Landfill operators in the US have decreased general emissions by roughly 45% since rules first handed within the Nineteen Nineties, in keeping with U.S. EPA information. However extra will be achieved, distributors and audio system mentioned on the Stable Waste Affiliation of North America’s WASTECON present final week.
The occasion, which featured panel discussions on a variety of subjects, included a dialogue of the human affect on local weather change from John Nielsen-Gammon, a climatologist at Texas A&M College and director of the Southern Regional Local weather Middle. Nielsen-Gammon mentioned the waste business can play a job in mitigating local weather change, however that it’s going to take “quite a lot of creativeness” to advance options.
Amy Lestition Burke, the CEO and government director of SWANA, mentioned the session was a reminder that the waste and recycling business has a “very important position to play” in impacting local weather change. She additionally mentioned a altering local weather can have impacts on operations, tools, coaching, budgets and extra for its members.
“We need to be on the offense, and to try this, we should be ready with info and information,” Burke mentioned in an emailed assertion following the occasion. “These preparations tie into SWANA’s targets to make the business safer and to be local weather champions.”
Landfills represented 71.8% of the waste business’s whole emissions in 2022, in keeping with the EPA, and as such characterize the most important goal for reductions. Consciousness of fugitive emissions has risen similtaneously demand for vitality has grown quickly within the U.S., making capturing landfill fuel not solely essential from a local weather perspective however enticing as a income driver.
That demand progress is pushed partly by the necessity for information facilities, Bryan Black, co-founder and CEO of landfill-gas-to-energy firm Nodal Energy, mentioned throughout a panel. He mentioned that whereas electrical energy demand has traditionally grown slowly, the rise of synthetic intelligence and different resource-intensive applied sciences has prompted a speedy improve in demand for extra vitality.
“Finally there’s quite a lot of [energy] sources which might be going to be required to fulfill that want,” Black mentioned. Elevated vitality costs because of that market imbalance have made fuel seize profitable.
Qnergy, an organization that is contemporary off a profitable demonstration at a landfill in Weber County, Utah, hopes it might probably present emissions abatement at the start and finish of a landfill’s life.
Isaac Garaway, the corporate’s chief know-how officer, mentioned Qnergy’s Stirling engine system has labored successfully within the oil and fuel sector for years. However the firm has discovered a brand new use case for the know-how — changing landfill methane that is “extremely corrosive, moist and just about ineffective for different know-how” into vitality through a modular, scalable system.
Qnergy’s PowerGen 5650 mannequin, proven at WASTECON 2024, is designed to seize landfill fuel at the start or finish of a facility’s life and convert it to vitality.
Jacob Wallace/Waste Dive
By way of an indication mission in Maryland, Qnergy has fine-tuned its system for landfill fuel particularly, making a model of its know-how that’s able to managing the variability of gases arising from landfills. The corporate plans to launch its standalone system for landfills later this yr, Garaway mentioned.
Garaway mentioned the know-how turns one thing that was previously a legal responsibility for landfill operators — the emissions launched earlier than landfill fuel assortment programs are put in or after the fuel from a closed landfill turns into too soiled for conventional programs — into a chance to generate income through carbon credit. The corporate is prepared to accomplice with public landfill homeowners to put in a full fuel assortment system and function it. It might additionally promote its know-how to personal landfill homeowners who simply need to incorporate the know-how into their current programs, relying on every landfill’s wants.
One other firm, LoCI Controls, can be working to deal with landfill emissions with extra fashionable know-how. The corporate’s monitoring system attaches to landfill fuel wells and might regulate to modifications within the composition of landfill gases in real-time. That has made the know-how significantly helpful for firms refining landfill fuel into renewable pure fuel. Such programs can solely tolerate slight modifications — lower than 1% — within the relative oxygen content material of landfill fuel because it enters their RNG refining crops. LoCI’s programs can detect such modifications and regulate the vacuum in particular person wellheads which may be sucking up an excessive amount of oxygen from the landfill, doubtlessly saving downtime for the plant.
Dave Hostetter, a vp at SCS Engineers, mentioned effectively monitoring know-how can scale back labor prices by eradicating the necessity for engineers to research defective wellheads in individual. As an alternative, personnel will be redirected to addressing points faster and making fuel assortment programs as environment friendly as potential.
“That individual that was doing it might probably now do one thing extra productive,” Hostetter mentioned. “We’re making an attempt to essentially leverage know-how to get higher outcomes at your facility.”