DeKalb earns cash from landfill trash

Money may not grow on trees, but it does waft from a trash heap in DeKalb County.

This month, DeKalb is expecting a third monthly check for around $12,000 from a venture that uses new filtration technology to harvest methane from rotting garbage at the defunct Live Oak Landfill.

The partnership with the landfill owner and a developer has produced the largest “high BTU” methane-extraction plant in Georgia. The plant refines the gas to a potent commercial grade that can be piped directly to consumers.

Cash from trash. It’s an idea that would seem to fit nicely into America’s energy independence strategy, but it is not without controversy. Proponents, including the developer of this project, are pushing for federal subsidies that would treat trash gas like other “renewable” energy sources, but some environmentalists say public money should only be spent on energy sources such as solar, wind and geothermal power.

The bottom line for DeKalb is green regardless of that debate: The county negotiated a deal that will draw dollars from Live Oak for years to come. Billy Malone, an assistant director in the sanitation department who helped negotiate the deal for the county, said DeKalb stands to earn as much as $575,000 a year if the sagging price for natural gas recovers.

Methane is a by-product of rotting trash. It bubbles up, like fizz from a soda, until the landfill goes flat some two or three decades after it closes.

The plant at Live Oak, which closed in 2004, uses new technology to strip away most of the carbon dioxide and other contaminants, so the methane can be injected into Atlanta Gas Light lines 1,200 feet away.

Atlantic Station developer Jim Jacoby was drawn to the project because it would convert trash from Atlanta into enough gas to heat 25,000 homes, said John Borden, a lawyer who helped engineer the deal for Jacoby Energy Development. Jacoby invested $25 million in it, Borden said.

“There’s no reason not to do it,” he said. “Natural gas is one of the cleanest-burning fuels.”

Yet projects like this are rare. There are 495 methane harvesting plants at the 2,300 landfills monitored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said Rachel Goldstein, team leader for the agency’s landfill gas program. Of those facilities, she said, 20 employ the kind of expensive filtration technology at Live Oak and at Georgia’s first such plant, the Oak Grove Landfill, which opened this year in Winder. The rest are using older technology to burn the gas in a dirtier state and heat boilers or fuel electrical generators. Both those older methods require proximity to factories or power lines.

The EPA promotes all methods of methane recovery as an alternative to consuming finite fuels such as coal and oil, and it counts 23 other landfills in Georgia that could prove a viable source of the gas.

There are no subsidies for the filtering done at Live Oak, so Borden has been lobbying Congress. Three lawmakers from Georgia have co-sponsored bills that would offer federal incentives for such harvesting.

“If we as a nation believe we must reduce our dependence on foreign oil, then we have to invest in new ideas and alternative methods of creating energy,” U.S. Rep. John Lewis, who co-sponsored the Biogas Production Incentive Act with fellow Atlanta Democrat David Scott, said in an e-mailed response to questions. Republican Johnny Isakson co-sponsored a companion bill in the Senate. Both bills are in committee and face uncertain futures.

The notion of subsidizing the waste industry has inspired disagreement among advocates for renewable energy.

The Sierra Club opposes new landfill gas facilities and subsidies for them. Mark Woodall, chairman of the Georgia chapter, said a subsidy would improve the financial prospects for landfills and undermine the business model for recycling. Also, most of the “green” electricity that Georgia Power buys at above-market rates through its alternative energy program comes from electrical generators at landfills rather than from solar or wind power facilities, he said, so landfill gas is already “elbowing aside the things we really consider to be renewable energy.”

But the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy supports landfill gas subsidies. The group advocates for solar and wind energy but says there is room in the nation’s energy portfolio for trash gas that would otherwise be wasted. Landfills that don’t harvest their emissions generally must burn them in giant flares to destroy the methane because it is a greenhouse gas.

“We see recovering methane that would otherwise just be flared as an important way of reducing global warming pollution and of reducing our need for coal or nuclear fuel,” said Mary Carr, the group’s renewable energy coordinator in Atlanta. “Using a local, homegrown energy resource that’s renewable is more sustainable than shipping in coal or oil or uranium from other states or other countries.”