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One place where gas is flared off is landfills. Methane is produced by anaerobic decay and must be burned to reduce its climate impact. One unfortunate conseq
by pfdietz 6mo ago
One place where gas is flared off is landfills. Methane is produced by anaerobic decay and must be burned to reduce its climate impact.
One unfortunate consequence of this is bird injury, particularly raptors. They like to perch on the flare stack, and when it flares to life... if they are lucky, only their feathers are damaged and they can be rehabbed. This can probably be ameliorated by design of the stack to avoid perching, but that isn't always done.
- quickthrowman 6mo agoI know biogas digesters exist, but I am unfamiliar with the economics of such systems. It seems like a better way to deal with the methane than flaring it off, but cheap natural gas in the US might make it uneconomical to do so. I’d be curious if anyone has any insight into that.
- pfdietz 6mo agoPeople have looked at microturbines to burn landfill gas. It's not something one could just put into a natural gas pipeline as it's about 1/2 CO2. Even in microturbines it requires cleanup because of cosmetics. In a landfill, cosmetics decay to produce volatile organosilicon compounds, and when these burn they deposit silicon dioxide slag on turbine components.
- flumpmaster 6mo agoRenewable natural gas / bio gas is alive and growing in the US. The economics are supported by California Low Carbon Fuel Standard credits. Sources include captured landfill gas and bio digesters processing animal manure. Captured bio gas is injected into adjacent natural gas transmission pipe lines and commingled with chemically identical fossil natural gas.
- pfdietz 6mo agoThe CO2 has to be scrubbed out. This is not necessarily all negative, since if the CO2 is injected underground for sequestration it makes biogas carbon negative.
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