Methane is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide, making it a significant threat to our climate. EREF is committed to advancing the science behind Climate Change and Greenhouse Gas Emissions, so we’ve created this hub for resources that address the challenges and opportunities in landfill emissions.
Controlled Release Project
The first step in mitigating the factors that exacerbate Climate Change is understanding them. While EPA ranks landfills as the 3rd largest emitter of methane, there’s still no one perfect way to measure those emissions. To address this challenge, EREF initiated a groundbreaking study to compare and contrast the accuracy and effectiveness of nine methodologies for measuring methane emissions from landfills. However, measuring landfill emissions is complex due to factors such as: the variable nature of their sources (e.g. point versus diffuse sources) and landfill geometry, which can create complex movement of air on and around the landfill (e.g. microclimates, orographic lifting). Unlike emissions from other industries, such as those from the oil and gas industry, landfills emit gases across large areas and in ways that behave as both point and nonpoint sources.
With funding from EREF, St. Francis Xavier University’s FluxLab conducted a controlled methane release study at a closed landfill in Ontario, Canada. Nine methodologies were assessed in the study, including those specializing in localization (identifying where emissions are originating), those focusing on quantification (determining how much is being emitted), and those with both localization and quantification capabilities.
The study sought to answer three main questions:
- How do different methodologies perform under various meteorological conditions?
- What are the quantification accuracies of different methodologies?
- What are the localization accuracies of different methodologies?
Researchers tested nine methodologies for quantification and detection performance during 71 experiments:
