Wilmington Plans $40 Million Landfill and Sewage Gas-to-Energy Plant

Date: January 23, 2012

Source: News Room

The City of Wilmington, DE announced plans for a $40 million plant to convert landfill and sewage gas into clean energy. The plant, which is to be built by Honeywell, would combine landfill gas from the Delaware Solid Waste Authority's Cherry Island Landfill with methane collected from the city's wastewater treatment plant's sludge-handling systems, then pipe the waste-derived fuel into a 4 megawatt power turbine. Leftover heat would be used to dry wastewater plant sludge, reducing its weight by more than 80 percent and converting it into a form that could be sold as fertilizer or used as a fuel itself in cement kilns or other industrial burners. The energy plant provides not only the benefit of clean energy and fuel revenue but also solves the problem of disposing 50,000 tons of sludge annually. That was previously handled by a company called VFL Technology Corp. that had been mixing the sludge with large quantities of coal ash and other industrial castoffs, mostly from surrounding states, but it never found a market for what it described as a soil substitute. When VFL failed to win a permit renewal, the sludge had to be hauled out of state beginning in 2009.

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