 While this briefing is titled Harnessing Landfill Methane to Benefit Local Economies and the Environment, it is part of a whole larger theme that we are hoping to really bring to policymakers and the policy community this year as we talk about short-lived climate pollutants and the critical need to look at these in terms of the many ways in which we find them in our society because we believe that in terms of short-lived climate pollutants, in terms of methane, and we're going to hear about an overview with regard to methane, but obviously taking a look at one major source of that, we will look at other sources of that in subsequent briefings. But in terms of thinking about black carbon, methane, tropospheric ozone, and also hydrofluorocarbons and the important role that they play as short-lived climate pollutants, that if we really are concerned about addressing climate, that we really need to look at the whole role that these pollutants are also playing. And one of the most interesting things, I think, is that as we look at this array of gases, that what we find is that by addressing them, we are also able to address multiple other issues and problems in a very winning way in terms of providing enormous co-benefits. So I think that it is a very exciting time, huge opportunities to think about how we can address multiple things. And we are delighted in terms of this briefing to have been working very closely with Congressman Scott Peters and his staff, LaMay, who we had previously worked with when she was over on the Senate side, and Congressman Peters brings great leadership to this issue. He represents Southern California, is very committed to making the quality of life better in the San Diego area, although many of us wonder, can it get much better? And so we are delighted that he is always looking for that. He brings a long history in terms of public service. He was the San Diego's first city council president, and he also served as a port commissioner. He spent time as an EPA economist and as an environmental lawyer, which brought him into direct experience dealing with landfills. He has some committee assignments in the Congress, now that we are so glad that he is here, which will also provide opportunities for addressing many of the issues that he cares so deeply about, serves on the House Armed Services Committee and on the Science, Space and Technology Committee, and he is now heading up the Climate Task Force for the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition. So please join me in welcoming Congressman Scott Peters. Thank you, Carol. I'd like to say how thankful I am and grateful that you all came out to hear about this issue, and I appreciate the context that we are in here in Congress. I'm on the Science, Space and Technology Committee. There is a substantial disagreement among the committee about whether climate change is even an issue. So all I can tell you is we are going to take a little bit of the long view here. We are going to try to lay the groundwork for when we will prevail on these issues of science, and so that is the context in which we are operating, but that is the intent, is that today we are going to at least talk about one way we might be able to make a difference with respect to methane. I did have a lot of activity. Right now I come as the Task Force Chair of the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition. Is that right? Is that right? Okay. I'm going to have essentially a caucus. I'm going to be working as the climate chair. We appreciate all of your input. You work with my staff, Lou Maze, my point person on this, and we're going to do whatever we can. What I like about this particular issue, these short-lived climate plumes, I heard Dr. Rahm speak at a business group in San Diego, and it's something that we can do that has a significant impact now without changing the energy mix of the United States of America. Clearly, we're going to have to deal with CO2 over time. That's so related to how we provide power, but it's also extremely politically charged. I'm hoping that we might be able to bite off a little piece of this with respect to methane, black soot, HFCs, and work on those things and have a huge impact. San Diego is awesome. It really is awesome. We are on the water, which presents sea-level rise issues for us. We have had wildfires. We expect more intense wildfires, and we're dependent on imported water. We know that drought is a big effect from climate change. I'm here not just because I'm in the abstract concerned about climate, which I am, but I think it really affects my district and affects everywhere. Let me introduce to you Dr. Rahm. He is a world-renowned scientist whose research on atmospheric pollutants has international reach. He's a distinguished professor of climate and atmospheric science at Scripps. Dr. Rahm is Rahmanathan. We just say Dr. Rahm, and all the students call him Rahm. He's a distinguished professor of climate and atmospheric science at Scripps. He is the director of the Center for Clouds, Chemistry, and Climate at Scripps, and has conducted research with the United Nations Environment Program, the World Meteorological Organization, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and his previous research in the effect of certain super pollutants, short-lived climate pollutants, played a major role in the formation of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to reduce short-lived climate pollutants. That's not a good acronym. A multinational effort announced by then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in February 2012. He's received the 2009 Tyler Prize, the Volvo Prize, the Zayed Prize, the Rossi Medal, the BIS Ballot Medal for Pioneering Studies in Climate and Environment, and has been elected to the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy by Pope John Paul II, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. That's pretty good. Just from a guy from San Diego. So today we're talking about a part of the methane issue with landfills, and Carol will introduce the other speakers. But I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Rahm, and thank you all for being here to help us out. Thank you, Dr. Rahm. Oh, it's here. Congressman Peters, I'm so proud to come from San Diego, and I'm so delighted and honored that you invited me here. So I'm going to just introduce the topic of short-lived climate pollutants. There are many studies, including mine, which have shown or projected that if you continue business as usual, that is not to mitigate any of the climate-warming pollutants, the planet is likely to warm by about 3.6 degrees. I'm using Fahrenheit and the Celsius in parentheses by mid-21st century. That's just around the corner in our time scale, so about 30, 35 years from now. So the first thing is climate change. We are talking about large warming is not 200 years from now, 100 years from now. Around the corner. And then you go on to the end of the 21st century, 2100, we're talking about 7.7 degrees Fahrenheit. There was a big report by World Bank on this very issue. So the main thing, my own research of the last 35 years, now UNEP has done a