Grantee Research Project Results

2024 Progress Report: Integrating Measurements Across Platforms to Feasibly Assess Emissions and Mitigation of Methane and VOCs from Landfills

EPA Grant Number: R840626
Title: Integrating Measurements Across Platforms to Feasibly Assess Emissions and Mitigation of Methane and VOCs from Landfills
Investigators: Hannigan, Michael P. , Henze, Daven K , Rieker, Greg , de Gouw, Joost , Casey, Joanna
Institution: University of Colorado Boulder , Fort Lewis College
EPA Project Officer: Davey, Elisa
Project Period: September 1, 2023 through August 31, 2026
Project Period Covered by this Report: September 1, 2023 through August 31,2024
Project Amount: $1,000,000
RFA: Understanding and Control of Municipal Solid Waste Landfill Air Emissions Request for Applications (RFA) (2023) RFA Text |  Recipients Lists
Research Category: Air , Air Quality and Air Toxics , Air Toxics , Endocrine Disruptors , Environmental Engineering , Land and Waste Management , Landfill Emissions , Waste Reduction and Pollution Prevention , Watersheds

Objective:

Sanitary municipal solid waste landfills are a key piece of how humans are attempting to live with nature in harmony; the definition of sustainability. To reduce the impacts of climate change and improve sustainability, we need to reduce GHG emissions. Entities that own and operate these landfills are required to limit emissions of methane and hazardous air pollutants. This project’s main goal is to develop sets of cost-effective tools and approaches that industry can use to improve its sustainability. This goal will be accomplished by meeting the following objectives.

1. Assess the uncertainty in landfill methane emissions at a representative set of three landfills using a combination of ground-based, aircraft, and satellite tools.
2. Develop methane emissions data for three different landfills with temporal resolution from interannual down to an hourly and use it to improve methane emissions models.
3. Develop a landfill volatile organic compounds (VOC) emissions data set that can be used to estimate speciated emissions based on waste and environmental parameters.
4. Assess inexpensive ground-based systems to routinely monitor VOCs.
5. Assess the ability of various measurement systems to observe the performance of real-world emissions mitigations.

Progress Summary:

In cooperation with WM, our team has completed site access agreements to deploy research tools at the Simi Valley landfill in Southern California. This is one of the landfills that WM has already extended its methane data collection, including soofie sensors deployed around the boundary of the landfill, added Carbon Mapper flyovers, and added drone surveys. We have prepared for that deployment by (1) acquiring an open path dual comb spectrometer (DSC), (2) refining our stationary sensor packages (now dubbed L-Pod) to increase robustness, reduce energy consumption, and allow for remote data collection), and (3) continued to develop two new measurement tools: a low cost dynamic flux chamber that measures capable of a wide range of methane flux measurements & an autonomous rover that can reproduce the existing regulatory surface emissions monitoring.  Additionally, we have undertaken some pilot data collection for VOCs using a mobile platform at local landfills in Colorado. 

On the data side, we have used previously collected point-based sensor measurements from a network deployed on a different WM landfill to explore methods for differentiating the methane from the local landfill from the methane from other sources including the background. We are also working on this challenge using satellite (TROPOMI) data. In addition, we are surveying methods for performing emissions inversions with TROPOMI and Carbon Mapper data.
 

Future Activities:

In Year 2, we plan to fully deploy the DSC and ground-based sensor network at Simi Valley landfill. We anticipate collecting 9 months of data from those two platforms during Year 2. We will also pilot the methane flux chambers, the methane sensing autonomous rover, and the VOC collection and speciation, likely for 1-2 months in the summer. We plan to select our two secondary landfills during Year 2, with the goal of deploying 10 ground-based sensors to each during the summer.

In terms of data, during year 2, we plan to integrate our methane data (once quality checked) into the BlueSky Resources Air Logic platform. We will begin exploring approaches to data integration for all of our data as well as that collected by WM contractors.

Future work for inversion will focus on evaluating the utility of Level 2 and oversampled TROPOMI XCH4 data products for trending and background correction for on-site ground measurements. We will continue to test the week-long IMI inversion for applicability for constraining emissions locally and regionally. Clustering for optimal state vector selection, point source constraints, and lower latency methods will be explored within the IMI tool. Other inversion methods and results from literature will also be used to inform the investigation.
 

Supplemental Keywords:

data inversion, methane flux