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Landfill Gas to be used to Run Garbage Trucks

post #1 of 5
5/6/08 at 10:33am
Thread Starter 

Via Ecogeek:

 

"A new joint venture between North America's largest waste management company, Waste Management, and Linde, a leading gases and engineering company, is hoping to "close the loop" by producing fuel from garbage and using it to power garbage trucks. The companies will construct a liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility at the Altamont Landfill near Livermore in California that (when it begins operation next year) could produce up to 13,000 gallons a day of LNG.

 

That gas will be used for vehicle fueling the collection trucks. Natural gas is already the cleanest burning fuel available for Waste Management trucks. Additionally, collecting methane for burning has an overall positive effect on global warming, because methane is a much more powerfull greenhouse gas than CO2.

 

Linde North America estimates that capturing and reusing landfill gas could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 30,000 tonnes per year.The LNG produced from the Altamont landfill gas will be a virtually zero-carbon transportation fuel and eventually lead to more facilities that can produce more than 200 million gallons of clean transportation each year from the garbage in California's landfills.

 

There's a lot of garbage out there and any way it can be re-used instead of just letting it rot away in landfills is a great thing. Waste is a terrible thing to waste."

 

Waste Management just picked up my garbage (and recycling and yard waste) this morning.  Awesome to see that they're going to be utilizing the methane released from landfills to fuel their trucks.  That kicks serious a**.


Edited by stins - Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:14:45 GMT
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post #2 of 5
5/6/08 at 9:33pm

 Can fuel produced from garbage be used to power other vehicles (like personal cars) as well? We've got so much waste in landfills around the globe...why not use it (indirectly) in this way?  It almost seems too good to be true.

 

Is it expensive to capture the methane? If not, why isn't it being pushed beyond just fueling garbage trucks?

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post #3 of 5
5/6/08 at 10:01pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lola:

 Can fuel produced from garbage be used to power other vehicles (like personal cars) as well? We've got so much waste in landfills around the globe...why not use it (indirectly) in this way?  It almost seems too good to be true.

 

Is it expensive to capture the methane? If not, why isn't it being pushed beyond just fueling garbage trucks?

 

Sure, you can run cars on natural gas (currently the only natural gas car is the Honda Civic GX).  I'm not sure how much equipment is required to capture methane from landfills, but it strikes me as a pretty big and expensive system.  Then once you capture it, you'd have to transport and store the gas, and bulid cars that could run on it.  Much easier to simply use it for vehicles already at the source (landfill) so that you don't need the extremely expensive transportation and storage infrastructure.

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post #4 of 5
4/20/09 at 8:16pm

A garbage to oil conversion would be considerably difficult and you'd have a problem with impurities from the waste. An anaerobic digester is as simple as putting a tent over the waste and attach a hose to the highest point. Run the gas through a wet scrubber and pump the biomethane into a tank or preexisting CNG pipelines.


Edited by dana1981 - 4/21/2009 at 03:39 am GMT
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post #5 of 5
4/20/09 at 11:40pm

This is similar to the village stove in India where they use cow 'stuff' for feed to a small methane generator. Small scale like that it is perfect - the labor is of no importance and the gas is adequately pure. The villager has no other real fuel source which they can afford. 

 

A land fill is a bit more challenging - the product has to be of more value than the equipment, labor, ongoing expense etc. The bigger the garbage dumps the easier - utilizing every small dump will probably always be impractical.

 

CNG (compressed natural gas) is one thing - LNG (liquified natural gas) is a far more expensive animal due to the cost and complexity of the refrigeration equipment + cyrogenic storage. Feeding such gas into an existing pipeline is the best distribution method. How cost effective CNG transport (by truck) is I don't know. 

 

I agree with Dana that operating the trucks with the product ga is an excellent start. If it can be shown to be economical then expand it further.

 

Walk, run then fly. To many green things start with the flying first and worse yet they want government money to fly with. Not unusual in itself as most major corporations request the same thing but too many of the small ideas are based on wishes rather than science. You can see hundreds of them (unrealistic or bad ideas) on the net in a day of surfing.

 

 

 

 

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