UNH Campus Now Powered by Landfill Gas

( nat sound)

"This is the beginning of the pipeline right here. You can see the gas is coming in from their processing plant..."

Waste Management’s senior district manager Alan Davis stands in front of a thick pipe at the Turnkey Landfill in Rochester.

That sound is methane gas from the landfill passing through a meter.

From a processing plant here, methane travels 12.7 miles underground to the University of New Hampshire campus.

(natural sound)

This is where it ends up - inside UNH’s co-generation plant. Here it replaces natural gas.

Paul Chamberlin is UNH’s Assistant Vice President for Energy and Campus Development.

"It’s a big relief; this has been an incredibly complicated project with lots of hard work by lots of people, and its all come together and it’s very exciting."

Before the ECOline project, Alan Davis says Waste Management was already using methane to provide power to about 9000 homes in the area.

"We were using 40 to 60 percent of the gas we were producing, and then there was another 40 percent or 50 percent that we were just flaring."

Landfills are required to capture and burn methane before it hits the atmosphere because it’s a powerful greenhouse gas. UNH’s Paul Chamberlin:

“The landfill has gas they couldn’t use, we had a power plant that needed lots of gas and after a lot of due diligence we had a deal.”

It was by no means easy. Methane is full of contaminants that must be removed and it produces less energy compared to natural gas.

Adding to the problem, UNH’s co-generation plant was designed to run on natural gas, not methane.

“To compensate for that we put in a blending skid, so we could add a little bit of natural gas if necessary to meet the minimum requirements of this turbine.”

Chamberlin says natural gas will remain a backup if the quality of the methane declines. The university also built a processing plant to clean and raise the methane’s BTUs.

In total, the project cost $49 million.

UNH already spends about 12 and a half million dollars a year for heat and electricity.

Waste Management says the Turnkey Landfill could continue to produce methane for up to 20 or 30 years after it has closed.

UNH’s Sustainability Director Tom Kelly says the Ecoline works financially.

"I think it’s definitely going to save money I think under a conservative scenario we’re looking at a ten year payback on the investment. All that depends on where energy prices go, but I think a lot of people see them going up."

And there’s yet another financial incentive, says Paul Chamberlin.

"We will be selling something called renewable energy certificates associated with the power that we’re generating to be used on the campus, we’ll do that for five years and that gives us more revenue to help with some capital and startup costs."

Fossil fuel producers need Renewable Energy Certificates, or RECS, to prove that a certain percentage of their power comes from renewable sources. Essentially, RECS represent the environmental benefits of replacing dirty power with clean power.

And after five years, the university can not only claim renewable energy is powering its campus, but also reducing its carbon footprint.

For NHPR news, I’m Amy Quinton.