Along with 750 other registrants, I spent the bulk of last week in San Diego at the 33rd renewal of SWANA’s oldest and certainly among its most well attended events. Granted, in this era of tough travel times, that the majority of the participants were from the western half of the organization’s constituency, the presentations were by no means parochial, covering such diverse subjects as the changing regulatory environment, renewable energy credits, carbon credits, ARRA, upcoming legislation, the cap-and-trade situation, and reporting rule considerations. Surprisingly there was even a little time left over to talk about landfill gas.
While the most exciting presentations had to do with beneficial use projects, I was most taken by some of the science work that has emerged in the past year having to do with methane oxygenation and collection efficiency. Now I won’t try to convince you that I found myself on the edge of my seat looking at x/y plots of methane molecules working their way through landfill cover soil, but I enjoyed the extent of their annihilation at the hands of oxygen during the journey. Mostly I liked the fact that we’re seeing some hard science emerge into an arena heretofore controlled by default values that presented a skewed vision of LFG escaping to the atmosphere. While the soft spot in predictive LFG modeling will continue to be methanogenesis, the work done by Jean Bogner, Dana Buske, and Tarek Abichou in methane measurement will do much to increase our knowledge as to the extent of the LFG contribution to greenhouse gas generation.
SWANA is to be congratulated in hosting another landmark event.