major study or 30 scientists from around the world, they have concluded similar things. That first thing I want to point out, it's still not too late either to delay or to reduce the dangers facing us downstream. The first, of course, is we have to stabilize the carbon dioxide concentration around below 440 ppm. It's about 400 now. The second thing, it turns out that that's not enough to really keep the warming under this 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit as 2 degrees Celsius. So we need to cut down four short-lived climate pollutants. So to tell you why they are short-lived, black carbon, it's soot. It's lifetime, it's less than two weeks. What it means is if we get rid of the black carbon emissions, their effects are gone a few weeks to a month from now. And methane, which is the focus, about 70% of it would be gone in about 15 years. So we have a tremendous opportunity to do something on short-hour lifetimes. And HFCs use as refrigerants 10, 15 years, and per ton of these compound emissions, they're as much effective as 25,000 to 4,000 times of taking a CO2 molecule. So they're, I think, what Congressman Peters called, which I agree, super pollutants. And the third important thing is we have technologies to cut them down drastically. And I'll end with those. So I want to now summarize a major study, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UCSD led in collaboration with National Center for Atmospheric Research and Climate Center. It just came about a week and a half ago. So what we show there is that mitigation of carbon dioxide and short-lived climate pollutants can reduce the warming from now to about 2050 by almost about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit. What is amazing about this is that short-lived climate pollutants contribute about 85% to this warming reduction. It's almost cutting down the warming by a factor of two. And that's the beauty of the short-lived climate pollutants. They act quickly. Carbon dioxide, for example, it stays in the air once you put it. About half of it for 100 years. So they accumulate. So as a result, their effects of mitigation takes a long time to show up. And that's where SLCPs come in. So we have a two-fold strategy. And methane contributes about half of the short-lived climate pollutants. So that's why the target of methane landfills by congressmen is just a brilliant first step to do. And as far as the sea level, that is the major study. So far, none of the studies have looked into what impact the short-lived climate pollutants will have on the sea level. And it turns out we can slow down the end of the sea level rise is projected to anywhere between one and a half to eight feet by 2100. We still have a large uncertainty. And the end of century sea level rise can be reduced by as much as 30%. And methane contributes about 41% of this effect. So it's a major player in sea level rise. And the black carbon in soot and a given carbon dioxide mitigation will do about 29%. Methane is 41%, black carbon is 17%, HFCs is about 13%. So we just have an opportunity to push each of these buttons. And what I want to conclude here is that this is based on a UNEPWM study. I was the vice chair of this, amongst three other vice chairs. So we, in fact, teamed up with economists and energy experts at YASA, and we came up with the measures which are most effective. So for example, for methane, you target oil and gas production, long-distance gas transmission, quite a bit of leaks happen and coal mining. As far as the emissions, those are all what we call fugitive emissions, leaks. And the target emissions from municipal waste and landfill, which is what we're talking about, wastewater treatment, livestock manure. In terms of black carbon emissions, the major thing to be targeted is diesel vehicles. California, we just released a study funded by the California Air Resource Board, has cut down its black carbon emissions by 50% since late 1980s. And we showed how statewide the soot pollution actually exposure to human beings has come down by 50%. It's also a major health effect. So the point here I'm trying to make is the technologies are there for us to start doing this right away. So we focus on the climate, what is the real beauty of the short-lived climate pollutant, particularly methane, and soot emissions is that it has huge health benefits. Worldwide, if we target methane and soot emissions as we have outlined in that report, you can save as many as 4.7 million lives and over 100 million tons of crops damaged every year from air pollution. And the US alone stands to benefit from the methane measures, close to about 8 million tons of crops which are damaged each year. So this is one of those things, no matter which angle you look at. Agriculture, health, water security, and climate change. Why is water security? Black carbon is a major contributor to melting of the snow packs, glaciers, Arctic sea ice. It will slow that down too. So with that, thank you. Thank you very, very much, Dr. Rahm, for that very, very important overview. And we will do Q&A after we've heard from all of our speakers and I certainly hope you will all want to take advantage of having such an incredibly renowned scientist with us this morning. We are now going to turn to Tom Frankowitz, who is the Program Manager for the EPA Landfill Methane Outreach Program. Tom is part of a team at EPA that is providing outreach and technical assistance to help local communities, small and businesses tap landfill gas in the US. And he is also working with the Global Methane Initiative as part of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition that Congressman Peters also mentioned. Also at EPA, he has worked a lot with industry through the CHP program, the combined heat and power industry, as well as other governmental organizations to encourage the deployment of biomass, biogas, generation CHP projects, as well as natural gas in CHP. So that we're using our resources in a much more efficient way. Tom. Thank you and thank you for having me here today. I'm going to be reading off of my laptop because all the printers were in sleep mode this morning and I couldn't get them off. Okay, so I'm glad that Dr. Rahm was able to speak about the science behind methane and some of the other short-lived climate pollutants, so I won't have to speak about that more difficult aspect. So I'm going to focus on really the basis of our program and how we work with communities to encourage landfill gas as a liability to be turned into an asset. We really have two goals. We were established in 1994 for the purpose of working with communities and helping them capture the landfill gas to flare it for methane reductions, but also to help them take that next step and actually utilize it for energy generation, okay. There we go. So I'm not going to speak in depth about landfills, but just a few basic elements particularly as they relate to landfill gas. This is a modern sanitary landfill and even though people kind of generically refer to them as dumps, they're really anything but they're a highly engineered complex creation and some of the, I'm not sure if there's a pointer here. Some