Stinky Energy: Clean Fuel from Landfill Gas in California
(image: i.bnet.com)
Think of it as the circle of life for garbage. As reported by TreeHugger on Thursday, when municipal waste decomposes through natural means, it gives off gases that can be collected and used converted to fuel.
At Waste Management’s Altamont Landfill near Livermore, CA, landfill gases are being collected and processed to create clean, renewable fuels—and “closing the loop” on garbage collection by using the fuel to power garbage trucks. This facility is currently the world’s largest landfill gas-to-liquefied natural gas plant. This week Waste Management announced that its collaboration with Linde North America, part of the Linde Group, a leading global gases and engineering company, has begun producing fuel from landfill gas at the Altamont facility.
The process works like this: collected landfill gas is fed into a gas purification system, a process which includes compression, chilling absorption, and membranes to remove impurities—such as sulfur, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and alcohols—from the gas stream. The purified stream is then fed into a natural gas liquefier where it’s cooled to below the natural gas boiling point of -260 F to produce liquefied natural gas (LNG). It is then transferred into an aluminum heat exchanger, where refrigerants—which cool the liquid—flow through one side while LNG flows through the other side. The cooled LNG is stored in a giant thermos-like tank to keep it at liquid temperatures until a truck picks it up to transport it to an LNG filling station. At the filling station, WM’s waste collection and recycling vehicles utilize the clean fuel.
When the Altamont facility is operating at full capacity, it is expected to process about 3 million cubic feet of landfill gas per day, which is equal to producing up to 13,000 gallons a day, or over 4 million gallons per year of LNG. This is enough to fuel 300 of Waste Management’s 485 LNG waste and recycling collection vehicles in 20 California communities.
An added benefit to this technology is that as LNG replaces petroleum-based vehicle fuel demand for diesel (which is very similar to heating oil), it could help lower heating oil prices, especially if it were to go into widespread use.
Watch Waste Management’s video explaining the process below:
Heating Oil Weekly Roundup: Weather Maps, Garbage to Fuel, and Tidal Energy | HeatingOil.com says: says:
[...] released by garbage and turning it into liquid natural gas. Sure, we’ve already covered the Altamont landfill’s LNG program at HeatingOil.com (ahem), but the work by the AP and ABC is still worth a [...]