Landfills yield valuable resource: methane gas

It's easy to look at a landfill and think of it as a waste of space, that all that land is good for is garbage.

But once you give waste a chance to sit and decomposition begins, a landfill can become the gift that keeps on giving.

One of those gifts is methane.

That's right, methane: a greenhouse gas more than 20 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

According to the EPA, landfills are one of the nation's largest producers of methane, not Uncle Barney.

Most people know that methane has an odor, burns well and that it's a prime component of natural gas.

But what they don't know is that landfill managers have learned a trick to keep the methane created in landfills from escaping to the atmosphere while, at the same time, earning a little money on the side.

It's also given those managers, engineers by trade, experience in an emerging type of commodities market by selling carbon credits to carbon polluters.

Garbage in, cash out

Don't do this, but if you were to tunnel under the garbage in the landfills in Layton, Ogden and South Jordan, you'd find a series of perforated pipes connected to a pump.

Every day, as garbage decomposes and methane is released, the pump draws the methane out of the landfill.

In Ogden, the methane powers a generator on the southwest side of the former landfill where enough power is generated that Weber County's solid waste manager Gary Laird can sell between $18,000 and $25,000 worth of electricity to Rocky Mountain Power each month.

But because the generator is so costly to operate, Laird said, he's happy just to break even, though he comes out ahead some months, too.

In Layton, landfill manager Nathan Rich sells $30,000 to $40,000 worth of methane a year to Hill Air Force Base, which generates some of its own power from the methane.

The Trans-Jordan Landfill will soon take advantage of an energy-recovery system expected to be up within a month, as soon as Rocky Mountain Power installs the lines to dump the generated power into its system, said Granger Electric Plant manager Randy Robertson.

When operating, the plant will power about 3,800 homes. That's about 4.6 megawatts.