Landfill gas could soon power generators
EDINBURG — The city’s latest potential revenue source had previously been going up in smoke.
Flares at the city’s landfill burn off more than 750,000 cubic feet of gas produced by the thousands of pounds of waste shipped to the regional site each day. But following the lead of other landfills across the country, Edinburg may convert the waste’s odorous byproduct into an alternative energy source.
“People sell the natural gas that they find on their properties to companies that have a use for it,” said Ramiro Gomez, Edinburg’s solid waste director. “The city has a product that, instead of burning it up, we’re looking into capturing some revenue from that source.”
The Edinburg City Council agreed last week to negotiate with Houston-based SCC Americans on ways to produce power from the landfill gas — a mixture of methane, carbon dioxide and other trace gases. SCC Americas specializes in greenhouse gas emission reduction at landfills, coal mines and industrial sites.
Exact plans for the gas produced at the landfill off East Encinitos Road won’t be known until the city completes negotiations with the company in about a month, said Edinburg City Manager Ramiro Garza. But the proposal should require SCC Americans to cover the capital expenses while giving royalties to the city when the project begins, likely sometime next year.
The 147-acre landfill, which accepts over 1,100 tons of waste per day, currently produces landfill gases capable of generating 0.6 to 1 megawatt of electricity. But with a remaining life expectancy of more than 20 years, the available energy will increase as the landfill’s gas collection and control system expands.
The city of Denton, for example, sends its landfill gas to a 1.6-megawatt electric generator located on site that can power 1,200 homes per year.
Federal regulations require landfill gas — a greenhouse gas that’s 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide alone — to be collected and managed once emission rates reach a certain threshold, Gomez said. Edinburg, which already has the collection system of pipes in place that collects the gases before flaring them off, is leaning toward using the landfill gas to power electric generators.
But it could also be used in its natural state to burn as a heat source in boilers or kilns, or it could be processed into pipeline-quality gas and injected into a natural gas distribution system or converted into the compressed natural gas used as vehicle fuel.
Google and other technology companies also can use methane — recovered in some cases from mounds of cow manure produced at dairy farms, a large contributor of the greenhouse gas — to power their vast network of computer servers.
Using landfill gas helps to reduce odors and prevents methane from migrating into the atmosphere and contributing to local smog and global climate change, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Landfill Methane Outreach Program, which encourages the recovery and use of landfill gas as an energy source. Landfills account for 22 percent of all human-related methane releases, only behind methane created by the digestive processes of cows and sheep.
More than 500 projects already use landfill gases for energy projects, according to the EPA, with another 530 landfill sites identified as potential candidates.
Capturing buried landfill gas is already required by the EPA as a way to keep the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere, said Mark Roth, an associate with Golder Associates, Edinburg’s solid waste consultant. Turning it into an energy source — rather than burning it off — is a way to the transform the city’s trash into treasure.
“Everybody wants to be less dependent on fossil fuels and (create) their own renewable energy source,” he said. “This is another revenue source for the city that, right now, is just getting burned away.”
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Jared Janes covers Hidalgo County government, Edinburg and general assignments for The Monitor. He can be reached at (956) 683-4424.