of the- I'll never say dumps. Yeah. Some of the key components here is that you have a liner to prevent leachate and other pollutants from entering groundwater. You have your gas extraction system here to collect and remove the methane and at the least it's, let's see if I'm pointing my way, at the least it's taken to a flare plant to be flared off. That leachate which is really just water filtering through the landfill and all the stuff that's rotting in the landfill seeping out. It's collected at the bottom and taken to a leachate treatment plant. And then there's also ultimately a final cover that tries to prevent rainwater from going into the landfill, but also interacts with the landfill gas. Okay, so I think this stuff was covered pretty well already but I guess there's just one important thing to consider and that's landfill gas. It's really a mixture of many things but it's mostly half methane, half carbon dioxide and then moisture. And so that's also an important consideration when thinking about how to treat that landfill gas to utilize it. As of the last inventory publication, landfills in the US are the third largest man-made source of methane emissions with natural gas systems and then enteric fermentation being first and second respectively. Okay, this is another diagram and this really focuses in on, we have the landfill here again, but then these are a representation of the gas treatment system that's often used for an energy project. And this is a little bit more complex than the average system, but they could actually get more complex. I just mentioned that landfill gas is really a mixture of things and it's the methane that you want for energy and it's the other things that you want to remove. So when we talk about gas cleanup, it's a variety of technologies that are used to take out some of the different trace elements and remove moisture. The most often used is an engine and that's where minimal cleanup is used, a little bit of compression, a little bit of moisture removal. But the amount of cleanup can vary widely, particularly for more advanced applications like injecting the gas into a natural gas pipeline or vehicle use. And then the so-called cleanup really is just removing as much of the other things to have a concentration of upwards of over 90% methane. So you're compressing it and you're taking the other gases out. All right, and this is really the focus of what we do in our program. This is tracking existing projects and identifying other project opportunities. You can see from here, since 2012, there's over 600 operational projects in the US. And that's really quite notable. This is something really amazing that's happened just really in the last 15, 20 years, although one of the first landfill gas energy projects was in the early 70s and in California. So these have been around for a while. It's a reasonably established marketplace. There's conferences for these things now. But there's at least four to 500 project opportunities out there, just based on some basic criteria in terms of waste in place. And we think there's at least 445 technically and economically feasible projects. But there's certainly, based on will and interest, there certainly could be a lot more out there. This is all information that we track in the LMOP database and that public could go and download in spreadsheet format. This is a snapshot of the state of landfill gas projects in the US. In the past year, based on existing operational projects, they've generated over 15 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and provided over 100 billion cubic feet of natural gas for direct use in the past year. As I mentioned, there's still a lot more out there. So just at those 445 projects alone, if those were developed, they could provide over 7 million megawatt hours of electricity per year. This is just a breakdown of some of the different technologies used. There's a lot of ways to generate electricity using the gas. But that top bar chart shows that by far the most common used is a reciprocating engine or internal combustion engine. This is just pictures of some of the main technologies. The internal combustion engine, it's more or less the type of engine that's in a heavy duty truck, a heavy duty diesel engine in a truck. It's much larger, but it's essentially the same function and then attached to an electricity generator. They're the most commonly used because they provide the greatest size range and are also the most flexible in terms of level of cleanup needed. Gas turbines are also used quite frequently, but it's a much larger size range. And then microtermines, as you might imagine, are much smaller. Down to the 30 kilowatt range, but they can be stacked in a train to actually provide several megawatts of generation at one time. All right, the other type of technology or application is what we call direct use. And all that means is that you're using the gas directly, often piped off site, sometimes distances of 15 to 20 miles, but often just three to five miles. Anything that you would use natural gas for for producing heat, whether directly like in a kiln or to produce steam, landfill gas can be used as well. And these are some pictures. While electricity is the most common, direct use provides for some of the most creativity. Again, it's the methane, methane is the same as natural gas. So think of things you use natural gas for. These are the same things you could use landfill gas for. So everything from brick kilns and boilers to heating greenhouses and fish farms. And this is something that's emerging, but really it's an accepted proven technology now, and that's vehicle fuel. And you see compressed natural gas buses here running in DC. It's the same thing, you're taking natural gas, you're compressing it, so it could be used as a vehicle fuel. If you clean up landfill gas to the same standards, it could be compressed and used the same way. One of the most frequent applications is in fueling the fleets for waste sites. And I don't know what Dan's presentation will be about, but I have to imagine that this will be covered because this is something that the waste management has really been a leader in. All right, and the wrap up is really just a bit of a pitch for our program, but also to make you aware of some of the tools and services that we provide. The barriers, even though it's an established marketplace, there's still some informational barriers. And at the end of the day, if a municipality has one landfill, it's a unique project for each and every landfill. It's the same learning curve each and every time. We try to help folks overcome that learning curve by identifying opportunities, helping them to assess utilization options, and also making introductions and provide a whole network of project partners that build, finance, develop landfill gas projects. Just lastly, I was told that we should talk a little bit about how we've supported states. We work with everyone that has a stake in supporting landfill gas projects. And municipalities have a direct role, but we work with over 35 states that are interested in supporting and promoting landfill gas. We've run workshops, we've