I agree that flaring isn't the most attractive form of environmentalism, there is clearly energy not utilized that really should be. But is it effective in the fight to stop global warming, yes. I also fundamentally disagree with the statement that the Chicago Climate Exchange sells 'rip-offsets' (ps, I love that term). The CCX is highly regulated and the reductions that companies are making are completely real and not required by any government agency.

The thing with offsets and the CCX is that they provide that additional incentive for companies and projects to green up their act. We may only be talking on the margins here, but if somebody knows that they can get an extra few thousand dollars here or there for taking an positive action, they are more likely to do it. These are basic market signals that offsets are sending -- every time you donate to an offset group or purchase offsets on the CCX you are sending the market a sign that you want the market to produce more of that.

Soon, we will have comprehensive legislation that will either regulate offsetting organizations or make them a footnote. But until we have that, we need to tell the market what we want; global warming solutions now.

Paul Burman
carbonfund.org

Hi, Joe, long time reader, firt-time blogger.  

I have been following your posts and articles for quite some time, and I must commend you for all your work and knowledge.  I've retained copies of your Congressional testimony on nuclear power, and numerous articles and blogs you've written on alternative energy. I find them most useful and informative.

I feel somewhat compelled to chime in on this particular post.  Now, before I begin, do not mistake anything I type for a ringing endorsement of the voluntary carbon markets.  I do not believe that the greater problem can be solved through voluntary markets - there will need to be hard caps and/or carbon taxes, but which of those is better, I'll leave to people much more intelligent than me to determine.  I have found it interesting, though, that recently even some conservative/global warming denier economists, like Kenneth Green of American Enterprises Institute or Margo Thorning of the American Council for Capital Formation, have written papers sort of, kind of, seemingly supporting carbon taxes over cap-and-trade systems (if something HAS to be done, I suppose).  I honestly don't know what to think of their recent papers, I've generally found myself on the opposite side of the fence from those people on the climate change issue.

But, to the subject at hand, and where I see, from my perspective, some positive contribution from the voluntary markets...

We have worked for a medium-sized, public landfill in Ohio for more than 15 years.  They are about twice as large as the Virgina landfill you cited in your original post.  They still do not trigger Title V/New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) requiring active gas collection and control, so for the longest time we were installing passive vents and letting the methane go to atmosphere.  Based on principle, some of us would look into options for voluntarily switching to an active system and maybe even utilizing the gas in some fashion, but never to any avail.  Installation of the collection system alone at that landfill will probably cost about $1,000,000 - no small amount for a modest sized County in Ohio.  Moreover, energy developers expressed no interest in a project - too small, not enough gas to make it profitable.

Recently, though, we had quite a bit of interest develop and 10 companies proposed on a landfill gas to energy project.  What drove the new and sudden interest was a combination of three factors:  Production Tax Credits, Renewable Energy Certificates, and Carbon Credits.  Theoretically, we should be able to pull 1,000 to possibly, on the optimistic side, 1,500 scfm landfill gas at 50% methane.  Until very recently, this seemed to be considered borderline for a potential project.  Now, we have numerous companies interested in the site.

As I see a couple posters have commented, there are rules to sell the carbon on a voluntary market like the CCX - these include the date of startup of a system (for CCX after Jan 1, 1999), that the system is entirely voluntary (part of the additionality requirement, it cannot be "business as usual", also included in that is typically a yardstick question of "would you have started the project if it weren't for potential revenues from the carbon market?" - they want that answer to be yes, that the demand of the market created the incentive to do something that would not otherwise have been done), and of course requirements on documenting and verifying actual flow rate, methane concentration, and destruction efficiency.  I'm not saying there aren't people who skirt those rules, and the abstractness of trading in this fashion is somewhat confounding to me, a simple engineer, but there are supposed to be rules in place and for the most part, from the little I've seen, most vendors/traders adhere to them.

At the landfill I've been discussing, if we can pull 1000 scfm, that will translate to approximatley 100,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalents per year.  The CCX has typically yielded CO2 equivalents around $4/ton, though recently it has dipped to less than $2/ton (rumor has it that someone dumped a whole lot of carbon on the market, and the market is not large enough to absorb that much supply).  So, that, coupled with PTCs and RECs, should generate a good revenue stream both for the developer and the local community (and in this economy, the community could really use it), and if properly documented (which I promise will happen), the methane destruction will be real, verified, and something that they would not have been doing were it not for the carbon market (the community could not easily afford the million dollars to put in an extraction system, let alone all the equipment for energy generation).  Additionally, we'll be generating about 2.5 MW of electricity to put on the grid.  It's a drop in the bucket, but it is something, and as others have written, using it is so much better than simply flaring it.

But, whether or not to use the gas for something still depends greatly on the amount the landfill is producing.  For example, at a small, abandoned landfill up in Michigan in 1996, the State installed an active collection and flare system.  For various reasons, the system did not perform well, and within a year, was shut off for good.  There was no regulatory requirement to collect and flare the gas, so the system was simply shut down and methane was allowed to vent to atmosphere - and it probably would have remained so if not for the eventual problems resulting from gas migrating through the soils and killing trees in the State Park in which the landfill is located.  So, the State hired us to get the system restarted.  We've since expanded the system to collect more gas to keep up with generation.  As of 2006, we were extracting about 500 scfm landfill gas (at 55% methane), but only flaring it.  Because it was all State taxpayer money funding all the operation and maintenance at the site (which was abandoned by the company that had operated the landfill), I was quite active in trying to find any source of revenue to help the State out.  But, whenever I spoke with an energy developer, as soon as I'd say how old the landfill was, all interest would go away (it is on the downward slope of its productivity).  Whenever I spoke to a carbon vendor/trader, they would tell me it couldn't qualify because the system was installed before the 1999 date.  Recently, I have found a company that is interested in bringing in a small Caterpillar generator to the site, and this is probably made possible because of RECs and PTCs - I can't get any carbon credits for the site.

