Honeywell Finds a Solution

to its Gas Needs

Natural gas is the lifeblood of Honeywell International Inc.'s massive Hopewell plant.

Every day, the sprawling complex off state Route 10 consumes about 57 million cubic feet of natural gas, which is used to fuel the plant's operations and as a raw material to manufacture a key ingredient in nylon.

"We are probably the largest consumer of natural gas on the East Coast and one of the largest in the United States," said plant manager Rick Higbie.

The dependency on natural gas has been a challenge for the plant management team in recent years. As natural gas prices have increased, the plant has faced burdensome energy costs that, in turn, have contributed to job reductions at the site, which employs about 700 people.

As plant managers looked for ways to cut dependency on natural gas, they found an underground solution. Among the maze of pipes that wind around one section of the complex, a single pipeline juts from the ground and connects the whole plant with an energy source that originates in trash containers up and down the East Coast.

The 18-inch polyethylene pipe runs beneath the plant and cuts cross-country for 23 miles to Waverly, where it ends at a massive landfill owned by Atlantic Waste Disposal Inc. Inside the landfill, thousands of tons of decomposing trash produces methane gas that is pumped through the pipeline to the Honeywell plant, where the gas is used to help power the plant.

There are other landfill gas pipelines in Virginia and the United States, but the pipeline supplying Honeywell is unprecedented in scope.

"It is the largest pipeline of its kind in the country," said Keith Togna, an engineer and energy coordinator at the Hopewell plant. When it was completed in late 2003, the Waverly-to-Hopewell pipeline eclipsed the previous record-holder, a landfill-gas pipeline in Wichita, Kan., by more than 10 miles.

The Hopewell plant relies on natural gas for two purposes. One-third of the gas is used as fuel, with the rest used as a feedstock for making ammonia. That, in turn, is used to make caprolactam, a raw material for the nylon resins manufactured at Honeywell's nearby Chesterfield County plant. The cost of natural gas makes up about 30 percent of the final product price for caprolactam.

The landfill gas offsets a portion of the natural gas that would normally be used as fuel, Higbie said. Landfill gas is now displacing about 15 percent of the natural gas fuel requirements of the plant and eventually it will displace about 25 percent, or even as much as 50 percent of the plant's fuel needs.

"That may take 10 to 15 years as the landfill grows in capacity," Togna said. "It is a very gradual thing and hard to predict."

Higbie said the plant could save about $50 million in energy cost over the life of the 15-year contract to purchase landfill gas.

All that energy is produced by trash. At the other end of the pipeline, the 373-acre Waverly landfill takes in about 15,000 tons of solid trash a day. Big trucks arrive at the landfill six days a week, hauling in waste from as far away as New Jersey. The landfill, which rises above the surrounding landscape like a small mountain, has been in operation since 1994 and has taken in about 15 million cubic yards of waste. It has about 95 million cubic yards of space left, or about enough for another 40 years.

The trash, buried beneath a layer of soil, rots and produces methane gas. Placed at strategic points around the landfill are 132 "straws," or collection wells that draw out the methane gas, which is piped to a compression and filtering unit beside the landfill. A team of technicians makes sure that the gas is being filtered properly and piped to the Honeywell plant.

The entire landfill is carefully managed to prevent odors and leakage of waste material, and managing the methane emissions is part of that.

"The days of just digging a hole and burying trash in it are done," said Michael P. Kearns, district manager for Atlantic Waste Disposal. Methane "is a byproduct of the decomposition process, and it is being used beneficially," by Honeywell, he said. If the gas were not being piped to Honeywell, it would be discharged into the atmosphere.

DTE Energy, a Detroit-based diversified energy company, operates the gas collection system and pipeline. Rick DiGia, vice president of operations for the company's biomass unit, said the Honeywell project is among a few that have broken boundaries for the distance that landfill gas is transported.

"The paradigm has been you can't go more than 5 miles away," DiGia said. However, with prices rising for standard fossil fuels such as natural gas, landfill methane-gas pipelines are becoming more attractive from a cost perspective.

"There certainly is a lot more interest within the last 18 to 24 months given where energy prices are at," DiGia said.

While Honeywell is using gas for industrial applications, landfill gas is typically used for electrical generation, DiGia said.

DTE also operates a landfill gas pipeline near Lynchburg, he said. "We do help displace oil and natural gas," DiGia said. "We are using a resource that would otherwise be wasted, and we think we fit in nicely with the mix of alternative fuels."

Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency recognized Honeywell as the nation's most outstanding landfill-gas project. The EPA is pushing the use of landfill gas as a way to reduce methane emissions and dependence on fossil fuels and coal.

Of the 2,300 operating or recently closed municipal solid-waste landfills in the United States, about 380 have landfill-gas utilization projects, the EPA said. The agency estimates that about 600 more landfills could turn their gas into energy.

Officials with Honeywell, Atlantic Waste Disposal and DTE Energy tout the environmental benefits of the project, which helps reduce methane emissions into the atmosphere and cuts back on fossil-fuel use.

The pipeline project has resulted in a reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions equivalent to planting more than 5,200 trees. 

"It is the kind of project that doesn't come along very often," Higbie said. "It was a win for business, a win for the community, and a win for the environment."

-- November 16, 2006

This article was originally published in the April 24, 2006 edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. It is republished here with permission.