provided direct resources. We've done a matchup of all the landfills of their state to industry to show which landfills could use that gas, and we're happy to work with more. Thank you for having me here today, and I'm happy to answer more questions at the end. Thanks very much, Tom. One of the things that I really love about all of these stories is that it is so important that we always look at waste, or not even think about things in terms of waste, but think about how they really become resources that we can do so much better with. We're now going to turn to Dan LaFevers, who is the Vice President for Federal Public Affairs with Waste Management. Waste Management is based in Houston, a company with over 43,000 employees. And there are numbers of trade associations dealing with waste management, and it just speaks to the large number of issues, problems that waste does create in this country, and in terms of finding ways to better deal with that so that, again, we really do tap it as a resource. And Dan's work also involves memberships in the Secure America's Future Energy, as well as the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. Dan? I'd like to thank EESI, you know, they've done a really good job in putting on some fantastic briefings over the years. I've been able to participate in some of those in other roles in my career, particularly at the Gas Technology Institute. So this issue I've talked about in the past before, so I've had a great opportunity to come to Waste Management and learn about their activities in this space and other energy development space for renewable energy. So, okay, this is a slide. It points out a few things about us, and I always like to start out with this slide because managing waste is a lot of work, and doing it in a very environmentally friendly and safe way is a lot of work and costs a lot of expense, and we feel we are the leader in this space and we do our very best to protect the environment and to create a lot of renewable energy that's being used throughout the country. So as you can see the first little bullet there talks about how much renewable energy that we make and our ability enough energy to do 1.2 million homes. There's other facts on here that you can take a look at, but the point is that we take this very seriously at Waste Management and we continue to grow our renewable energy space as well as our commitment to sound environmental practices. So as we've already learned, and I'll go through this quickly, it's a renewable resource. And really, and Tom talked about this, any technology or application that uses natural gas can also use landfill gas. And in many cases, that's what we do with the gas, either using it directly in applications like transportation or for businesses like in Boilers or we actually make electricity with it. So quickly go through this. This is how it works, Tom. These are the pictures of kind of the diagram that you had of how we collect the gas at landfills. And then of course if we're unable to find a renewable resource for it to either make electricity or use it directly, we do flare it. So this is a very important point to make. Landfills are highly regulated activities. There's a lot of regulation around them. So the first thing really is the environmental protection, that's our first priority. If we're going to make renewable energy from our landfills, that's the second priority. So we have to make sure that the first priority is in no way degraded or affected for making renewable energy. One other point I'd like to make in our industry, the MSW landfills, the methane from those landfills, have gone down by 27% since 1990. So our industry as a whole is actively working to reduce methane emissions at our landfills. I got it. All right, so we have 138 landfill gas projects. That's enough renewable energy to power 500,000 homes. You might wonder why this is different than the previous slide. The previous slide also included our subsidiary wheel abrader who does waste energy facilities and also owns the Shasta biomass facility in California. I'll talk a little bit about Altamont. That's a picture down there in the right-hand corner. This is where we actually make LNG out of the landfill gas and then use it in our trucks. And we produce more renewable energy than the entire solar industry in America, so I think that's pretty interesting. And if you want to come to see and read about our sustainability report, again, I have copies here. Or you can download a copy at that link that's provided in the presentation. Types of landfill gas projects. Tom went over these a little bit. Power, vehicle, high BTU. And I'll go into more detail over that. These are the inventory. And you can see we're very active in these spaces. In fact, it looks like we're about one third of the power projects in America are operated by waste management or at one of our landfills. So I'm going to go quickly through these because there's a lot here. But why don't we do more medium BTU projects? And there's a lot of facts and information on it. But in essence, you need to build a pipeline to an end user. And there can be a lot of issues around that. Are they close enough? Can we get it right away? Natural gas prices are very cheap right now. And that's been affecting our ability to do projects in this space because there might be some kind of operation or boiler that would like to use landfill gas. But when natural gas is down around 350 and MMBTU, it's very difficult to make the economic case. So there's less and less of these kinds of projects being built today. Why not more high BTU projects? Well, they're very interesting projects because most of these projects are either going to be used for transportation applications or they're going to be put directly into the pipeline. And that's becoming more prevalent but is a very expensive proposition. When you hear people talk about the difficulties of connecting to the electric grid, connecting to a high pressure interstate pipeline is complex and expensive. So in the renewable space, and this has been something that's been very helpful and useful, when we're looking at using in a fleet applications, whether it's our own fleet or whether we're putting direct natural gas or cleaned up landfill gas that really mirrors natural gas into the pipeline system, one of the customers can be a fleet customer somewhere else that will buy the gas under contract and they can create RINs to use that gas in their compressed natural gas vehicles. And so this is something that we actively pursue and there's other project developers in the country that are also involved in these kinds of applications. If you're familiar with the RFS, there's a lot of volatility around RINs so it's difficult to build a pro-former around these projects because the RIN price has got to move around. This is pictures of the facility at Altamont. It's a very complex facility, very large facility, but it gets a lot of press in California and interestingly enough, the company that invented this technology is my former employer and then I came to waste management to work on all the issues that we do but this was actually out back in