Nov 6 - McClatchy-Tribune Business News Formerly Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News - Rosalie Rayburn Albuquerque Journal, N.M.

Behold the power of trash. Mix together leftovers from last month's spaghetti dinner, a scrunched pile of junk mail, add a dash of lawn clippings, throw it in a landfill, let it ferment and you have a ready source of methane, a normal part of the natural gas used to heat homes and run power plants.

That's the plan for a 265-acre southern New Mexico landfill that will soon generate electricity for El Paso Electric, the utility in the Las Cruces area.

The $2.7 million project is a partnership of the Camino Real Environmental Center, a landfill in Sunland Park; Four Peaks Energy Inc., a Santa Fe renewable energy company; and STC Engineering of Albuquerque. New Mexico State University's Waste Management Education and Research Consortium helped bring the partners together.

The partners plan to use methane gas produced by decaying organic and other materials buried in the landfill to fuel generators that will produce 3 megawatts of power, enough for 2,400 average households.

First of its kind

Although the city of Albuquerque recently began using landfill gas to power a 70-kilowatt microturbine, this is the first utility-scale landfill gas power project in New Mexico.

El Paso Electric has agreed to purchase the electricity generated by the landfill plant under a federal law that requires utilities to buy power from federally qualified energy producers. El Paso has 83,000 customers in New Mexico, including the city of Las Cruces, as well as 264,000 in West Texas.

STC vice president Ed Henderson and president Daniel Sandoval said they have worked on methane and microturbine projects with major international engineering firms.

They have done engineering design work for a woodburning biomass plant that produces steam to heat a hospital at Fort Bayard, near Silver City, and a dairy-waste biomass heat and power plant in upstate New York and are involved in several other projects that use dairy or landfill gases to produce heat or power.

Collecting fuel

At Camino Real, they will work with gas produced by trash -- but no medical or hazardous waste -- from households and businesses in El Paso and small border communities on both sides of the Mexico-New Mexico border.

At present, federal law requires landfill operators to cover trash with a layer of fine clay to keep the methane and carbon dioxide from escaping into the atmosphere. Landfill operators must collect gases trapped beneath the dirt via a pipeline network and burn them at a central collection point.

STC Engineering has designed a device that will be installed at the collection point to cool and remove moisture, salts and other contaminants so the methane can be fed into the generator.

Within the next two months, the partners hope to have the site ready for the first 1.5-megawatt generator and to produce power by the end of 2006 or early in 2007.

They plan to install a second generator of similar size next year. The Caterpillar generators have been specially designed to use gas with a lower methane content than regular natural gas.

Methane breakdown

Natural gas burned in power plants or homes contains about 95 percent methane. Landfill gas is a mixture of 65 percent methane and 35 percent carbon dioxide.

Scientists have identified methane and carbon dioxide as greenhouse gases, which have been linked to climate change. Burning the landfill gas to generate power will help reduce its harmful effect, said Four Peaks vice president and director of operations Calvin Hildebrand.

"We're cleaning things up here and providing a long-term source of renewable energy," Hildebrand said.

The city of Albuquerque began producing electricity in January from the Los Angeles landfill just south of Alameda near the Balloon Fiesta Park.

A grant from the state Energy Minerals and Natural Resources Department helped the city use some of the gas to run a 70-kilowatt microturbine, which drives a water purification system and powers the vacuum system that extracts gas from the landfill, said Alfredo Santistevan, director of the Albuquerque Environmental Health Department.

The city is now looking at other landfill gas projects and exploring how to use waste vegetable oil to produce biodiesel for city fleet vehicles, Santistevan said.