Livermore Chamber member Waste Management fuels trucks from landfill - 13,000 gallons per day!.     Altamont Landfill's gas fuels garbage trucks  David R. Baker, Chronicle Staff Writer  Tuesday, November 3, 2009

A company that manages landfills has a new source of fuel for its garbage trucks - rotting trash.  At the Altamont Landfill near Livermore, Waste Management Inc. has installed a $15.5 million system that collects gas given off by decomposing garbage and turns it into fuel. The company unveiled the system on Monday.

Built by German engineering company the Linde Group, the project strips impurities from the gas, chills it to 260 degrees below zero and turns it into a liquid. Specially equipped garbage trucks burn it as fuel. The system can produce as many as 13,000 gallons of liquefied natural gas per day.
The environment benefits in several ways. The methane produced by rotting garbage is a powerful greenhouse gas. Burning it keeps it out of the atmosphere while cutting the amount of fossil fuel that Waste Management uses. Three hundred of the company's garbage trucks in California will run on liquefied natural gas from Altamont.
"We felt there was this unbelievable opportunity to close the loop, where we literally run the trucks on fuel from the garbage they carry," said Kent Stoddard, vice president of public affairs for Waste Management. The company, North America's largest garbage hauling business, is based in Houston.
The idea of turning landfill gas into liquefied natural gas has been tried before, but the Altamont project is the world's largest, according to Waste Management and Linde. Stoddard said the companies, which developed the project as a joint venture, plan to replicate it elsewhere once they have more experience running it.
Many landfills already trap their gas and burn it, either to generate electricity or just to keep it out of the air. California air quality regulators earlier this year passed a regulation requiring landfills to capture their methane by 2012.
State agencies contributed a total of $2.3 million in grants to the Altamont project, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger praised the project on Monday.
"As California continues to move forward with its nation-leading policies to fight global warming, we need a diverse, dependable and environmentally sound mix of energy supplies to meet the needs of our people and our economy," Schwarzenegger said.
E-mail David R. Baker at dbaker@sfchronicle.com.