By the way, I will be presenting a paper on the design and modification of the extraction system at this site at the Solid Waste Association of North America's WASTECON 2008 in Tampa, Florida the week of October 20.  One of the Keynote speakers for the conference will be Dr. Jean Bogner, who was a lead author of the Waste Management Chapter of the 2007 IPCC report.  I'm looking forward to it.

We have another situation in which we are working with another State agency to develop projects at some small, old, closed landfills that a few years ago would never have attracted the slightest interest from an energy developer, nor would the local communities have been able to afford the cost of installing an extraction/flare system.  These sites are currently passively venting gas to atmosphere, but we may be able to interest investors into paying to have an extraction system installed to flare the methane and sell the credits.  The investors would pay a percentage of the carbon proceeds back to the State and local communities, which won't be much, but right now, every little bit helps.  These sites will not produce much gas, 200 scfm at best - but that would translate to 20,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalents per year at $2-4 per tonne, and it is better than letting it go to the atmosphere.  And it absolutely couldn't happen without the voluntary market.  200 scfm is not likely enough to make a viable reuse project, though I've spoken with a couple developers who may be interested if we can verify that flow rate and there is an end user or interconnection available very close to the site.  I'd much prefer to use the gas, but it just might not be economically or logistically feasible at these kinds of sites.

Interesetingly enough, I worked with Alan Cummins, the coordinator mentioned in your post, for many years.  He is an honest fellow, and I don't know exactly the context of his quote, but I know a couple things about that particular landfill.  Closed in 1997, the Christiansburg Landfill has about a million tons of waste in place and was producing about 100 to 120 scfm total landfill gas in 2006 (with a theoretical generation rate of about 250 scfm - probably down to about 200 scfm today).  I personally am not familiar with Virginia's air rules (though others I work with that work in that state are), but at that size, I find it extremely doubtful that the landfill would have triggered Title V/NSPS requirements - so they are likely under no obligation to even flare the gas unless Virginia rules require it.  But, if the rules do require it, then they shouldn't be eligible for voluntary carbon credits (unless they are doing so ahead of schedule, there are usually timelines for implementation, but I won't go into that here).  

Anyway, at 120 scfm collected, they should be achieving about 12,000 tonnes CO2 equivalents per year... about $50,000 to $60,000 per year up until recently (back in Feb-March 2008, it was trading at about  $7.50/tonne) and so would have yielded more revenue).  In 2006, the US EPA Landfill Methane Outreach Program had a 7-page Project Highlight for this landfill, which identifies 7 potential end-users for the gas they were collecting and flaring - it appears they were pursuing a medium BTU direct-use application (boiler fuel) with local industries, which is not surprising given the very low gas flow rate.  Given the closed status of the landfill, and being closed 10 years or more, it would not attract much attention for an energy project because it is in effect dying (generally you need about 400 to 450 scfm to keep one Caterpillar 3520 generator happy, though Cat has some smaller generators now that are making smaller projects more viable). And as I see another poster has commented, the extraction system at a landfill is only a portion of the cost - bringing in equipment for handling, cleaning, and/or generating the electricity is also expensive, so the revenue from power sales and environmental credits needs to be able to justify the investmetn.  I do not know if a re-use project was successfully implemented there or not.

Finally, I would like to put a plug in for the EPA's Landfill Methane Outreach Program - they have done a marvelous job of encouraging and supporting landfill gas development/use projects.
As of 2007, there are about 450 landfill gas utilization projects ongoing in the US, and LMOP has assisted about 360 of them. These projects account for 105 million tonnes CO2 equivalent reductions over the past 13 years, and if you include flaring only, that value climbs to 132 million tonnes.  They have an active database of 1,300 "candidate landfills."  But the big landfills are obvious choices for projects, it is the small- and medium-sized landfills that really would not be feasible without carbon credits, RECs and PTCs, and these are the types of landfills that I am personnally striving to bring into the mix.

For more info on LMOP visit their web site, which I have no idea how to make an active link through this process, so I apologize for that if the site doesn't somehow do so automatically.  I'd post a cool chart or two they have there, but I've really got no clue how to do that.

 http://epa.gov/lmop/overview.htm

I once read somewhere that F. Sherwood Rowland said that we could slow or reduce the rate of global warming by 15% if we just captured all the methane from our landfills, and that rather inspired me to try to do more in this area - an area in which I have some knowledge and ability.   I don't pretend that flaring or (preferably when viable) utilizing the methane from a handful of small- to medium-sized landfills is even going to make a dent in the large scheme of things.  I fully recognize that voluntary carbon markets will never be able to address the climate change issue on their own, and I am keenly aware that voluntary markets will be subject to abuse and exploitation by unscrupulous profiteers.  But what endeavor has man ever undertaken that hasn't been exploited?  I think there is a role for voluntary markets, and I think there are some people, maybe most of them, that are looking to follow the rules and make sure that their carbon reductions are legitimate, verifiable, and additional.

I would recommend the book "Voluntary Carbon Markets" by Ricardo Bayon, Amanda Hawn, and Katherine Hamilton as a pretty decent basic overview of how voluntary carbon markets work for anyone who is interested.  I read it.  And I must confess, a lot of it still seems so... abstract... to me, but I'm trying to make the best of it.

Please keep up the great work, Joe, I really am a big fan.  I hope my general tenor does not come off being critical or confrontational.