It was with great interest that I read the article by Paul Ruffins, “A landfill full of food is a recipe for methane,” in the March Life & Times.
Photo credit: Paul Ruffins
I trained in nuclear physics at George Washington University, but I found that type of energy to be bad for our planet: water, land, animals and people. Nuclear physics research brought me to France, where I switched to studying renewable energies, and stayed to teach and have my career — building wind farms and working with cities and rural areas on their waste management, renewable energy infrastructure and other sustainable development projects.
Mr. Ruffins aptly describes methane. It is a gas, like helium in a balloon, but it is heavier, containing carbon and hydrogen.
Methane comes out of every oil well. It is the gas that we use to run our furnaces and gas stoves. It burns cleaner than coal and oil, although it is still a polluting energy source. It is not cheap, as we know if we own a gas furnace.
Our current president thinks oil companies should not sell the methane gas from their oil wells, but should torch it while drilling — or let it float into the air and crud up the atmosphere.
That is bad business.
The methane gas that is a by-product of oil drilling is coming from deep beneath the Earth’s crust, from decayed prehistoric plants and dinosaur poop.
A runaway greenhouse effect happened already on Earth. It killed eras of previous life, including our Jurassic dinosaurs. What is a runaway greenhouse effect? It’s when our atmosphere gets so crudded up that the Earth heats up until all bodies of water evaporate. Without water, everything dies. The Earth becomes as lifeless as Venus or Mars.
How can we prevent this? Oil companies dredge up old methane gas from rotted Jurassic forests and dinosaur poop. But we can make it fresh, with our own plant, organic waste, and livestock poop. This is helpful for two reasons.
First, you don’t coat the atmosphere with more climate-changing crud. When a plant grows, it absorbs climate-changing crud out of the atmosphere — a mix of carbon and oxygen. And when that plant decays on your compost heap, it gives off exactly as much carbon and oxygen as it pulled out of the atmosphere while it grew.
This is called a net zero effect. Net zero is a great effect to promote when you want to make clean, cheap energy and keep your landfills from overflowing.
The second reason to make our own methane is that it’s cheap.
If you make and harness your own methane, you don’t have to pay for fracking rigs or for the millions of barrels of water and the toxic chemicals that are needed to blast our Earth’s crust. You don’t have to buy drilling rights or pay to clean up the land and drinking water supply you’ve saturated with toxic fracking chemicals.
If you decide to make your own methane, people will bring you their organic waste. And while doing so, you help keep landfills from overflowing. What’s more, the methanization process makes the best compost you have ever used — a commodity that will greatly serve our farmers.
Go get a few truckloads of landfill-methanized compost and double your crop productivity.
Sounds smart right?
In other countries, people have been using this process for the last 60 years. When I first started teaching in France, I asked my students to debate the pros and cons of French nuclear energy production vs. Danish farm-produced methane production. That was in the early 1990s. Today, city waste management plants make their own methane gas and sell it to the utilities. In France, even deep in the country, the buildings at municipal landfills make their own methane and run their own furnaces for free.
We are three generations behind the eight ball in the U.S.
Mr. Ruffins might whisper a hint to his friends at the county landfills: Quit wasting your money. Take our waste and make your own methane gas, then use it or sell it.
Come on, America. Let’s go net zero. Zero wasted money. Zero overflowed landfills. Zero crud in our atmosphere. Let’s make our own methane.
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Anne Petrov is a resident of Bladensburg.
