An agreement signed January 18 by companies, the Rio City Hall and the government of the state provides for 200,000 cubic meters of methane gas per day to be used a source of energy at the Duque de Caxias Refinery (Reduc), owned by Petrobras
The Gás Verde company is going to process the gas that will be extracted from the mountain of garbage, and separate the carbon dioxide from methane. A 6 kilometer long pipeline will take the fuel to the Reduc refinery. Production is expected to start before the end of the year. According to Gás Verde, the landfill’s gas reserves should last at least 15 years.
The use of the gas, which would otherwise end up in the atmosphere, will also result in international carbon credits. According to the Brazilian minister of Environment, Carlos Minc, some of the money obtained from gas sales will be returned to the city halls of Duque de Caxias and Rio de Janeiro (which operates the landfill), and passed on to environmental projects and to a fund for garbage collectors at the landfill.
“Jardim Gramacho is among the largest landfills in Latin America. Over 30 years, more than 9 million people have disposed of garbage there. It is one of the sources of greenhouse gas emission in the Metropolitan Region. By capturing that and turning it into natural gas, we will refrain from emitting hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2,” said Minc.
According to the minister, this is the first large action for fighting global warming in Brazil since the signing of the Climate Act, by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in December 2009.
According to Comlurb, Rio’s urban cleaning company, which is in charge of the landfill, Jardim Gramacho should be closed within two years, but gas production should go on afterwards, due to the accumulation of garbage over the years.