Garbage May Soon Power The World
Posted on: Wednesday, 21 May 2008, 15:15 CDT
Trash haulers like Waste Management and Allied Waste Industries Inc see giant landfills as enormous opportunities to create new sources of energy. These landfills use pipes below the garbage to extract gas and send it to a plant that turns it into electricity.
More companies are setting their sights on new ways to use methane gas to provide new sources of energy.
The Waste Management landfill provides enough energy to power 2,500 homes in Southern California.
Such technology has existed in the U.S. since the 1970s, according to Waste Management's vice president of renewable energy, Paul Pabor.
Pabor said that federal incentives to produce a percentage of power from renewable sources have fueled the recent growth in such projects.
Overall, people toss out 1.6 billion tons, or 250 kilograms per person, of garbage each year. Landfills of municipal waste are the biggest producers of methane, a gas whose greenhouse effect is 21 times worse than carbon dioxide. Some propose that if the methane from landfills is transformed to generate electricity, the emissions of carbon dioxide are less harmful to the environment than the original methane.
"We are able to take that resource and turn it into real value financially for us. In a very basic sense it helps improve our earnings," said Ted Neura, senior director of renewable energy development for Phoenix-based Allied Waste, which is turning waste into energy at 54 of its 169 U.S. landfills, with 16 more projects in the works.
"You begin to look at landfills a little differently when you couple them with a renewable energy project," he said.
However, some environmentalists still say that turning landfill trash into energy is not the best option.
Nathanael Greene, director of renewable energy policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said touting the benefits of landfills was similar to putting "lipstick on a pig." Instead, we should be trying harder to reduce waste.
In Britain, landfill gas makes up a quarter of the country's renewable energy, giving electricity to some 900,000 homes.
Biogas, another name for methane produced from waste, manure or other organic matter, is most developed in Europe, where Germany has 70 percent of the global market.
Last year, the World Bank reported that it would install a gas collection and electricity generation system at a landfill in Tianjin, China, with implications of the addition of similar projects in the nation.
"Some of the developing countries are fascinated by the possibilities of introducing incineration," said Henrik Harjula, principal administrator for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. "The problem is normally that it is like putting a modern facility in the jungle. There is nobody to take care of the maintenance."
Some experts still say that although methane to energy processes are positive solutions, they aren’t reinforcing the best plan for trash haulers.
"This is an environmentally preferable option, but it's not renewable in the sense that it's not something we can do forever," said the NRDC's Greene. "Before we go adding incentives for energy production from garbage, we need to first get the incentives right so that we are maximizing the amount of recycling we do."
Nevertheless, Waste Management and Allied Waste are benefiting from the new revenues produced by landfill gases.
Waste Management is currently planning to spend $400 million over the next five years to build an additional 60 landfill gas-to-energy plants.
Landfill energy projects are much smaller than gas or coal-fired power plants, producing about 5 megawatts of electricity each, on average, Neura said. That's about enough power for 4,000 homes.
Waste Management also announced plans last month to use waste to power vehicles. Plans are already underway for the largest-ever facility to turn landfill gas into liquefied natural gas, which can be used to fuel its garbage collection trucks.
"As a public company, of course, we've got to invest our fund in projects that do make a return for the investors," Pabor said.
He declined to say how much of the company's revenue comes from its energy projects.
The idea of turning gas to electricity has also caught the attention of smaller companies, such as Boston-based Ze-gen Inc. The company said it is creating a zero-emissions process for producing electricity from construction waste that it is diverting from landfills.
"We are talking to large companies who are really worried about the escalating price of oil or natural gas," said Bill Davis, the company’s chief executive.
Solena Group, which is backed by Spanish conglomerate Acciona SA, is developing a facility in California to make renewable jet fuel from municipal waste, and BlueFire Ethanol Fuels Inc is building its first cellulosic ethanol plant adjacent to a landfill in Lancaster, California, so it can use municipal waste as its feedstock.
"It was the lowest risk feedstock," said Arnold Klann, president and chief executive of BlueFire Ethanol.
"By putting this inside the landfill we totally avoid the creation of a new infrastructure, because the infrastructure already exists to bring (waste) into the landfill every day and bury it. We are taking the material that society values the least and converting it into a transportation fuel."
Source: redOrbit staff and wire reports
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User Comments (1)
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Posted by Mike on 05/21/2008, 19:19 Interesting! |
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