I mentioned in an earlier post experiments elsewhere in Latin America on utilizing methane recovered from landfills to power vehicles or run industrial boilers. I just ran across an interesting article about a project in the US intended to tap landfill methane to cut the energy costs of a SC Johnson manufacturing plant:
http://www.jsonline.com/news/racine/mar03/123597.asp
Seems to me this could be possible done in the DR, perhaps to provide power to an industrial zone or a free zone...
You might say, well, Keith, the DR doesn't have a real landfill to tap. True enough, but a Brazilian environmental engineer friend of mine, Jose Henrique Penido -- in fact, the guy who runs such a project for Rio de Janeiro -- claims in a 1996 paper he gave me that
Quote:
Even an open dump is suitable for a recovery installation, once it has received a sufficient quantity of waste (about 100.000 tons, which is the amount produced by a 50.000
inhabitants city in nine years) and is disposed with an eight meters thickness, at least.
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The open dump has to be prepared properly to be able to tap its methane, but such recovery systems can be "extremely simple" according to Penido. The recovered gas can not only be used for industrial boilers and furnances or to power vehicles, but also for domestic use -- cooking, lighting, refrigeration etc....