the R&D facility I used to work at and we eventually commercialized, the GTI commercialized it and licensed it to Lindy, well, a subsidiary of a partnership between Lindy and Waste Management and it's creating about 13,000 gallons of LNG a day and we're powering our refuse trucks as well as we're now using some of those larger trucks that move waste from transfer stations to landfills. We've just converted 20 of those trucks to be using the fuel created here. And one thing that I didn't mention and I guess I should mention, we have 2,000 natural gas refuse trucks in our fleet and they can use natural gas or they can use landfill gas that's cleaned up and we plan to expand that, 90% of our future purchases will be compressed natural gas trucks and they help us lower our carbon footprint of our company overall. So these are the most common, as far as the number of ways or the number of projects that exist today that are using landfill gas, they're landfill gas to power projects. They're well established, they've been around, I think, Tom, did you say the first one was in the 70s? Yeah, and so we've been involved with this space for a long time. We have a lot of internal expertise on how to build the facilities, how to take care of the engines. These are state of the art facilities, they're excellently run and these are some of the advantages. I mean, you don't have a product risk because you're making an electron. Most renewable energy incentives, whether they're statewide or in the federal government are focused on renewable electricity so that helps these projects come along. And there are challenges, particularly permitting and the congressmen state can be very difficult now because there's very strict rules on stationary engine pollutants. So I think that the criteria of pollutant knocks is very difficult to get down to a level where you can actually put an engine at a landfill these days. So that's made it more difficult to do landfill, to renewable electricity projects in California. So many of these projects are starting to look at how can we use the gas directly or to put it into the pipeline system? Though right now, until recently, there was a ban on putting landfill gas in the pipeline. They're working on the rules at the CPUC to figure out how to change that. A law was passed changing that, but now they've got to do the regulatory behind it. So here's some of the, what we call revenue sources in this, but these are really incentives that we look to help develop these projects. These are multi-million dollar projects, and so we have to create a, so you understand how these work in the real marketplace, we have to create a contract, a long-term contract with a buyer to be able to look at these and build them so that they're economically viable. We can use renewable energy credits that some states have, and of course, different states have different RPSs, states with really strong RPSs. We're very active in those states. There is a federal credit. It's 1.1 cent per kilowatt, which is $11 per megawatt hour. So that goes for 10 years. Many of our plants were built in that space and are using that credit. Accelerated depreciation helps. Anytime you're putting in large equipment on the ground that cost a lot of money, a bonus depreciation, which was actually passed as part of the fiscal cliff deal for one more year at 50%, and any kind of accelerated depreciation that exists in the makers is good now. Hopefully that won't change as part of Comprehensive Tax Reform. And then there's state incentives, credits, exemptions, grants, and loans. We take advantage of all these opportunities to develop more and more projects. Without these opportunities, we could not do the number of landfill gas to energy projects that we do today. They're all important. But energy prices have dropped and low natural gas prices have made it very difficult to compete in the marketplace in creating renewable energy. I suspect you've heard this from the solar industry and the wind industry and others, but low price natural gas does make it more difficult to compete in the electricity market. And I'm not saying that's bad or good, I'm just stating that as a fact. So I'm not trying to dig at natural gas. So it doesn't seem like any more states are developing RPSs at this time. And of course, many of you staffers in the room know that the federal PTC ends at the end of this year. And so if the open loop biomass credit goes away, that won't be available to develop these projects any longer. Quickly, there's a graph there. It shows you how the bundled energy plus renewable energy credits prices are dropping. So this is making it more difficult to do the economics of the projects. This slide talks a little bit about the REX in different states and they're huge. I mean, they're so different. I mean, the value that you can get in a state like California compared to the value you can get in the state of Ohio based on their RPSs, it's just, it's big. So in states where there's more incentives, it's much easier to develop these high cost projects. And the last bullet's very important, and I think this is important for all the renewable folks in this space, 14 states have introduced bills that will water down their RPSs. And that's critical to continue these kinds of projects. There's a map that I won't go into because it's very complex, but if you want to look at the copies of my presentation or on the website afterwards, you can get more into this. But it really gives you a kind of an overview of all the different renewable portfolio standards in the country and how they operate. So this is another important point I want to bring up about long-term fixed rate contracts. These contracts are getting less and less, let's put it this way. Electric utilities seem less and less interested in developing long-term contracts for renewable energy. So you can see that in three years we've executed 18 long-term fixed contracts, but there's a noticeable decline over the last couple years. So that again, if you can't develop a long-term contract with the utility to purchase your renewable electricity, it makes it much more difficult to do these projects. A little bit about the federal production tax credits, I won't go into detail here. I think many of you know how these work. I would say there's an interesting, I put a link here that talks about a concept for renewable energy credits going forward as part of comprehensive tax reform based in parity technology neutrality and on the end product as opposed to the technologies. If you want to look at that, you can find it at that link. It's at the biomass power association website. Trying to keep on time. All right, so I was actually in this facility, I think. I think this is the facility in Ohio. It was recently built. I was really impressed when I first came to waste management and toured our facilities. This has about six or seven engines in it. You could literally eat off the floor in this facility. It is clean and operates well and run well. And this is the top-notch power generation facilities that we're putting together. Very impressed, because throughout my energy career, I've gone to a lot