Northwestern Shoshone proposing electricity plant

BRIGHAM CITY — The Northwestern Band of Shoshone Nation wants to turn municipal garbage into electricity on Promontory Point in the Great Salt Lake.

The tribe's business arm, the Northwestern Shoshone Economic Development Corp., is acquiring a 2,000-acre landfill site and plans a gasification plant that would produce electricity for sale to California cities. The process heats up but doesn't burn garbage.

However, it's unclear where the tribe will get the garbage.

The Northern Utah Regional Landfill Authority, which controls garbage from five northern Utah counties, says it has reservations about the Shoshone proposal, which ranked fifth on a list of six potential landfill sites in a Zions Bank analysis.

"I don't think we should move them to No. 2 and enter into confidentiality agreements with them just because they're knocking on our door," Box Elder County Commissioner Clark Davis told colleagues at a landfill authority board meeting last week.

The authority's No. 1 proposal was defeated Nov. 4 by Box Elder County voters who rejected a plan to turn a small dump at Little Mountain into a large, regional landfill.

Issa Hamud, Logan's environmental director, said the Shoshone's idea is worth taking seriously, but "I want to see a delineated plan."

Devine said Monday that gasification was proven technology and that he already was negotiating to sell power to California cities. His economic development agency plans to take garbage efficiently by rail cars over a Union Pacific causeway that crosses Great Salt Lake, he said.

The trash-to-energy plant won't have trouble selling or wheeling power to California, where lawmakers are refusing to take any more coal-fired power, and where municipal power authorities will take any kind of clean, renewable power they can get, he said.

Gasification does produce some emissions from the natural gas or propane that's used to heat up garbage, said Dave Oliver, general manager for Shoshone Energy.

But in oxygen-deprived ovens, the garbage doesn't burn. Instead, it breaks down into a synthetic gas that can be burned cleanly to generate electricity, Oliver said Monday.

Devine said the power also could be used to make hydrogen fuel cells.

Still, some environmentalists are likely to object. The conservation group Friends of Great Salt Lake says trash at the site could blow around in the wind, harming the lake.

The Northwestern Shoshone Economic Development Corp. also is drilling wells for an 100-megawatt geothermal energy plant near Honeyville, about 25 miles south of the Utah-Idaho border. The customer for that power is Riverside, Calif.

The geothermal plant is expected to be built and producing power by 2010, Oliver said.