Landfill waste to power Waste Management hauling fleet

Germany’s The Linde Group maintains its core business in industrial gases and engineering. But the company has been putting a new focus on alternative biogas, landfill gas, and hydrogen. And it isn’t starting out small.

Linde North America and Houston-based Waste Management (NYSE:WM) said a joint venture between the companies is now producing clean, renewable vehicle fuel at a plant at the Altamont Landfill, near Livermore, Calif. The facility, completed on schedule, is considered the world’s largest landfill gas-to-liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant.

The plant, which Linde built and operates, purifies and liquefies gas that Waste Management collects from the decomposition of organic waste in the landfill.

“Our plans are to focus on these alternative fuels and bring them to market not only in the United States, but in other countries,” Steve Eckhardt, Linde’s head of business development, alternative energy, told the Cleantech Group today. “We think there’s a very good growth market here.” 

The two companies have been collaborating for the past three or four years on the joint venture, Eckhardt said, with Linde bringing financial backing as well as technical and project management expertise (see Waste Management, Linde to build landfill gas plant).

When it reaches full capacity in the next two to three months, he said the plant is expected to be able to produce up to 13,000 gallons of LNG a day—enough to fuel 300 of Waste Management’s 485 waste hauling and recycling collection vehicles in 20 California communities. Since September, when the commissioning process began, the plant has produced 20,000 gallons of LNG.

Two other similar, but smaller plants exist, Eckhardt said, one outside of London from UK-based Gasrec, which produces liquid methane fuel using gas created by the decomposition of biomass (see Gasrec starts fuel production at U.K. biomethane project)

The other in Los Angeles is owned by Redmond, Wash.-based Prometheus Energy. Linde supplies the liquefier to the plant outside of London, Eckhardt said.

In July, Prometheus Energy raised $10 million from Kenda Capital, with the potential to raise another $10 million if the company meets certain milestones. The company was bought by private equity firm Black River Asset Management last year, following Prometheus’ de-listing from London’s Alternative Investment Market (see SolFocus closes $77.6M round, readies for manufacturing ramp).

“Our purification system is a little different than the other ones,” Eckhardt said. “We have designed a multi-stage process for liquification to ensure we are really cleaning up the contaminants in the liquefied gas.”

The four-step process uses compression, chilling to 260 degrees below zero, absorption, and membranes to turn the gas into LNG.

“The steps are designed to take out various contaminants such as carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and alcohols,” Eckhardt said.

Electricity produced at the landfill by the landfill gas powers the process, so it’s an entirely renewable process, he added.

LNG is considered to be a super ultra-low carbon fuel. The Altamont project is expected to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 30,000 tons per year.

But it wasn’t an easy feat to get the plant up and running, he said. Landfill gas has low methane content, and it can change over time. The purification process has to be robust and cost efficient.

With one success under its belt, the landfill gas-to-LNG technology being deployed by Linde and Waste Management at Altamont has potential to be implemented at other landfills across North America.

“We’re hoping there are going to be a whole lot more plants like this out there,” he said.

The $15.5 million plant has been funded 50-50 by Linde and Waste Management, with about 10 percent of the funding coming from several state agencies in California, including the California Integrated Waste Management Board, the California Air Resources Board, the California Energy Commission, and the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

According to a news release, the management of several state grants was provided by the Gas Technology Institute, which also licensed elements of the LNG production technology used in the Altamont facility.

Eckhardt wouldn’t comment on the revenue potential of the plant, but said that in the future, some of the LNG capacity may be sold to third parties at market prices in the state of California. Market pricing of LNG is typically offered at a 20 to 30 percent discount to diesel. Currently, Waste Management is expected to use all the LNG the facility can produce.

Another Linde joint venture with Japan’s Taiyo Nippon Sanso announced last month that it has been awarded a long-term contract to supply its specialty gases to Bosch Solar’s new solar manufacturing site near Erfurt, Germany (see Linde tapped for Bosch Solar manufacturing site in Germany).

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