Veolia Refuse Vehicle
Veolia Environmental Services Ile-de-France, working with Veolia Environnment’s Research and Innovation Department, has set up the first unit in France to produce biomethane fuel from non-hazardous waste landfill biogas. The unit is located at the Claye-Souilly non-hazardous waste landfill in the Greater Paris area and has been operational since September 2009. Launched in 2008, the project represents an investment of €1.6 million (USD 2.32 million), including a subsidy of €300,000 from ADEME, France’s environment and energy management agency.
Eight light vehicles and one household waste collection vehicle, all equipped to operate as Natural Gas Vehicles (NGVs), now run on Meth’OD® fuel (Méthane 100% Origine Déchets, i.e., methane produced entirely from waste), produced at the Claye-Souilly landfill.
The demonstration unit extracts carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen gas (N2) from the biogas (comprising 45% methane (CH4), 35% CO2 and 16% N2), and then removes its pollutants (siloxanes, etc.), which produces a gas containing 95% methane. The treated gas is then compressed to 300 bar in order to obtain a fuel with the same composition as town gas. In addition, this biomethane meets the technical and economic criteria for being fed into the natural gas transmission and distribution network.
Two technologies are being tested on the Claye-Souilly demonstration unit in order to validate the most efficient in terms of separating the CO2 and N2 out of the biogas: the VPSA process, which adsorbs undesirable components on porous solids, and a more innovative membrane process. Veolia says the technology selected will be rolled out on a wider scale to other non-hazardous waste landfills.
“The future for this research program is very significant given that the facilities operated by Veolia Environnement worldwide—over and above its landfill sites—produce in the order of 750 million cubic meters of methane a year. The program makes it possible to recover biogas directly, either as fuel for use by the vehicles that deposit the waste or by Veolia Transport’s bus fleets, or as biomethane that can be injected into the natural gas transmission and distribution network,” says Christophe Aran, Deputy Director of Veolia Environnement’s R&D centers.
The demonstration unit has the capacity to produce 60 Nm3/h of biomethane fuel from biogas collected at a landfill. Due to methane’s high energy value (1 metric ton of household waste produces around 200 m3 of biogas or 100 m3 of methane, which is the equivalent of 100 liters of gasoline), this output can meet the annual energy needs of a fleet of 210 light vehicles. This new energy recovery method of using the biogas produced by non-hazardous waste landfills complements the other Claye-Souilly energy recovery facilities, which produce enough electricity to meet the needs (excluding heating) of a city with 228,000 inhabitants.
“Operated as energy production facilities, non-hazardous waste landfills are becoming more and more efficient at biogas collection. This new development broadens the range of methods of converting biogas into energy. From the waste collected from households, we produce Meth’OD® gas, which is then used as fuel by a waste collection vehicle: we’ve come full circle,” says Pascal Peslerbe, head of waste treatment and recovery at Veolia Environmental Services Ile-de-France.
From an environmental viewpoint, as biomethane is not a fossil fuel it is considered a renewable energy. In the longer term, using biomethane fuel instead of diesel will avoid emissions averaging 140 g of CO2 per kilometer traveled. For a fleet of 210 light vehicles, each covering 30,000 km a year, that represents an annual saving of 882 metric tons of CO2.
Replacing fossil fuels by new fuels produced from waste helps to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Optimizing the performance of biogas recovery and conversion at non-hazardous landfills and diversifying the methods for achieving this is one of the research programs conducted by Veolia Environnement, which dedicates 70% of its R&D to combating climate change.
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