Mar 15, 2009 3:01 pm US/Eastern
CBS 2 Goes Green: Generating Energy From Garbage
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
At a time when the federal government is setting aside billions of dollars for renewable energy, are we literally throwing away a plentiful energy source?
Every day New Yorkers generate 24 million pounds of residential garbage. More than half of it ends up in landfills where it decomposes and emits methane, a greenhouse gas.
Operators of large landfills are legally bound to capture that gas, and for more than twenty years landfills in our area have been turning it into energy.
"Once a landfill is finished and all the garbage is in place, 25:13 we then drill vertical wells into the garbage and then we connect them with pipes on the top so all the wells are connected. We put a vacuum on the pipes and that literally sucks the methane right out of the landfill right into the plant," said Tom Marturano of the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission.
From there the gas is either refined and piped to local utility companies or converted to electricity and then sold to utility companies. The energy produced at this New Jersey facility alone is enough to power 20,000 homes.
"Whatever we produce here doesn't have to be produced by coal or natural gas," Marturano said.
Of all our trash, 56 percent eventually yields methane in a landfill. Of that, 30 percent is recycled or composted and the remaining 14 percent is burned to make electricity at waste-to-energy plants.
"This waste creates heat and the heat in turn generates steam. We use that steam to power our turbine generator which in turn feeds electricity out to the grid," Alan Harleston of Covanta Union, Inc. said.
"We're exporting or sending out to the grid about 40 megawatts of power right now, and that's enough to power 30,000 homes on a continual basis," Harleston said.
Paul Gilman is the Chief Sustainability Officer for the Covanta Energy Corporation. He says those numbers could grow substantially, in the tri-state and nationally, if more trash was used for energy.
"We could do three, four or 5 percent of our electricity needs from energy from waste," Gilman said.
That 5 percent of the country's electricity is more than the total electricity usage of some medium-sized nations, according to Nickolas Themelis, director of the Earth Engineering Center at Columbia University.
"The electricity produced from these plants makes up for not using 30-million barrels of oil, a substantial amount of energy we would not have to import or alternatively dig out of the ground," Themelis said.
New Jersey Public Utility Commissioner Joseph Fiordaliso says we need to use every method available to establish a new national energy strategy that reduces our dependence on foreign fuel.
"We import 70 percent of our oil here in the United States. I believe that one of the greatest threats to our national security is the fact that we do depend on an unstable part of the world for that energy," Fiordaliso said.
People we spoke to agreed.
"It's like a double benefit, because I'm sure it would lower the cost here and alternative fuel would be better for the environment," said resident Julie Funk of Manhattan.
"It seems like we haven't done anything to help the situation at all so just, it's at least a step in the right direction," said Brooklyn resident Elizabeth Bertsch.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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