of distributed energy sites and I will tell you, you can't eat off the floor. No problem. So here's a fuel skid. And this really compresses and filters and de-waters the gas, which is important. If you make high-quality gas, of course, you really have to get it to a high spec and you have to concentrate it, as Tom said, to about 90%. But in most of these instances where we're just making electricity, as he said, we have to clean it up a little bit and we have to de-water it a little bit. But other than that, we can run in the engines. The caterpillar engines in this next shot, they're very robust and we actually do work on them when we get them to even make them more robust to be able to handle the landfill gas over a long period of time. And then, of course, we convert the power to utility line voltage. So this is my last slide. So what is the development strategy for us to continue to utilize our landfill gas into the future for beneficial reuse and renewable energy projects? So medium BTU sales are the easiest by far. I mean low amount of cost other than the pipeline that you have to put to the facility if it's close. But there are no incentives to build these. So it really is a competitive market with natural gas. High BTU projects are much more difficult, currently with low natural gas prices. And really the only incentive out there to do these is the RINs, because the end user's gonna have to use this in a transportation application for this to be economically viable at all. And of course the RINs are volatile. So again, it's very difficult to run a pro forma and understand how you might get a rate of return on your investment when these RINs are kind of bouncing around at different prices. Power plants are good, they're proven, and really these are the most of the projects in the country and we'll continue to look at opportunities to deploy those. And unfortunately some locations just don't work. I mean you don't have an opportunity to connect to the grid at that location. You can't build a pipeline to another user. So unfortunately in some of these spaces we just have to flare the gas. We don't want to, we would love to use it in some kind of other application. And when it's possible and makes economic sense, then we do that. So thank you very much, I appreciate your time and look forward to your questions. And I made a mess. Great, so now we have looked at the science, we've looked at sort of the whole state of landfills and what's happening with regard to methane production and looked also at the business end of doing projects and how to make them work and the whole connection with policy. So let's open it up. We've got for your questions or comments we have a few minutes for that, okay? Here first. Thank you. I can comment more on a commercial ski. I don't know about municipalities run landfills, but usually when you're gonna do a renewable energy project, landfill gas to electricity, this is a landfill that's kind of been around for a while. I mean, there's not a lot of new landfills being built. So there's already a pretty large organic matter within the landfill itself based on its life. And so I don't think that's accurate or either accurate or I think it's kind of a red herring to be quite frank with you. If you're looking at diversion, which is a big thing out there in the marketplace right now, diverting organics, I mean, our stance is really if you have a plan, great, but you really need to have a plan. And places like Washington State have done very well, but it's very important. There's been instances where they've done diversions for organics and there's big piles of organics sitting around doing nothing. You have to look at the whole story. You have to look at the economic viability of what's gonna be done with those organics afterwards. Are you gonna make energy with them? Are you gonna make compost out of them? What are you gonna do? So I would say doing these projects, renewable gas to energy projects in no way affect the opportunity to recycle or the impetus to recycle whatsoever. I guess to that I'll just add maybe two considerations related to that is one, the economics of a project compared to both the expense and revenues of operating the landfill are of very different scale. And so the landfill gas energy project wouldn't drive how the landfills operated. And there's also two different sets of regulations that dictate how each of those are operated. But one other just kind of technical thing to think about you mentioned, and I've earned this complaint with more, or your point rather, more with respect to waste to energy for incineration. And that's where things like recycling could be affected because the calorific content of the different materials that could also be recycled. When it comes to methane from a landfill gas energy project, Dan mentioned diversion and that's maybe the more important thing to think about because it's only the organic fraction basically things that would rot, food, wood, textiles, they decay at different rates, but basically organic fraction that is what contributes to methane formation and would be used in the energy project. Things that would be recycled, tin, cups, plastic don't contribute to methane formation. So just a technical thing to think about. Okay, we'll go here and then there and then back over here, okay. Hi, thanks for your informative presentations. Landfill gas, the capturing use of this obviously very important for monitoring gas kind of change perspective. One of the rules of thumbs that I've come across is that about 25% or so of the landfill gas still escapes its fugitive even if you have landfill gas capture recovery in place. So I'm wondering what you see in terms of the future of that, whether it's more of a local effort, cities going zero waste efforts as if there's diversion of biogenics upstream of the landfill or in a maybe anaerobic digesters in place or if there's something that can be maybe more of a top-down approach to dealing with this but those fugitive emissions are still a problem even when we have landfill gas. Of course the numbers vary from landfill to landfill, I'd say. I was wondering whether you could comment on that. Still in a way that it don't, thank you. To build a landfill in a way that does a better job of capturing the methane emissions. I don't know if there's any way that you will ever get 100% of the methane emissions captured but we continue to find ways in which we can reduce the methane emissions at landfills and even when you divert them of course you may have some similar issues. I mean the bottom line is whatever you do there has to be some economic model that makes it work, right? So if you decide to divert whatever organics you have to identify a means in a way in which that's gonna work in the marketplace and so people need to think through those things and certainly we are actively participating in those activities particularly in places like Washington where they already have diversion activities and some of those are going to composting some of those are going to digesters so that's definitely gonna be part of the answer as we move forward but again it's very important to