US: May 22, 2008
LOS ANGELES - About 45 minutes north of downtown Los Angeles, a machine the
size of a small truck flattens tons of food scraps, paper towels and other
household trash into the side of a growing 300-foot pile.
To Waste Management which operates the landfill, this is more than just a
mountain of garbage. Pipes tunnelled deep into the mound extract gas from
the rotting waste and send it to a plant that turns it into electricity.
Apart from the huge-wheeled compactor driving over garbage on its surface,
it looks like an ordinary hillside. And it doesn't even smell. Yet it
produces enough energy to power 2,500 homes in Southern California.
Trash, rubbish, whatever you call it, the 1.6 billion tonnes of stuff the
world throws away each year -- 250 kilograms per person -- is being touted
as a big potential source of clean energy.
As concerns about climate change escalate and prices on fossil fuels like
oil and natural gas soar to record levels, more companies are investing in
ways to use methane gas to power homes and vehicles.
Around the world, landfills where municipal waste is collected and buried
are one of the biggest producers of methane, a gas whose greenhouse effect
is 21 times worse than carbon dioxide. If instead that gas is collected and
burned to generate electricity, proponents say the resulting emissions of
carbon dioxide are less harmful to the environment than the original
methane.
In the United States, trash haulers like Waste Management and Allied Waste
Industries Inc are rapidly expanding the number of gas-to-energy projects at
their landfills, while start-up companies are developing the latest
technologies to transform garbage into ethanol, gas and electricity.
"We are able to take that resource and turn it into real value financially
for us. In a very basic sense it helps improve our earnings," said Ted Neura,
senior director of renewable energy development for Phoenix-based Allied
Waste, which is turning waste into energy at 54 of its 169 US landfills,
with 16 more projects in the works.
The "green" credentials that go along with the waste-to-energy projects are
an added benefit, Neura said.
"You begin to look at landfills a little differently when you couple them
with a renewable energy project," he said.
Environmentalists aren't quite as enthusiastic. Nathanael Greene, director
of renewable energy policy for the Natural Resources Defence Council, said
touting the benefits of landfills was akin to putting "lipstick on a pig."
Instead, we should be trying harder to reduce waste.
BIOGAS AROUND THE GLOBE
Biogas, another name for methane produced from waste, manure or other
organic matter, is most developed in Europe, where Germany has 70 percent of
the global market. In Britain, landfill gas makes up a quarter of the
country's renewable energy, giving electricity to some 900,000 homes.
Waste-to-energy projects are also being expanded in the developing world,
where rapid economic growth has led to a surge in municipal waste, but
efforts to collect the methane emitted by rotting garbage have been slower.
Last year, the World Bank announced a deal to install a gas collection and
electricity generation system at a landfill in Tianjin, China, saying the
opportunities for other such projects in the world's most populous nation
was enormous.
In less developed countries than China, however, a waste infrastructure
needs to be installed before energy projects from landfills or garbage
incinerators will make sense.
"Some of the developing countries are fascinated by the possibilities of
introducing incineration," said Henrik Harjula, principal administrator for
the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. "The problem is
normally that it is like putting a modern facility in the jungle. There is
nobody to take care of the maintenance."
In the United States, technology to produce electricity from waste has
existed since the 1970s, according to Waste Management's vice president of
renewable energy, Paul Pabor, who said federal tax incentives introduced in
2005 and state mandates to produce a percentage of their power from
renewable sources has fueled the recent growth in such projects.
Environmentalists recognize that turning methane into power is preferable to
releasing it into the air, but quibble with the characterization of landfill
gas as renewable.
"This is an environmentally preferable option, but it's not renewable in the
sense that it's not something we can do forever," said the NRDC's Greene.
"Before we go adding incentives for energy production from garbage, we need
to first get the incentives right so that we are maximizing the amount of
recycling we do."
RUBBISH TO REVENUE
Despite the arguments about how "green" landfill gas really is, Waste
Management and Allied Waste are benefiting from their growing new revenue
streams. Allied Waste's Neura said the company generates less than 5 percent
of its revenue from sales of electricity, but is evaluating all of its
landfills to determine how best to develop them.
Landfill energy projects are much smaller than gas or coal-fired power
plants, producing about 5 megawatts (MW) of electricity each, on average,
Neura said. That's about enough power for 4,000 homes.
Houston-based Waste Management, which already produces energy at 100 of its
280 US landfills, plans to spend $400 million over the next five years to
build an additional 60 landfill gas-to-energy plants.
To produce enough gas to make a power plant financially viable, landfills
must contain a large amount of organic waste and have been in operation for
several years, Pabor said. At the moment, they also have to be located in
states where power prices are high enough that electricity from the landfill
will be competitive with energy from the grid. Finally, they also need to be
close enough to transmission lines that the interconnection costs do not get
out of hand.
"As a public company, of course, we've got to invest our fund in projects
that do make a return for the investors," Pabor said in an interview. He
declined to say how much of the company's revenue comes from its energy
projects.
TRASH TO TRUCKS
In its latest effort, Waste Management last month joined a growing number of
companies that are using waste to power vehicles. In California, the company
is building the largest-ever facility to turn landfill gas into liquefied
natural gas to fuel its heavy-duty garbage collection trucks.
But big, established companies aren't the only ones using waste to replace
fossil fuels.
One start-up company, Boston-based Ze-gen Inc, is creating what it says is a
zero-emissions process for producing electricity from construction waste
that it is diverting from landfills. Ze-gen, which is backed by venture
capital firms Pinnacle Ventures LLC, Flagship Ventures and VantagePoint
Venture Partners, through a gasification project turns waste into syngas, a
combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide.
Bill Davis, the company's chief executive, said Ze-gen's syngas is able to
produce more energy than competing gases without the waste having to be
buried. Ze-gen hopes to attract industrial customers that will be able to
power their factories with both their own waste and Ze-gen's technology.
"We are talking to large companies who are really worried about the
escalating price of oil or natural gas," Davis said.
General Electric Co. is also working to adapt its gasification technology,
which today is used to burn coal more cleanly, to turn municipal waste into
a cleaner-burning gas.
Solena Group, which is backed by Spanish conglomerate Acciona SA is
developing a facility in California to make renewable jet fuel from
municipal waste, and BlueFire Ethanol Fuels Inc is building its first
cellulosic ethanol plant adjacent to a landfill in Lancaster, California, so
it can use municipal waste as its feedstock.
"It was the lowest risk feedstock," said Arnold Klann, president and chief
executive of BlueFire Ethanol. "By putting this inside the landfill we
totally avoid the creation of a new infrastructure, because the
infrastructure already exists to bring (waste) into the landfill every day
and bury it. We are taking the material that society values the least and
converting it into a transportation fuel."
(For more coverage on the business of waste, click on http://www.reuters.com/news/globalcoverage/recycle)
(Reporting by Nichola Groom; Editing by Eddie Evans)
Story by Nichola Groom
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
