It's a Gas

From the Baltimore Sun:

Businesses and local governments are teaming up to generate electricity or steam from the methane gas produced by decomposing garbage buried in landfills. The move is prompted by rising natural gas prices, federal tax breaks and recently enacted state requirements, but it also helps combat a major environmental problem - global climate change - by curbing releases of harmful "greenhouse" gases that trap heat in Earth's atmosphere.

Earlier this week, Anne Arundel County officials announced plans to sell Fort Meade the gas yielded by the county's 564-acre landfill in Millersville. If a deal can be struck, the gas would be piped five miles to the Army base and burned to produce heat or electricity for a new building planned to handle an influx of new workers expected in the next few years.

[snip]

Meanwhile, without any fanfare, three massive engines have begun to generate up to 3 megawatts of electricity - enough to power 1,900 homes - from the methane-laden gas collected at Baltimore County's Eastern Sanitary Landfill near White Marsh.

And city officials say they are entertaining several suitors for the gas building up in the 149-acre Quarantine Road landfill in South Baltimore. The overseer of the city's waste disposal figures the fumes, now treated as an air pollutant or potential safety hazard, could yield millions of dollars worth of energy - and savings for taxpayers.

"This has been a quixotic quest of mine for a few years now," said Mark Wick, chief of the city's solid waste environmental services. He calls it a potential "win-win situation."

For years, operators of landfills have been required to monitor, collect and vent or burn the fumes produced by the millions of tons of garbage buried in them. Landfill gas is about 50 percent methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, and it has caused explosions and fires when it has seeped into nearby buildings.

It turns out that Prince George's and Montgomery Counties have had this sort of program since the 1980s, but it hasn't more widely adopted until now. I would also add that this is good news that we're developing an alternative fuel program, is it really good news that we've got so much waste that the gas it produces is an environmental threat? Wouldn't we be better off reducing the amount of trash we produce? And what kind of waste actually turns into methane in the first place?

UPDATE: This article from Mike Ewall provides a critical perspective on the use of landfill gas as fuel.