Garbage to Natural Gas & The Biggest Cincinnati Dump (Rumpke)

Click on Title. This from the Cincinnati Enquirer:

I see no reason why this can't work. Natural Gas prices are such that there is profit aplenty. However, based on today's prices ($10.10/mcf or so projected for Duke this coming Winter) the income figures are lower than stated in the article.



Producing green power, profit
Waste byproduct will no longer go to waste
BY CLIFF RADEL CRADEL@ENQUIRER.COM
Your garbage gives gas to Mount Rumpke.

Starting Monday, that indigestion - methane gas generated by, among
other things, rotten oranges from the garbage of homes in
Southwestern Ohio, moldy grapes from Northern Kentucky and smelly
scraps from last weekend's barbecues in Southeastern Indiana - will
be recycled and readied for natural-gas pipelines at the largest
recovery plant of its kind in the world.

The $10 million Montauk Energy Capital Plant sits at the base of
the man-made mountain known as the Rumpke Sanitary Landfill.

The new plant - plus the landfill's existing 20-year-old gas-
recovery system - can refine 15 million cubic feet of methane gas a
day. With an average retail price of $13.50 per 1,000 cubic feet of
gas in Ohio - according to the U.S. Energy Information
Administration - that daily gas supply is worth $202,500 on the
retail market. That's $73.9 million a year, all from garbage.

The daily output of 15 million cubic feet at this round-the-clock
operation can produce enough natural gas to fuel 25,000 homes - as
many as there are in Colerain Township.

"This plant is doing its part with technology that is as green as
it gets, to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions while using a
renewable resource and cutting down our dependence on foreign oil,"
said Dan Bonk, an engineer and director of business development for
Montauk. The Pittsburgh firm owns, operates and staffs the new
plant as well as similar ones in its hometown and Houston.

The Rumpke site "is the largest of its kind in the world from a
capacity standpoint," Bonk said.

He pointed to 24-inch pipes moving methane gas from the landfill
and into the system. All around him, compressors hissed, generators
hummed, and filters whirred as the system went through its
shakedown phase.

• Video: How does it work? Take a tour with Dan Bonk of Montauk Energy

The world's second-largest gas-to-pipeline energy production plant
can be found at Staten Island's Fresh Kills Landfill. That site,
the final resting place for the debris from the World Trade Center,
produces 14 million cubic feet of gas a day.

"We would much rather recycle this gas and see it turned into
natural gas than flare it off or burn it through a smokestack,"
Rumpke vice president Jeff Rumpke said. "This way, we're taking a
waste and turning it into something positive."

And profitable.

Montauk buys the gas from Rumpke, sells the refined product to Duke
Energy and pays a royalty to Rumpke.

The 1.5-acre plant resembles a small refinery. With its system of
landfill wells, pipes, pumps, holding tanks and filtration devices,
the operation takes methane - a gas produced by decaying garbage -
and in minutes strips out impurities. Away go molecules of water,
carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide - which gives garbage its
rotten egg-type smell.

"Landfill gas is a slightly different animal from natural gas out
of an oil well," Bonk noted.

"Oil-well gas is effectively 100 percent methane. Landfill gas is
50 percent methane and 50 percent carbon dioxide," along with water
and hydrogen sulfide.

At the end of the refinery's line, the gas goes into a Duke
pipeline. From there, the landfill's byproduct is processed into
natural gas suitable for lighting a burner on a nearby home's cooktop.

Bonk sees no shortage of the plant's raw material.

"As long as they keep dumping garbage on top, it will keep decaying
and producing gas," he said.
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