Assessment of the in situ energy recovery potential from medium-sized landfills in Canada

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This project will involve comprehensive fundamental and applied research to assess the potential for landfill energy recovery methods for medium-size landfills in Canada. The focus will be on two potential sources of energy including landfill gas (LFG) generation and low-grade geothermal heat. The proposed research study is intended to reduce the data gaps and uncertainty that have represented obstacles to the implementation of these sort of in situ energy recovery approaches. The increasing popularity of municipal solid waste (MSW) anaerobic digestion (AD) and other techniques might indicate that, in the longer term in larger cities, much of the organic-rich waste will be diverted, leaving only a relatively inert residual material to be landfilled. There will remain, however, many hundreds of millions of tonnes of conventional MSW slowly degrading in situ in landfills across Canada. While organics utilisation (by AD or otherwise) will undoubtedly grow in popularity and decrease in cost, smaller landfills in rural communities or small cities are unlikely to economically and technically adopt such solutions in the short term.Landfills generate substantial amounts of heat that could be recoverable using techniques similar to those used in shallow geothermal projects. The heat generation mechanisms are reasonably well understood but characterisation of thermal and hydraulic properties of waste presents a challenge to this type of development.