The Associated Press
Hundreds of sea gulls scavenge for food as bulldozers bury
rubbish at the Wake County Landfill in Raleigh, N.C.
Ajinomoto USA, a manufacturer of pharmaceutical amino
acids in Raleigh, pipes in methane from the landfill about
a mile away to fuel two boilers that generate steam for
heated processes.
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RALEIGH, N.C. - Jim Voss hopes his company
will make a fortune out of garbage - from methane gas produced
when tons of trash decay in landfills across the nation.
Methane - 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than
carbon dioxide - has to go somewhere.
Federal rules require large landfills to burn it or pipe it
away to be processed.
Voss and others are convinced there's money to be made in
the process by selling the stinky garbage gases to those
hunting a steady, consistently priced source of energy.
"It's a shame to waste all the BTUs that are there if you
have an end user that's reasonably close," said Voss,
president of Arizona-based Methane Credit LLC.
This fall, the company plans to start turning landfill
methane into enough electricity to power 500 homes a year in
rural Wayne County, 50 miles east of Raleigh.
Methane power is not cheap enough yet for most electric
utilities to replace coal with the gas at power plants, but
the gas is priced attractively enough for many companies to
pipe it directly from landfills to power their facilities.
"The development of these things is becoming increasingly
favorable," Voss said. "We can come in with these indigenous
supply lines and provide more or less a fixed price."
The market for methane has developed as international
demand has caused the price of natural gas to skyrocket.
In April, the commercial price of natural gas was 15
percent higher than a year earlier and 56 percent higher than
three years ago.
According to state and federal environmental officials,
about 380 landfills nationwide and at least 19 in North
Carolina are turning turbines for electricity or selling
methane directly for industrial uses.
Such pipelines have carried the greenhouse gas to a variety
of companies for a decade or more.
In eastern North Carolina's Wilson County, Voss' company is
negotiating with a Bridgestone-Firestone Inc. tire
manufacturing plant to deliver gas generated by 2 million tons
of buried garbage from a landfill that closed in 1998 after 24
years.
Now instead of
having to burn off the methane, Wilson
County hopes to collect a percentage of the
profits.
Ajinomoto USA, a manufacturer of
pharmaceutical amino acids in Raleigh, has
had a long and satisfying experience with
landfill gas.
The company pipes in methane from a Wake
County dump about a mile away to fuel two
boilers that generate steam for heat
processes, saving about half the price of
natural gas.
"It's a stable price," said Ajinomoto
facilities manager Gary Faw. "It's not
dependent on what goes on overseas."
In one of the boldest projects,
Matthews-based Enerdyne Power Systems Inc.
built a 23-mile pipeline from one of the
East Coast's largest landfills in Waverly,
Va., to a Honeywell Inc. plant in Hopewell,
Va., that makes a component of nylon fiber.
The feat was honored by the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency last year.
While replacing about 15 percent of the
plant's gas needs, the project will save the
equivalent of 370,000 barrels of oil per
year, enough power to heat and cool 22,000
homes, according to officials.
The business has shown enough promise
that animal manure on farms, which also
generates methane, is being tested for its
power potential.
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