The Dirty Business of Landfills: How Earthview's BluBird Platform Helps Monitor Methane Emissions
Energy can be found everywhere and that includes society’s largest eyesores, landfills. Landfills are large emitters of methane, a potent greenhouse gas and essential fuel for humanity. Landfills produce this gas as a byproduct of the natural decomposition of organic waste materials, such as food waste, yard waste, and paper products.
When organic waste is buried in a landfill, it undergoes anaerobic (without oxygen) decomposition by microorganisms that break down the waste into simpler compounds, including methane (CH4). As the waste decomposes, methane gas is released into the air in and around the landfill. Landfill operators all over the world have a huge opportunity to capture this methane and sell it as renewable natural gas (RNG) or biogas. This action has a huge benefit for the profitability of the landfill and an even bigger impact on the climate.
Continuous Monitoring and Landfill Methane Emissions
Earthview has developed the leading continuous methane monitoring platform for accurate and real-time methane concentration measurements. The benefits of continuous methane monitoring apply to every phase of RNG operations.
Pre RNG-Ready: Gathering emission data from the target landfill prior to installing any biogas extraction systems helps the operator understand where the most methane emissions are coming from, thus helping with the optimal placement of the biogas pumping systems.
Day-to-Day Operations: Continuous methane monitoring data can be used to optimize the operation of biogas pumps in RNG systems. By analyzing the real-time methane emissions data, operators can adjust the suction of the pumps in areas with higher methane concentrations, allowing for more efficient and effective extraction of the biogas. This can result in a reduction of measured methane emissions and improve the overall performance of the RNG system. By using Earthview's BluBird platform, operators can easily access and analyze the methane emissions data, enabling them to make informed decisions and optimize the operation of their RNG systems.
Strategic Initiatives: The goal of setting up a landfill for RNG is to increase profitability by decreasing methane emissions. Decreasing methane emissions also has a huge, positive environmental impact and Earthview can show this impact by calculating a total emissions value and showing that trend as time goes on. Our data also helps in verifying that pumps are placed in ideal locations.
Setting up the BluBird Platform
Monitoring your landfill is an easy decision and we are here to help. Earthview’s BluBird Platform offers the highest performance at the most economical price point possible.
Typical Setup: The average landfill will take between 50 – 100 BluBirds to adequately cover the site. When designing a landfill layout, our team focuses on the inactive area, active area, and perimeter.
This will allow the BluBird to get a good handle on spatial variations in emissions throughout the landfill and get a better understanding of total emissions volume, using the perimeter BluBirds. It gets even better, BluBird nodes do not require any digging and are easy to set up.