Brandon's Chevening Fellowship Blog: Landfill Gas and Lord Adair Turner

Last Friday we travelled east along the Firth of Forth (past some of the best links golf country in the world) to Dunbar, where a company called Viridor has a landfill gas project. The landfill is relatively new...about 10 years old. It was built in what was a limestone quarry used by Scotland's only cement factory, a La Farge operation. As of 2003, the EU requires all landfills (new and old) to be capped and capture methane emissions. Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas that has a global warming potential of more than 20 times carbon dioxide. So most new landfills (and most old ones too, it seems) are now installing the necessary piping and electric generating engines to produce electricity from this methane they are already capturing. As the EU gets slightly better about recycling and composting organic waste (the UK at least is still miles behind the US in recycling in my opinion so far), however, the waste coming into the landfill starts to produce less methane.

Viridor is also hoping at building an incinerator to burn garbage and produce electricity on this site (which they claim would run at 60% efficiency (much better than most coal plants today) and have clean emissions). They have submitted a planning permit and are meeting with some local opposition. This incinerator would currently qualify for renewable obligation certificates (their version of REC's for their renewable obligation), though the way he answered my question suggested to me that this might change in the future. When I asked if they were considering gasification, he said they looked it at, but it wasn't yet "bankable." (meaning it was not a proven enough technology that banks would consider making loans to finance the capital costs of installation).

Yesterday, we attended a speech by Lord Adair Turner, the chair of both the UK's Financial Services Authority (bank regulator) and the UK's Climate Change Committee, a recently created entity meant to serve as a non-partisan government advisory board on climate change. The event also included a speech by Jacqueline McGlade, the executive director of the European Environment Agency, which seems to provide impartial information and support to the EU and member country environment agencies. They broadly discussed the significant threat of climate change the the challenges for governments to mitigate climate change. Turner explained how the committee came up with the UK's 80% greenhouse gas reduction goal (essentially they tried to estimate where the world needed to be by 2050 to avoid dangerous climate change and come up with Britain's projected per capita share of total world emissions). While the goal is massive, the committee estimated it could be accomplished at cost of only 1-2% of total UK GDP (cashing in on savings from efficiency, shifting behavior at no cost to GDP, and realizing that energy costs are only a small portion of the UK's overall GDP). McEwan Hall, a magnificant hall built by a local brewer to host the university commencement ceremonies, was a great setting for the event.