A new plant recently approved by Manatee County will take methane gas from the Lena Road landfill and capture it for use as a source of energy.
The $50 million project will be operated by Nopetro Energy, which operates a fleet of compressed natural gas fueling stations. It will keep this potent greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere and store it on site. The gas will then be connected to existing natural gas pipelines.
Travis Payne, the company's senior vice president of renewable natural gas development, said most of that gas now comes from out of state.
"Then it'll be put into the Florida gas system as a renewable energy, but basically unidentifiable from natural gas that's coming on to the system anywhere in Florida," he said. "Most of the gas in Florida, though, comes down from Texas or from the Northeast. So this is locally produced, renewable fuel in Florida."
Payne said this will be the first facility of its kind on Florida’s west coast. Besides being used to power buses and trucks, natural gas fuels about three-quarters of the electricity produced in Florida.
"It's preventing this harmful methane from entering the atmosphere," he said. "You capture it with a well and landfill control system that captures it, and then you just process it, clean it up and put it into a pipeline."
Methane is the major component of natural gas. It's also one of the most potent greenhouse gases, and is the second-biggest man-made contributor, after carbon dioxide.
The company said the project is expected to eliminate the equivalent of carbon dioxide produced by 5.3 million gallons of car gasoline each year. That's comparable to the amount of carbon that would be captured by approximately 22,000 acres of forest. When operational, the facility will produce enough renewable energy to power more than 4,500 homes every year.
