Editor’s note: This story first appeared in The Waco Bridge’s July 2 newsletter.
The banana peel and half-eaten hamburger you chuck into the kitchen garbage is a problem for the environment, but also an opportunity.
When food and other organic waste are buried in landfills, bacteria transform it into a flammable gas called methane. The gas bubbles up to the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas some 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Landfills account for about 13% of methane emissions, about as much as 24 million cars, the EPA reports.
The city of Waco currently collects and flares its methane at Waco Regional Landfill, which turns it into water and carbon dioxide, but that’s due to change.
On June 17, the Waco City Council selected a company, Viridi Energy of Delaware, to clean up that methane and sell it as natural gas.
Here’s what you need to know about that plan.
What will happen to the landfill gas, and who gets the money?
In the next 18 months, Viridi will finance and build a system to refine the gas at a new onsite facility. It will also build more gas collection infrastructure, which the city would have built anyway as the landfill closed. That agreement will save the city $5 million, said Director of Public Works Kody Petillo.
The company will sell the cleaned-up methane into natural gas pipelines, giving the city of Waco 6% of the revenues. That could generate nearly $550,000 a year over 20 years to help the city pay for landfill closure costs, Petillo said, adding that the financial model was “leaps and bounds” above other proposals.
Hasn’t the city tried selling this gas before? What happened to that project?
In May 2008, the company now known as Mars Wrigley began using gas collected from the landfill to fuel two steam furnaces at the candy factory on 1001 Texas Central Parkway.
Mars Wrigley officials later discontinued the project, telling the Tribune-Herald in 2022 that impurities in the gas “fouled up” the equipment.
“Our process removes all those contaminants,” said Jake Crouse, Viridi’s vice president of development, in an interview this week. “We’re processing the gas to meet pipeline quality specifications.”
Is the concept of selling landfill methane well-tested?
Despite Waco’s early struggles with landfill gas, the systems are becoming well established in Texas. Dallas, College Station and Corpus Christi have similar systems to those slated for construction in Waco this year.
“There shouldn’t be any landfills that are flaring anymore,” Crouse told The Waco Bridge.
