Methane Facility Gets New Lease On Life

November 09, 2009

(Host) One of Vermont's and the nation's first landfill-based methane generators is about to get a new lease on life.

A Burlington company plans to turn a Brattleboro methane facility into a collection of mutually beneficial businesses - and a model of efficient resource management.

VPR's Susan Keese has the story.

(Sound of bucket loader, bottle, beeps)

(Keese) It started in the early eighties, when Brattleboro's now-sophisticated recycling facility was still a privately owned town dump...

A couple of conservation-minded entrepreneurs installed some pipes and started mining methane gas from the landfill's decomposing refuse. They hooked up to a generator and started selling electricity to Central Vermont Public Service.

(Murray) "And it was one of the first ones to take landfill gas and produce electricity from it."

(Keese) George Murray directs Brattleboro's Windham Solid Waste Management District. The district took over the landfill in 1988, and closed it in 1995.

The methane operation found a new owner who kept selling electricity through 2005. After that, interest waned.

By the time Don McCormick appeared, the Waste District had disconnected the generator and the gas was being burned off through a flare on the landfill property.

(McCormick) "We know there's a lot more resource here and if we could put some investment back in, we'd save the community from having the gas just go back into the atmosphere, be a greenhouse gas and a nuisance."

(Keese) McCormick is the founder of Carbon Harvest Energy. The company has a contract with the 19-town district and plans to spend $1.8 million dollars modernizing the plant.

At the new facility, nothing will go to waste. The heat generated producing electricity will be captured.

(McCormick) "So we'll bring in a heat loving business - in our case a year-round greenhouse facility and a year-round aqua culture operation. So we'll raise fish and plants off of the waste heat from the generation plant."

(Keese) McCormick has done this before. For five years he and his wife raised vegetables and tiliapia, a popular culinary fish, in a so-called aquaponics system. They sold to some of best chefs in New York.

He says the Brattleboro business will produce 20 tons of food a month, half of which will go to the Vermont FoodBank.

The nutrient-rich fish water will feed the greenhouse plants in a recirculating system. Remaining nutrients will be used to grow algae. Carbon dioxide, nitrogen and sulfur gases that would normally be lost as exhaust will be recycled to feed the algae, too.

The company will be working with UVM's Rubenstein School, which is exploring uses for blue green algae. McCormick hopes the algae will be used for biodiesel fuel, and also as fish food.

The project is small by current industry standards, but McCormick says that's the beauty of it.

(McCormick) "If you tried to make this energy plant succeed on its own, it's marginal. If you tried to make a greenhouse here all by itself it would be marginal from a business point of view. If you tried to do an algae biodiesel project here, you'd have to bring in nutrients."

(Keese) McCormick hopes the project will usher in a wave of similarly integrated businesses that allow communities to take complete advantage of their resources, and full responsibility for their waste.

November 09, 2009

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