green garbage truck powered by natural gas

We assumed a 70% efficiency for converting natural gas to hydrogen and that 113,400 Btu = 1 kg of hydrogen. We assumed 0.0030 GGE of CNG is produced per standard cubic foot of landfill gas, see LMOP’s calculator LFGcost-Web V3.0, available at epa.gov/lmop/lfgcost-web-landfill-gas-energy-cost-model.

Additional vehicles and specialized refueling infrastructure would be needed to utilize all of this biogas.

Vehicles that can operate on fuel produced from landfill biogas are currently in limited production.

Projects include electricity generation for power plants and manufacturing facilities as well as the production of various transportation fuels including biofuels.

Environmental Protection Agency, Landfill Methane Outreach Program (LMOP), March 2015 database, available at epa.gov/lmop/

What If Garbage Fumes Powered More of Our Cars, Trucks, and Buses? (PDF) (2 pp, 1.27 MB, EPA-420-F-15-020, September 2015, About PDF) (One GGE is the amount of fuel that contains the same energy as one gallon of gasoline.) How many vehicles would this power? If your local landfill is large, it may be emitting enough gas to produce up to 3,200 gallons gasoline equivalent (GGE) of transportation fuel each day. Plus, because we are displacing gasoline or diesel, we would also reduce lifecycle GHG emissions associated with producing and distributing the fuel used by those vehicles. If we converted all this biogas to transportation fuel, we could prevent about 40 million metric tons of direct GHG emissions (CO 2e) from being released each year, equivalent to taking 8 million cars off the road. These landfills could collect an approximate total of 475 million cubic feet of biogas per day - enough to fill nearly a billion party balloons. EPA estimates that there are about 450 landfills with untapped potential to use their garbage fumes. landfills are already collecting biogas for use in energy projects 2.

Green garbage truck powered by natural gas