Landfills for the Environment?

So I heard from a representative of Curtis Engine about utilizing landfills to run their methane powered engines this past week. They make one of only a handful of engines world wide that can be powered by methane.

The basics of the landfill background are:
-Large landfills, especially those with lots of organic materials in them and with moist conditions, give off tons of cubic feet of 50% CO2 and 50% methane (as well as <1% other trace elements) per year.
-In the past this would have merely leaked out into the atmosphere, or possibly leaked out underground, occasionally into people's basements, and rarely causing explosions.
-In more recent years, the excess methane has been flared off, which produces CO2 and H2O, because it is 20 times as detrimental a greenhouse gas as CO2.
-This is wasted energy potential.

Many up and coming entrepreneurs, and some who are already well established, are realizing the potential for some of the newer and larger landfills to be converted into small, methane-fueled power plants, with the assistance of these special engines. This will still convert methane into the less harmful CO2, but it will do so in a beneficial way that will take pressure off of using fossil fuels and natural gases as a source of power.

One of the most interesting things noted in the presentation and discussion was that this way we are only using carbon from today, not stable, stored carbon from millions of years ago and adding it in addition to the current circulating supply. This goes along similar lines as using corn oil as a source of fuel, because the corn that will be used will sequester some of the carbon in the atmosphere. It will all be in a nice little cycle. Though I am not necessarily for corn oil as a source of fuel, because I think those lands could be put to use at making food instead, I am very much for the use of methane from landfills. This gas will be present either way, and using it as a fuel does not waste it, and it controls its release better so that it will not escape through underground crevasses and cause unnecessary damage.

This is also a nice opportunity to create more jobs for today's economy. Technicians would be needed round the clock to monitor the engines and generators. This would take an otherwise generally unwanted area and turn it into an economically profitable venture.

Advances for Wind

I went to another lecture on wind energy this past week, and part of a solution to the unpredictability of wind caught my attention. They mentioned three methods of storage.
1) One used the turbines as some sort of water pump which would then drive generators.
2) The second used a sort of compressed air system.
3) And the third used a storage system built into home appliances.

There were a few other methods named which were a bit less direct, like using excess energy when the wind was blowing the fastest to charge electric cars (another very interesting topic). The one that most interested me, however, was the compressed air system. I found a great New York Times article that talks about the potential for the new technology. One of the major problems people point out with wind energy is that there is currently no way to store the energy during times of high wind to be used at peak hours of electrical use when there may not be as much wind. This system would use wind turbines to compress air underground, which would later be released and used to turn generators during peak hours. There is apparently a power plant in Alabama that has been using this sort of technique since 1991, as well as a plant from Germany built in the 70's.

These power plants are not based on wind power, though, and can use a variety of fuels to compress air. This means that they are still researching new ways to store the technology, but I believe the new market for it will spur them into quick innovations. Forerunners on the project are looking at using old mines and natural gas deposits to store the air underground, since in many places excavating new underground storage would be difficult due to the rocky substrate. I think this would be a very economical, and environmentally conscious act on their par. Since mines are normal detrimental to the environment, it would be just to use them as part of a mechanism for clean energy.

Though wind energy can be used, as it has been proven in many places, without the assistance of energy storage, the addition of storage systems would help it pass judgment with some naysayers who hold this as their main negative aspect. I believe the more innovations that can be made to improve this technology, the more people will realize how crucial a component it is for our world's future.

Why not wind?

So I went to a lecture on wind energy last night, done by a representative from Maryland's Blue Water Winds project. He showed us an interesting video about wind power, including people's opinions, technical information, and environmental effects.

Now one thing that stood out to me was the people's opinions. Now of course they had the people talking about how great it would be and how useful and environmentally friendly, as any campaigning project would. But what I thought was interesting, was that one of the construction managers from Denmark said. He noted that the US is worrying about problems that they were discussing 30 years ago.

It is understandable that we are taking another look at most of these issues, seeing as we are in a completely different part of the world and may face a whole new set of problems. I feel like people are ignoring many important issues, such as the general reduction of CO2 emissions which has been proven, and focusing on less drastic problems, such as temporary effects on the benthic sea life when the cable is laid down.

People also do not seem to realize that this is a potentially new industry for the US to take part in. With any new project, new jobs are created, but right now we do not have any of the equipment to build these wind parks on our own. If we opened the doors for outside companies to start facilities here, or even started one from scratch (though this would be significantly harder) it would make this budding industry much easier to realize, and more beneficial to our working class.