Experience of Landfillgas Utilization with Gas Engines

摘要

Collecting the gases from the landfill waste for combustion in gas engines prevents them from escaping to ghe environment directly with positive influence on greenhouse effect.Furthermore such preparation with gas engines on landfill sites or waste water treatments can be fed to a very high percentage into the public grid making the invesment feasible in many cases. Installatins can be found mainly in Europe and the US,but also in Asia. In far more than 30 years,the Jenbacher gas engine divesion of GE Energy has installed more than 1,000 engines on landfill landfill gas has been a"standard gas"in the 90ties,it became more and more challenging in the recent years due to increased contaminations. Beginning with biogas applications,later on as well landfill gas applications have been facing increasing problems due to the organic silicon compounds contained in the gas.Inworst cases,already after a few 1,000 operating hours,damage may occur that necessitate the exchange of components like cylinders,cylinder liners,etc.As root cause so called volatile organic silica compounds(VOSC's) in the gas have been identified,which could not be removed by simple filter technology. For biogas -like e.g.,sewage gas-a simple system with exchange of the saturated active carbon after a certain time interval is known as feasible and proven concept,available since almost 10 years.GE has developed these sytems in the mid 90 ties,meanwhile more than 100 plants are successful in operation. This activated carbon system works in principal also for landfill gas,but the high amount of adsorbable hydrocarbons in the landfill would caude short exchange intervals and therefore high ooperating costs.So GE Energy has developed a more sophisticated system with automatic regeneration of the active carbon at the plant.