GAIL to take up experimental landfill gas project in Delhi

GAIL and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) plan to undertake an experimental landfill gas project at Ghazipur in Delhi to generate methane gas from landfill sites.
The Rs 32-crore project will convert and retrieve the methane released from solid wastes generated from the municipal land fill sites in Delhi.

Under the first phase of the project, the Delhi Municipal Corporation had retained environmental management consulting firm Senes Consultants India, the Indian arm of the World Bank-funded Canadian consulting firm Senes Consultants to ascertain the potential of gas generation at its landfill at Ghazipur.
GAIL had retained environmental consulting firm Techknow Environmental & Sustainable Solutions, a subsidiary of US-based Techknow Engineering, a professional design firm to MCD to assist in preparing a proposal on he project for the municipal corporation.

GAIL plans to market the gas that it succeeds in commercialising retrieved from the Ghazipur landfill. If the cost proves commercially viable, GAIL will take up more such gasfil projects across the country.
It also hopes to gain carbon credits at the rate of EUR 10-EUR 12 per ton of carbon dioxide. According to GAIL's calculations, if it retrieves 15,000 cm of LFG, then on the basis of prevailing CNG price of Rs 20 per KG it hopes to have an internal rate of return of 6.27 %, rising to 14.79 % for 25,000 cm and to 25.96 %, for 45,000 cm of LFG per day.

Any increase of CNG would enable it to realise a higher margin.
According to GAIL's calculations its margins would improve to 12.74 %, 22.82 % and 31.74 % for 15,000 cm, 25,000 cm and 40,000 cm respectively if the price of CNG were to rise to Rs 30 per kg.