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< Landfill gas comes into its own as landfill tax continues to rise | Severn Trent Water's former MD Brian Duckworth says justice has not been done >
Energy from waste the Italian way
Landfill gas is used as a renewable fuel in Italy and the UK, but in the future companies are looking to waste to energy, writes Janet Wood.
Where there's muck, there's a business opportunity, to misquote the proverb. In Italy, a company called Amiat collects and manages waste from the northern city of Turin and the surrounding area. Most of it is sent to landfill outside the city, but that is not the end of the story.
It is a source of renewable energy that cuts the local-authority-owned company's carbon dioxide emissions and gives it a useful income stream. Fabrizio Bonnardel is Amiat's technical director. He sees his job as transforming waste "from a negative to a positive".
At present, 60 per cent of the area's waste goes to landfill and the site is very close to the town. Some of the houses are only 300m away.
The company has been capturing the gas produced as the waste rots since 1985. Bonnardel explains. "At first the main aim was just to capture the gas, because if that does not happen there could be bad smells or even explosions," he says. "The aim is to capture as much as possible so it does not escape. Our collection efficiency is mostly 95 per cent. That is measured against efficiency standards set internationally and it is as good as any."
Stopping the gas escaping became all the more important as it became clear that methane and other components of the gas were significant greenhouse gasses, "but now we also we want to exploit it", says Bonnardel.
That means that instead of flaring the biogas, it is used to fuel engines to produce electricity, a resource the company began exploiting when it installed its first landfill engine more than 20 years ago.
"At first, because the biogas is so dirty, the efficiency of our engines was just 30 per cent," he says. "We had a lot of maintenance problems. Now the technology has been developed the new engines can work longer, they need less maintenance and the efficiency is much higher."
New engines
He was speaking as Amiat took delivery of four new gas engines from GE subsidiary Jenbacher. Amiat has six Jenbacher engines already in place, and with the four new ones, each rated at 1.4MW, there is an annual benefit of 7-8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide that would have been emitted if the electricity had been generated from fossil fuels.
Bonnardel says: "Today we are generating 40MWh a year." The "waste" heat is used for offices and in other processes - such as compost production - on the landfill site.
In Italy, landfill gas is classed as renewable energy and qualifies for green certificates. This, together with the price the electricity fetches on the open market, earns Amiat €17 million a year. The return on investment for the four new engines will be two to two-and-a-half years.
The engines have an operating life of just eight years because of the characteristics of the gas. The composition of the waste varies with season and year, and as the input changes the biogas produced varies accordingly.
Eventual decline
Eventually, the output of gas from the site will fall as the material rots. "In 2009 we will close this landfill site and the gas production will start to decrease," Bonnardel says. "From 2012 we will have fewer engines installed or use engines of lower power to manage the decline. Some engines will be moved elsewhere."
Maurizio Magnabasco, chairman of Amiat, says the partnership between his company and Jenbacher means that "we can help solve an important problem of emissions while making an economic return".
He told Utility Week: "We want to exploit our technical knowledge to enlarge our field of activities in Italy and abroad. We will be asking GE and Jenbacher to work together with us to exploit those business opportunities."
His target markets are those where the waste problem is growing and where they have not begun to recover the energy. In South America he has Argentina and Peru in his sights. In Europe it is the eastern countries that are of most interest, led by Romania. He is also looking at China and South Africa.
Jenbacher's major European markets for its landfill gas engines are the UK and Italy, and it is no coincidence that in both these markets landfill gas has benefited from green certificate systems. In France, the electricity price is too low to make it worthwhile and landfill gas is collected and flared. In Scandinavia, it is too cold for landfill to rot, so they began investing in incineration and associated district heating a long time ago.
Little support
There is little doubt that as far as Europe is concerned, the market will decline. In both Italy and the UK there is little public support for landfill waste disposal, and the move is to thermal energy-from-waste projects.
Amiat itself is adapting to these changing market conditions, Bonnardel explains. "In the future, we will switch to a thermal power plant. In order to do that we have to separate 50 per cent of our waste. We have to reach that target by 2010 and we are confident we will do that as we already separate 47 per cent of the waste."
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