remember that there has to be a means to do this that works. Tom or Dr. Rom did you wanna add anything to, okay. All right, I think we're going to go over there first and then we'll come over here. Okay. Any thoughts on energy from waste facilities is maybe alternative to the LNG and maybe if those are in opposition to each other or if one is more useful in other. That's waste for the use of another hand. Thanks for asking. I think it really depends on the situation. I will say that in areas where they are using waste energy facilities there is a conscious effort to ensure that there are the most robust opportunities to recycle and I think those things need to go hand in hand. It's very prevalent in other parts of the world particularly in Europe. There's a lot of waste energy facilities so they certainly can be built in a way that's environmentally sound. It's a policy question about do you wanna make renewable electricity from that source? Is there a way to economically do that? So I think there's a place for both of them in the United States and I don't think they're at odds with each other at all. I think both of them are viable depending on the specific situation. Okay. Waste energy facility as an example would be the real operator facility in Baltimore that directly takes MSW and incinerates it and makes electricity. Okay, but thank you for asking. Okay, over here, go. I'll try to answer that. I'm a little unclear on I guess the technical nature of this but if you're talking about a project where they're trying to use the gas directly, a medium BTU that we call or direct use, there's two main expenses. The biggest one of course is getting that gas to the facility, the pipeline. And the other expense is retrofitting the boiler or the equipment for that purpose. The retrofitting is all things considered a relatively low expense. The highest expense is the pipeline, the materials but then also the ride away and everything else. There are currently no policies directly to incentivize that. There's local tax breaks for construction and things like that but there's nothing to directly incentivize that. We maintain a database of different incentives out there. We're happy to share them with other states but in this case, probably the thing that would be the prevailing factor is the change in natural gas prices because ultimately it's the economics that make any project feasible. So there's probably greater things working against that than just incentives that might be in place. Okay, okay, go ahead. How many kilowatt hours would produce all 425 of those projects like that? Just 20 or something? Yeah, I think it was like seven million megawatt hours. Obviously natural gas is right now and we have a lot of renewable energy everywhere. So I'm just curious whether from a scientific perspective, from a multi-chromatic knowledge perspective, is there anything out there that you guys see that could, other than change a natural gas process in terms of this technology for the need for this energy that could compete with that factor? Hello, good. Yeah, I do. You know, the incentives in the country, particularly the federal incentives, is very much focused on electricity production. And I think if the incentives were more focused on creating renewable energy products that included replacements for natural gas and gasoline and diesel, I think the opportunity would present itself that more renewable energy could get into the marketplace in different energy spaces other than just electricity. Because right now we have the PTC and it really drives you to doing those types of projects, correct? I mean, you see the incentive and you look at the pro forma and you understand that you get this credit and that's what you're gonna do. But if there was also similar credits to make pipeline quality natural gas from landfill gas or other energy products that we might use so that the credit system was more technology neutral and maybe focused on the end product as opposed to the technologies, I think that would definitely open opportunities for more projects to get done in the country that would be creating replacements, renewable replacements for natural gas or gasoline or diesel or the like. And I might just mention too that as Dan was saying with regard to the concentration on electricity incentives, there's kind of a void on the policy front with regard to thermal incentives. And yet we use a lot of heat in this country but yet our energy policy sort of doesn't really address that. Okay, back here first, yeah. And I'll get to you. I'll follow up to that. Is there any elements in building these that bring fostering of structural changes and that's why you're lower than? Probably the only area that I could see reduction in cost, maybe the cleanup systems, there may be some new developments in the way we are able to process and clean landfill gas or gas in general. Other than that, I mean, I don't see engine costs going down or pipeline costs going down or retrofits for the other side going down. So probably not. Okay, here and then back there. Okay. The number is 70% is an assumption that has been lost for months for years. I don't think it's been substantiated at all. Some more recent studies by EPA so looking at optical scanning shows that the range could be quite large to be as well as 38% somewhere in California. So they take the good after looking at several antels in this area to be over 60%. And the consequence of that number being long is huge because if we've got, here we are encouraging people by calling the green energy to use landfills as a solution to a rather than diversion regardless of the cost, then you're encouraging more emissions if that fugitive emission number is higher than we were assuming. And I don't think you have any data whatsoever to use to defend that same type of sentiment. Then the impact is enormous. So I guess I have to say number one, oh, and even that number that has been tested and measured to some small degree is only looking at the emissions during the active life of the landfills. You're not counting the emissions that may occur at the beginning before you put a cap on or at the end, actively, the whole landfills is abandoned. So it could be emissions at the front end and in the back end. It could increase that number even more, maybe two, maybe multiple times. The point is, is that number actually wrong? And I'm going to ask Dr. Rahm, what's the consequence of this number being wrong? I just say this, it's fake from our standpoint, but we support the most accurate measurements that you can get. So we are happy to do more measuring and getting better, more accurate data. We support that as a company. So that's all I can tell you. I was asked to give the view from 30,000 feet. So I want to bring some perspective and then I try to answer your question. First is, if you look at the various sources of climate change, particularly carbon dioxide, coal is the most damaging fossil fuel source. So switching from coal to natural gas is a good thing. We bring it down just by that switch. And then when you go to the natural gas, whether it is really natural gas, natural gas, or this LFG, the issues