Ada County officials will cut the ceremonial ribbon Tuesday, May 13 on a new natural gas treatment plant at the Ada County Landfill, but a small amount of the captured and cleaned Landfill Natural Gas (LNG) from the facility is already entering the commercial pipeline.
Texas-Based Bio Gas is the company behind the project, we first reported on it in January. A company spokesman says the amount of natural gas being produced from landfill emissions will grow over the next several weeks. Ultimately, the county expects to bring in about $1 million a year in royalties - revenue that will help keep landfill fees low.
BioGas makes money, too, and the project means fewer climate-warming methane emissions. The Ada County Landfill, as required by the Environmental Protection Agency, has been capturing methane emissions for years. Some powers electricity generators, most is flared off; carbon dioxide is a far-less damaging gas compared to methane.
But a group of local citizens continues to push for more detail on the risk of PFAS - or forever chemicals - in the finished product. This spring, Citizens Allied for Integrity and Accountability (CAIA) noted a 2024 study showing high levels of PFAS in untreated landfill gas.
On April 4, BioGas, CAIA representatives and researchers who led the University of Florida study met via zoom to discuss the research and methodology.
“What these researchers did is they modified an EPA method. It's called OTM-45, and they changed it,” said CAIA member Richard Lewellyn. “They're looking at additional PFAS that they expected to be volatile and therefore in landfill gas. Now that doesn't mean, again, that it's a really easy thing to test.”
Therein lies the rub: there isn’t an established, reliable standard of testing for PFAS in LNG. There are no federal regulations around it either.
BioGas spokesman Brian Cronin wrote by email that University of Florida researchers did say the company is using the best known practices, “in terms of capturing the gas and minimizing/eliminate fugitive emissions and then cleaning the gas, particularly the using granular activated carbon, which they believe (though are now starting to study) removes the PFAS from the gas.”
CAIA, which Lewellyn emphasized does like the idea of the LNG project, remains concerned.
“What they described is that the granular activated carbon was, quote, very ‘hot’ with PFAS. Now that is typically seen as a final polishing stage. So whether or not it captures all of the PFAS, we just simply don't know,” he said.
University of Florida researchers are currently studying a landfill with an LNG facility in that state, and Cronin wrote that BioGas is encouraged by that research and is a willing partner for additional studies.
As more LNG enters the Intermountain Natural Gas pipeline, Lewellyn said CAIA thinks customers most likely to be receiving the LNG - Avimor, Dry Creek, Hidden Springs and the east end of Eagle - should be notified that their source has changed.
A spokesman for Intermountain Gas was not immediately able to share if the utility had plans to make any notifications.
