collection, sink more wells, stop leaks and thoroughly survey the area to find the richest gas producing pockets.

The committee recommends the review panel should have the power to sign off another $150,000 worth of spending as soon as it can be shown to be a good investment.

City Networks general manager Ray Swadel said while action was needed urgently, the bad experiences of the project’s past highlighted how important it was to make the right decisions based on quality information.

Ratepayers’ response to recycling with the roll-out of kerbside bins saw a dramatic increase in the volume of recycling arriving at the facilities.

However, the project accounted for $1.1m of the total project overspending, and still excluded a pre-sorting area that was flagged as a serious omission back in 2009.

There were health and safety risks for staff who carried out pre-sorting in the area where trucks unloaded. The area was uncovered, exposing staff to all weathers. Material was damaged when it rained, and some blew away when it was windy. For $150,000, it is proposed to set up a mechanised, pre-sort and in-feed process.

Next week’s council meeting has to approve the recommendations.

- The Manawatu Standard

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A project in Wewoka, Oklahoma will use landfill gas to fuel a nearby brick factory, reducing approximately 30,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution per year in the process.

The project is being financed by eBay, Esurance, Designtex, Ceres, Brighter Planet, and College of the Atlantic through the purchase of NativeEnergy’s Help Build carbon offsets.

The project developer is landfill gas to energy specialist, Enerdyne Power Systems and the landfill is owned by Sooner Landfill, LLC, a subsidiary of WCA Waste Corporation and WCA of Oklahoma, LLC.

NativeEnergy is a provider of verified carbon offsets and renewable energy credits. NativeEnergy’s Help Build carbon offsets help finance construction of Native American, family farm, and community-based carbon reduction projects.

Wells will be installed at the Wewoka landfill to capture the gas which will be delivered through a half-mile pipeline to the Commercial Brick Corporation’s kilns.

Bob Hartsock, President of Commercial Brick Corporation, said the favorable long-term contract for the gas from the landfill will pay for the investment to retrofit the burners in his kilns and help the company remain competitive in a challenging market.

Jeff Bernicke, President of NativeEnergy, noted: “This project shows that well-planned environmental initiatives can deliver local economic and social benefits too. We’re pleased to play a central role in this project and are thankful for the substantial participation of key customers.”

eBay, Esurance, Designtex, Ceres, Brighter Planet, and College of the Atlantic have already made significant purchases of carbon offsets from the project.

By purchasing NativeEnergy’s Help Build carbon offsets the companies are providing upfront funding to the project and in return they will receive a share of the project’s long-term verified carbon reductions.

The Wewoka Biogas Project is NativeEnergy’s fiftieth Help Build project. (http://landfill-gas.com)

William Brinker, Vice President and Operations Manager of Enerdyne, said:

“This is a perfect example of how to make a small project work. WCA Waste wanted the gas from their project to be put a beneficial use, and Commercial Brick was looking for a way to control their fuel costs. With the two properties adjoining, this was a perfect match! Thanks to the capital and carbon funding provided by NativeEnergy’s Help Build program, we were able to bridge the gap between all of the parties and build a successful project.” 

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The term “final storage quality” was first defined twenty years ago by Baccini and Henseler and other members of a Swiss working group on landfills. In the meantime, the definition has been modified by several authors in various published papers.

In essence, final storage quality is used to imply an “environmentally sound flux/load for short, medium and long term periods”, to use one of the academic versions that I rather like for its brevity.

Which criteria should be used to determine when the “Final Storage Quality” has been reached, is being debated.

What will be the final contaminating parameter of the large number of potential pollutants in a landfill at the end of that that long awaited transition from active aftercare management to passive aftercare?

Which contaminant will be the most critical in the long term, which when it is dissipated, we can all stop concerning ourselves that what was once a landfill no longer has a potential to harm the environment which surrounds it?

Well, having I hope now wetted your curiosity, I am going to disappoint you by saying that I don’t think that academia really yet knows for certain the answer to that. Given the huge number of sanitary (lined and capped landfills) now being filled around the world as I write this, I think we should all think hard and get a little worried for our offspring.

However, two aspects of long term landfill which are of direct economic importance and about which more can be said, are:

1. The longevity of economic landfill gas production for energy production,
2. And, (for those tasked with landfill aftercare duties) it is from the point of economic aftercare, how the escape of the remaining methane to atmosphere without first oxidising it, can be achieved.

It is important to achieve “final storage quality” while consistently burning/flaring the methane in landfill gas, or in another way oxidising the methane to prevent serious climate change implications.

We can be sure that in the long-term, gas produced by landfills will be characterized by low methane content.

The methane content and rate of gas production will be so low that there will be scarcely any possibility for its use in economically-sound energy recovery procedures and yet it will still amount to a significant discharge due to the very long period of its slow discharge.

There is no escaping that the gas produced in the long tail of the “elk” requires treatment due to its global warming potential.

New low-cost technologies must be found, either to extend the phase of profitable landfill gas utilization, or methods developed to, if possible, reduce the landfill gas aftercare phase and mitigate long-term emissions.

At our sister landfill gas web site we have started to look at possible aftercare strategies with respect to dwindling landfill gas, and we have written about:

• The proportion of total Active Landfill Gas Recovery that can be economically utilised by active landfill gas extraction
• The developing concept of bio-oxidation of landfill gas instead of flaring, either in specially designed vessels or within modified landfill caps during landfill aftercare.

Click on the linked text in the above lines to read more.

The company said that it had received written consent from the council to initiate the appeal proceedings, following March’s initial refusal of the application, which saw 20 out of 22 members of the council’s planning committee voting against the plans (see letsrecycle.com story).

Lodging an appeal means that the final decision on whether or not the plans are given the go-ahead will now be made by the government’s planning inspectorate through a public inquiry, which is expected to be held in the first half of 2010.

The company’s plans to develop the plant, known as the Cornwall Energy Recovery Centre (CERC), represented the centrepiece of the 30-year PFI-funded waste treatment contract that it signed with Cornwall county council in October 2006 (see letsrecycle.com story).

And the company’s project director, David Buckle, claimed that its proposals to develop the CERC to treat the county’s residual household waste continued to be the best option.

“There is an urgent need for this facility to avoid a waste management crisis and to provide a modern waste management solution for the whole county in which we produce energy from non-recycled waste, rather than landfill it,” he said.

If built, SITA UK has said the CERC would produce enough electricity to power the equivalent of 21,000 homes, as well as producing heat which could be provided to local businesses, and in particular the china clay industry.