Greenhouse Effect Reduction and Energy Recovery from Landfill: A Case Study

Waste management systems are a non-negligible source of greenhouse gases. In particular, methane and carbon dioxide emissions occur in landfills due to the breakdown of biodegradable carbon compounds operated by anaerobic bacteria. A case study of landfill gas recovery project in Handan city, Hebei province of China is discussed in this paper. The project will collect landfill gas and the generators will combust the methane in the landfill gas to produce electricity for export to the grid. Excess landfill gas, and all gas collected during periods when electricity is not produced, will be flared. The analyses are conducted based on using the US EPA first order decay model and methodology ACM0001 of Clean Development Mechanism for the estimation of greenhouse effect reduction for the project´s baseline. It is found that the project capacity by combustion and flaring combined will reduce emissions of about 3.998 million tones of CO₂e over the next 21-year lifetime, and at the same time, 653GWh electricity will be produced.