30-04-08 A joint venture between Linde North America and Waste Management will create the world's largest facility to convert landfill gas into clean vehicle fuel.
Waste Management, North America's largest waste management company, and Linde North America -- part of The Linde Group, a leading global gases and engineering company, announced a joint venture to build a liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility, located at the Altamont Landfill near Livermore, California, to convert landfill gas into a clean vehicle fuel. The project offers a unique opportunity to "close the loop" by fuelling hundreds of collection trucks with clean fuel produced from garbage.

The companies will partner to install systems to purify and liquefy the landfill gas Waste Management collects from the natural decomposition of organic waste in the landfill. When the facility begins operating in 2009 it is expected to produce up to 13,000 gallons a day of LNG.
Pat Murphy, president of Linde North America, said, "Linde and Waste Management are joining together to clean up our environment by capturing and reusing landfill gas for vehicle fuelling, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by more than 30,000 tpy. Linde is using its expertise in designing and developing LNG plants around the world to create a clean and sustainable energy solution for the residents of California."

Duane Woods, senior vice president of Waste Management, said, "This project has the potential to allow us to tap into a valuable source of clean energy while greatly reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. This will be the largest plant of its kind and we hope to break new ground by producing commercial quantities."
"Natural gas is already the cleanest burning fuel available for our collection trucks, and the opportunity to use recovered landfill gas offers enormous environmental benefits to the communities we serve."

The $ 15.5 mm Waste Management-Linde project will receive grant assistance from the California Integrated Waste Management Board, the California Air Resources Board, and the South Coast Air Quality Management District.
Linda Adams, secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, calls the project a "very significant step towards helping meet Governor Schwarzenegger's new, low-carbon fuel standard. The LNG produced from the Altamont landfill gas will be a virtually zero-carbon transportation fuel. This is a key milestone in helping us develop the facilities needed to produce more than 200 mm gallons of clean transportation fuel each year from the garbage in California's landfills."

Waste Management, Inc., based in Houston, Texas, is the leading provider of comprehensive waste management services in North America. Through its subsidiaries, the company provides collection, transfer, recycling and resource recovery, and disposal services. It is also a leading developer, operator and owner of waste-to-energy and landfill gas-to-energy facilities in the United States. The company's customers include residential, commercial, industrial, and municipal customers throughout North America.
The Linde Group is a world leading gases and engineering company with more than 50,000 employees working in around 100 countries worldwide.