There are 49 municipal waste landfills operating in Pennsylvania.
Every one of them emits gas as trash decomposes. A facility planned
for Central Pennsylvania would make a Franklin County landfill one
of a handful in the state that captures some of that gas and converts
it into electricity. Brad Linder has more.
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Landfill Gas
A new facility in Franklin County joins a handful of power plants
in Pennsylvania that use landfill emissions as fuel.
July 2, 2002
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This month, the Mountain View Reclamation
Landfill is receiving the infamous incinerator ash generated in Philadelphia
sixteen years ago, which is just now completing an international round-trip
journey. But most of the landfill's trash is municipal solid waste,
which gives off gases such as carbon dioxide and methane as it decomposes.
Joe Catina is director of construction for Ingenco, the company planning
a gas-to-energy facility at the site. He says there's enough solid
waste at Mountain View to generate methane and carbon dioxide for
years, even after the landfill is capped off and closed.
"That landfill gas is currently being flared," says Catina.
"Because if it weren't flared, you would have an odor problem
with that gas. So it's basically being burned off as wasted energy
right now. And what we will do with that landfill is take a significant
portion of it and generate electricity from it."
Catina says landfill gas is gaining momentum as a fuel source in the
United States, but it's a finite resource, which will probably never
provide the same amount of energy as coal, natural gas, or nuclear
power. "Landfill gas is a relatively small portion," he
says, "In terms of both the energy available and the amount of
it that's currently being used."
The Franklin County facility, scheduled for completion early next
year, will be a 12-megawatt plant, generating enough electricity to
power about 12,000 homes. Catina says methane will be one of two fuels
burned at the plant, the other being a petroleum-based liquid fuel,
purchased from area sources to supplement the electric output.
While the Environmental Protection Agency is promoting landfill gas-to-energy
plants as a means of putting landfill gas to use, there is some debate
over whether it should be considered "green energy." Mike
Ewall, with environmental group Energy Justice, says the same process
that converts methane to electricity can release carbon monoxide and
nitrogen oxides. So while landfill gas-to-energy facilities put trash
to work, they aren't clean energy providers in the same way as wind
or solar power plants are.
But according to Joe Catina, Ingenco's primary goal is to convert
fuel into electricity, and with a focus on small energy distribution
plants, landfill gas seems like a good fit. The company already uses
methane from two landfills in Virginia, and has plans for several
more in Pennsylvania.
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