Siseko Njobeni
24 April 2008
Johannesburg — THE City of Johannesburg has embarked on a project to turn waste gas from its various landfill sites into energy, according to a senior official in the municipality.
The methane gas-to-energy project presents the municipality with a source of energy from an unused and cheap resource and comes at a time when municipalities need additional capacity as power utility Eskom struggles to keep up with demand for electricity.
City of Johannesburg executive director for infrastructure services Themba Camane yesterday said the municipality had identified the need for extraction of dangerous gases from the city's various landfill sites. "These gases could either be destroyed or converted into energy. Normally a landfill produces various gases. Methane is the one produced in large quantities.
"If released into the atmosphere, it contains a lot of carbon. That is not good given the various initiatives to curb carbon emissions," he said.
"If we can capture the methane, we would contribute to reduction of carbon emissions and the fight against global warming."
Three years ago the municipality commissioned a study to establish the quantity of methane in all of its landfills. The study found that there were large quantities of methane, he said.
"There were various means to deal with that. The one option, and the one that we chose, was to burn the methane to generate electricity. You burn the gas to drive the turbines and produce electricity. There are two benefits of this. Firstly, you generate electricity from an unused resource. Secondly, you destroy methane and thus contribute to reduction of carbon emissions," Camane said.
The municipality invited tenders for the project last year. "We got eight very comprehensive proposals in April last year. The preferred bidder for the project is EnerG Systems consortium. We had to do a due diligence of all the landfills to establish how much gas is there. We have finalised a report that shows close to 20MW would be produced in the next 12-18 months. This will be on an incremental basis," he said.
The city has identified about seven landfills that have the largest quantities of methane.
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