come in terms of fugitive emissions. And I think, I agree with you, I think your number was 25% as the fugitive emissions. Is that right, or? Or one of you gave a number, and you're, yeah. Yeah, it's a rule of thumb. So you're saying it could be as high as 70%, is it 68, or? IPCC said it could be 80%. Yeah, that would then make a huge impact, simply because we are consuming some energy to do all this. So then you have to do a full life cycle analysis of the whole thing. And I say if it's 25, then it's clear. It would be a good thing to do, to conduct methane emissions. But if it's 85%, then we have to bring in the energy you use to produce the LFG. Well, and I guess this debate is illustrative of the ongoing debate about it. But I would just add to that, I guess two things. You mentioned a study that EPA is doing. EPA on an ongoing basis is working to improve measurement, methodology for collection efficiency. There is a wide range. There is the part before the gas collection system is installed and then the part after it can operate efficiently afterwards is a certain point where there's not enough gas to maintain a flare. But the most important part is that landfill gas energy projects, which we do encourage as a program are not to encourage that more landfills be built to support energy projects. It's to collect, not only collect the gas that's coming out of landfills, but to utilize it for something useful. And that's probably the most important distinction that's really outside the debate of what the collection efficiency is. But we are always striving to improve our numbers on collection efficiency. Yeah, let me make a point about that because I have to make this point. The landfill gas energy projects are not gigantic money makers or something. I mean, it's not like we do those and we make all this money making renewable electricity. So the idea that in some way that the ability to incentivize these is gonna have us do something different it's just, it's not accurate. We use this as a means to develop projects that we believe provide useful renewable energy to the marketplace. And as far as the other side of the equation methane emissions at landfills, we work closely with the EPA. We are highly regulated and again, we support accurate data and we will always support accurate data. So we want that to occur. So I think that's what I can say about it. I can't speak for all landfill operators out there because I don't know, but I can tell you our company does a really good job. I've been to a lot of the landfills that we operate and they are steady the art well run and we're doing everything we can to make sure they're environmentally sound and have the least amount of methane emissions. Great, okay, last question. Yeah, my question is related. What percentage of the landfills in the United States would you say have good modeling of the future emissions? My concern is related, I think that I read a paper that said three percent of the methane emissions for natural gas use to escape given natural gas as an energy source is equivalent to cold and we're all in the war in perspective. So to quantify this and to understand back to the problem, how many of those hundreds of landfills are getting lost? I don't know the percent off the top of my head but what I can, and I can certainly find that number for you, but maybe the more clarifying answer is that the NUSAR's performance standard, which requires the collection of gas and really when you collect the gas, you can't store it, you flare it, there's monitoring requirements that go along with that for both for fugitive emissions and performance of those wells that collect the gas. So I don't know what the percent is of those monitoring over all landfills but all landfills that are required to collect gas have monitoring requirements that they're to meet. Well, as Dr. Rahm indicated at the very outset, obviously this is an extremely important issue. Methane escaping into the atmosphere is a huge forcer with regard to climate change. It's also a waste of a resource and therefore as everyone I think has made clear, moving towards getting better and better data is terribly important so that we can also find better and better solutions and where necessary the policies that will enable those solutions to take place and that should be our goal. The one last thing I wanted to ask Dr. Rahm is whether in terms of as more and more information has been coming out, talking about the role of short-lived climate pollutants, whether you see sort of an increase in attention and epitous with regard to the overall scientific community in terms of really starting to emphasize the need to take action in this particular area. Carol, yeah, that's happening. Just to give you a few examples, three weeks from now, WHO has asked a few of us to address all the health ministers about the short-lived climate pollutants. I mean, what better way to reach the global community? And we, you know, the California Air Resource Board and University of California, we are teaming up to organize a joint meeting with India, counterparts in India to see can California's experience in reducing black carbon emissions by a factor of two, can that be replicated in India? Then the World Bank is very interested. And it's very interesting that we're able to engage India and China. They are obviously very important when you talk about short-lived climate pollutants. From the air pollution issue, from the agricultural impact issue and the health exposure. So yes, I think it is bringing many communities together and just taking this landfill, waste management is a huge issue in all the developing countries. I spent about two months traveling in villages in India and this is one of the biggest problems. So, and things like these can happen, just collaboration between waste management and a equivalent company in India, China. We don't need 160 nations to sign on a piece of paper to do this. So I think that is the real beauty of this. One other thing I wanna point out is that I talked about in terms of cutting down the warming by 60.6 for one. When you talk in those things then you deal with a lot of uncertainties. Another way to think about it is whatever outcome we are going to face, cutting down short-lived climate pollutants delays that by about 20 to 40 years. Giving society time to adapt or come with brilliant technologies to solve the problem. While we continue to move as many things forward in the interim as possible, I want to thank everyone here who is here today in the audience and to also a very, very special thanks to our speakers. I think there was a lot of information that was presented. That information will also be up on EESI's website. So please feel free to go there and encourage your colleagues to take a look at that as well. Because I think as we also have seen that it's a terribly important issue. There are some solutions, but there are also some barriers and there are some hurdles to getting this really achieved and it definitely is a work in progress. So I want to thank you all very, very much for being here and look forward to working with you in the future. Thanks. We are at UCSD.