South Korea has opened the world’s largest garbage-fuelled power plant and expects to reduce its imports of heavy oil by 500,000 barrels a year as a result.
The 50-megawatt plant, designed to provide power to more than 180,000 households, began operating on Tuesday. It sits on a mammoth garbage dump in the city of Incheon west of Seoul, the ministry said in a statement.
For fuel, it uses only the methane gas naturally generated from the decomposing garbage on the site.
“It reduces greenhouse gas emissions by burning away methane and avoids burning more fossil fuel for electricity,” Park Han-Eop, an official of the ministry’s waste treatment division, told AFP.
The plant will save the country the import of 500,000 barrels of heavy oil and will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1.37 million tonnes per year, he said.
South Korea currently relies heavily on nuclear power plants which supply 40 percent of demand. It imports all its oil needs.
You might think that a nation which leads the world in the production of garbage — might also make this a priority? Right.
Wouldn’t it have made more sense to stir up some fear and hysteria and attack some other country instead?
Los Angeles generates 1.5 MW of power from methane gas that they used to just flare off.
Great idea. Wonder if anyone in the US would go for it.
“It reduces greenhouse gas emissions by burning away methane and avoids burning more fossil fuel for electricity,” – and the residue makes a good ice cream topping…
Put a tube up my oldest dog’s butt and you’ll get enough methane to power a small city.
We’ve actually got a small trash burner plant right in my town. Seems to work well enough. With all the problems with landfills these days I don’t know why they don’t build more of them.
[edited: you’re better than that one, James]
So long as they can deal with the pollution, then it is a great idea.
#5, your dead comrades solute you
The US DID this but the environmentalist killed it. It was called Waste to Energy or Trash to Cash. The air pollution control equipment technology in the 80’s did a fine job of capturing particulate and many of the gases produced by the combustion process. But the tree huggers forced the US to abandon this and instead bury the garbage in the ground letting future generations deal with the problem. Even the flyash from these plants were disposed properly in lined land fills. Not only was “free energy” produced but volume reduction of 10:1 was achieved extending the life of these landfills.
#8 — you simply haven’t a clue, have you? Did you even read the article? This is about burning methane produced from landfills — not incinerating trash.
Sorry, dude; but, I continue to be astounded by right-wing trash talk that starts off by missing the point > propounds a non-existent topic > yammers on about “problems” that have nothing to do with solutions.
i wonder how well Hong kong and canton could do??
WISH they would do something simular in MY AREA…we have over 500,000 cattle..
It seems like the problem is that getting *any* kind of power plant up and operational in the US is very difficult, because of regulatory issues. I for one think regulation is a good thing, but it shouldn’t hamper progress.
Average prive to get past regulations, BEFORE the first brick is laid…
$10,000,000
I bet it smells **horrible** there
13,
IT DONT SMELL…
What smwll is the Garbadge pit sitting there doing nothing..
If it stink then they havent used ALL the gas.