University completes gas-to-energy landfill project

The University of New Hampshire’s (UNH) EcoLine, a landfill gas-to-energy project that uses purified methane gas from a nearby landfill to power the campus, is complete, university officials announced.

The five million square-foot campus will receive up to 85 percent of its electricity and heat from purified natural gas, making UNH the first university in the nation to use landfill gas as its primary fuel source.

“This massive project, more than four years in the making, will reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and stabilize our fuel source and costs,” said UNH president Mark W. Huddleston.

EcoLine is a partnership with Waste Management’s Turnkey Recycling and Environmental Enterprise (TREE) in Rochester, New Hampshire where the naturally occurring by-product of landfill decomposition is collected via a state-of-the-art collection system consisting of more than 300 extraction wells and miles of collection pipes.

After the gas is purified and compressed at a new UNH processing plant at TREE, it travels through a 12.7-mile-pipeline from the landfill to UNH’s cogeneration plant, where it will replace commercial natural gas as the primary fuel source. In operation since 2006, UNH’s cogeneration plant captures waste heat normally lost during the production of electricity and uses this energy to heat campus buildings.

Total cost of the project, which included construction of the pipeline and the processing plant at TREE, is $49 million. UNH will sell the renewable energy certificates generated by using landfill gas to help finance the overall cost of the project and to invest in additional energy efficiency projects on campus. In addition, UNH will sell power in excess of campus needs back to the electric grid.