This automated tool helps combat methane emissions…

When Melinda Sims founded LoCI Controls, a company that provides landfills with real-time data on methane collection, she wasn’t trying to address climate change. Was 2012and methane – a super pollutant that traps 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide during a 20period of one year – was not yet part of the national debate on reducing emissions. ​“CO₂ reduction was the main focus,” Sims said. ​“Nobody was talking about methane or landfills.”

At that time, Sims was a graduate student in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She got the idea for the company after a large landfill operator asked for her help in solving a specific puzzle. The company was trying to capture methane – which leaks from landfills as food waste and other organic matter decompose – and use it to generate energy, but was unable to extract enough gas to fuel the engines of its on-site power plants. .

Sims was able to identify the problem: the landfill’s extraction system, a network of pipes and wells that collect methane and other gases, was leaking. ​“Landfills are dynamic,” Sims said. Waste decomposes and moves, temperatures vary, atmospheric pressure rises and falls – all of these changes cause the pressure within the extraction system to fluctuate and methane to leak.

As Sims researched the topic, she realized that the operator who had requested her help was no exception. ​“It wasn’t a single landfill issue,” Sims said. Operators must regularly monitor and adjust the pressure within the extraction system, but this typically only happens once a month – nowhere near enough to detect leaks. In response, Sims and colleagues MIT graduate student Andrew Campanella developed technology that does this work remotely.

A decade later, we know that landfills are the third leading source of methane emissions. As state and federal regulators tighten landfill emissions requirements, automated well tuning has become an important tool in the effort to reduce this source of greenhouse gas emissions – and LoCI Controls is at the forefront of this effort .

After food scraps are thrown into landfills, they are buried under dirt and other waste and then covered with tarps. Over time, aerobic bacteria, which feed on oxygen and organic matter, chew up this food, depleting the oxygen within the waste pile. This frees up space for methanogens, which eat the carbon dioxide produced by aerobic bacteria and pump out methane.

Under the Clean Air Act, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency places limits on the amount of methane that landfills can leak. To meet these requirements, landfills must install extraction systems, which pump methane to sites where it is burned or piped to energy projects. But experts say the meeting EPA requirements is largely an honor system. In addition to monitoring the extraction system monthly, operators typically perform manual inspections of a landfill by walking across its surface with a portable emissions detector. An analysis of landfills in eight states found methane leaks that exceeded legal limits in 96 percent of them. Inspections of major landfills across the country revealed cracked and aging extraction systems.

LoCI Controls places sensors in wells whose purpose is to draw methane to the surface for collection. These sensors continuously monitor the conditions of the extraction system, including pressure, temperature and composition of the gas collected, and then send this data to a server where an algorithm automatically makes adjustments to the well valves. ​“That’s tens of thousands more measurements than a landfill would normally have,” said Peter Quigly, the CEO and chair of LoCI controls.