As I sit down to write this column I have just returned from Colorado where I performed the marriage of a friend. As I passed through the area of Texas where New Mexico makes a big corner into our state, the Fort Stockton area, I observed hundreds if not a thousand wind turbines generating electricity. There were also big 18-wheelers hauling blades for additional turbines that were being built. I found these wind turbines fascinating to watch as the wind produced additional electricity for our needs. Texas leads the nation in this form of electrical production and San Antonio’s CPS Energy has bought into this production.
Yet it is another form of electrical production that caught my eye on returning home: electrical energy from our waste management. When I was a kid you could always tell where a city disposed of their garbage. There would always be a column of smoke outside the town where the garbage was hauled and burned. This method has been around for millennia.
Gehenna, Jerusalem’s trash dump in a valley south of the city, is biblically used by Our Lord as hell. There in Gehenna was found the unending fires, as in hell.
Modern times outlawed the burning of trash as pollution. Thus we now build hills of trash outside our towns known as the local trash dump or refuse dump. These mountains of trash produce both methane and carbon dioxide gases. They are produced about equally, but methane gas is about 20 times the global warmer of the tow. Cows also produce methane, and some want to cut back on cattle production for this very reason. Methane is produced as organic matter disintegrates either in the cow or the garbage dump.
Yet in the garbage dump we are able to control and even speed up its production. When storm rain water trickles through the mountain of trash it produces leachate and together they bring out the gases from our trash. These waters and resulting leakage can be pumped up from the bottom of the trash mountain to again filter back down through over and over again producing the resulting gases. The methane gas can then be collected and burned to generate electricity.
Methane has only about half the energy potential as natural gas, but it is effective in electrical production and this process keeps it out of the global warming cycle and is merely a byproduct of society.
In 2009 there were 24 landfill gas energy projects in Texas, one of which supplied some 1,000 to 1,200 homes with electrical power for a year. Not a bad return on keeping a pollutant out of our air. We have some additional 57 potential sites where such projects can be implemented. Austin and Houston are already working on this new energy source, and I believe San Antonio can’t be far behind.
The major electrical production will continue to be provided by coal, natural gas and nuclear production. Wind and solar will continue to grow in electrical production, but this landfill production will supplement nicely.
In this refuse electrical production the company is paid to take out trash. They make some money on the sale of recyclable items and then resell the byproduct in the form of much needed energy. This is taking our stewardship of the earth another notch as it were. We can cut down on waste in recycling and get a bonus in using less of nature’s abundance in our power production needs. Thus stewardship can help us now and save for our future generations. And stewardship is an obligation for all of us from God.
Father Samuel Heitkamp is a retired priest of the archdiocese, and was head of the former rural life organization.