Waste Management, will spend $15 million for 300 trucks to run on landfill gas (a lot to spend on a big pile of ....)
A system designed and installed by German engineering company Linde will purify the gas and chill it to 260 degrees below zero, cold enough for the gas to turn into a liquid. Waste Management will use the liquefied natural gas in its own, specially outfitted trucks. The company also may try to sell it.
Landfill gas by itself won't replace oil, he said. "It's going to be more on the niche side," Eckhardt said. "It's not going to be the fuel for the majority of our vehicles. But we think the world will turn into a multifuel world."
Not all environmentalists agree that landfill LNG qualifies as green. The rotting food and other organic matter producing the methane deep within the landfill should be composted, they say, rather than dumped.
"Certainly, capturing landfill methane is preferable to flaring it," said Craig Noble, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council. But "it's preferable to avoid the production of that methane in the first place, by avoiding putting all that organic matter in the landfill."