welcome to recycled Idaho for to recycling industry veterans bread Eckart nick snyder explore idaho businesses and organizations that are putting in the work to keep idaho environmentally and economically viable at the same time take a listen to how these entrepreneurs business owners and operators from making things happen in the great state of Idaho in this podcast Nick and I made our way over to Burley Idaho sit down with Josh barley may and Nate Francisco southern Idaho solid waste these two guys are making waves in the sawed waste industry and they’re doing it right here in Idaho take a listen and go check out the youtube version of this podcast is there are some great videos shot of the landfill’s daily operations right now we’re speaking with Nate Francisco and he really specializes in the landfill gas and bio mental side too I believe and can you tell us a little bit about the landfill gas and how that works yeah sure so I’m an environmental manager here part of that well what I do here is I make sure that we’re compliant with all of the regulations environmental regulations part of that landfill is

when you place garbage in Atlanta it starts to break down immediately it starts to decompose just like imported compost or something else like that so over a period of one to two years that break down that decomposition uses up all oxygen when that happens a new type of organism comes in that creates methane so anaerobic bacteria those are the ones that create methane which is similar to natural gas it’s pulled out of the ground natural gas has about 99 percent methane our gas has about 50 years in that date so we’ve got about half of the energy value of natural gas and it’s just coming out of you know garbage it were very you doing anything special other than put in network of piping that can extract that gas out so it’s a resource that we’re creating or are we put in the more gas we create does the fat go over the top of the trash of the solid waste does that sit on top is it sit below like with the liner is or is in the middle how does that framework of piping work to pipe the gas to where it

needs to go sure all the books so we place the pipe as we build the landfill so when we first put in the liner on the bottom we’ll put in a series of pipes that are meant to collect the moisture has percolates down from the landfill and so we can evaporate that moisture we also can extract gas through those pipes and then as we build the landfill up we put in a network of pipes that we can hook on later date to extract the gas out of its six inch perforated pipe on HTTP so then what we do is we look it up headers that go around the perimeter of the landfill and those headers blowers attached to them skip two big motors and blowers that create a vacuum so we’re actually hooking up to each end of those pipelines and putting the constant back to was about thirty inches water column on the landfill so as you build off the landfill you add another blower another section to it and then pull it to the bottom like the main track of air that pushes it in all right sure so I mean the

blowers can also non-skid at the end of where all the headers come together and we oversize those so that as we expand they have enough capacity just wrap them up and create that constant vacuum on landfill so once we so now with our system with the gas the energy we’ve got those blowers they used to go to a flare or over just burn the gas and destroy all the harmful you know contaminants pollutants instead of doing that we’re sending it to a conditioning skid or a compression skid and what this does is we actually have another set of blowers that pressurizes the gas when we pressurize the gas it sits up and it actually all the moisture and the gas will vaporize when we heat it up and we’ll run it through an after cooler and a pillar that brings that temperature down to the dew point and when that happens it forms water droplets within the gas that we can remove – coalescing filter drops out all the water and when that water drops out when those water droplets formed it actually binds up some of the contaminants and the gaps there are

our engines as well silicon and hydrogen sulfide other types of sulfur things like that actually drop out at that point as well and then after you do that we warm the gas back up with the hot gas that’s coming in we have a heat exchanger and we send it back over to the engines so we sent it to our energy plant so as the engines run then I assume that’s what then generates the electricity sure yeah so that cleaned up gas goes over we’ve got right now we’ve got two Siemens HGN 560 engines each one produces about 1.3 kilowatts their kilowatt hours of energy that gas comes in is distributed evenly into the two engines and then a fuel regulator speeds up and slows down the gas based on whatever power output we ask it to produce so we’re asking to produce 1.1 it’ll back off how much gas is going to the engines the reciprocating engine they’re basically a large train engine locomotive engine or a tugboat engine that’s converted from diesel or landfill gas so it’s kind of its kind of converted it’s got it it’s like a diesel engine

with liners but it’s got spark plug in the top so it’s kind of a mix of the two it runs that engine which runs the crankshaft which then turns a generator or alternator on the does that run 24 hours or disdain Europe when you guys are here yeah so it’s based off we run 24 hours unless we have scheduled maintenance Azure power outages things like that because I know power determine how hard you run it or how many kilowatt so do you guys is that all I’ve done internally do they tell you hey we can use as much as you can send us or is it I mean how who determines the pool so we determine it the only thing that willpower holds us to is what we tell them we will do so we can set our power production where we want it to be but if we tell them that we’re gonna have a certain amount of power we need to produce that certain amount of power or there could be penalties involved so when we get our power purchase agreement threat of power to we tell them how much we’re going

to produce and like right now our project is 5 megawatts right now we’re like two point six megawatts so we can we can do anything within the first 5 meters up to 5 megawatts so we’ve sized our facility to be able to put another generator in because we know that we can go up to that nameplate capacity of the five megawatt so we saw a lot of future Rev a first future installation is that because of cause of your time are there is it because you want to make sure that you know you could you know basically piece it a piece and part it together versus going all the way to trying to produce find out the gate to start and kind of getting everything rolling and it being able to add on well this or what after now when I talked about the more garbage put in the more gas so I just didn’t have we didn’t have enough gas to run tangents so it wasn’t efficient to have three engines running it 60% when we started because the maintenance cost is the same even if you’re running at 60% around hundred percent

so maintenance cost goes up but your production stays low so you know we needed to get to a point where we’re running the two we have 8090 percent capacity before it makes sense to get that third engine and so it’s just the amount of gas that we have so for years it took you to get it done and now four years later would you change anything that you did with it but you do it different are you happy with it I’m happy with it I think a project of this size you rarely go without hiccups involved so when you look back at all the hiccups I think the success could be based on how you reacted to those hiccups and how to move forward and how you made it a successful project and so if that’s the way you look at it then yes it’s been a successful project and I wouldn’t change what we have up here I would’ve done it sooner this is a the one thing that I would have changed I would have tried to push this so we could get it in sooner start using the resource we got

out there instead of burnin enough for ya I think that’s what people can take away from it like that I hope whether it’s a landfill in Illinois Ohio New York but to hear you say it say the only thing we would have changed was we should have did it earlier maybe that’s all they need to kind of push it’s a pretty common place for landfills to do it or is there a lot that couldn’t be done and they just haven’t taken that leap so are you required to control the gas some people would rather control the gas then install cattle in the structure that’s makes money it is cheaper to control the gas versus make electricity we chose to make electricity out of this so you can still control it by flaring the gas off but because there’s a lot of opportunity at landfill gas the energy is pretty common around landfills there’s a lot of other technology out there though we spent four years seeing what type of project we wanted to install because there were at the time we were looking for different technologies now there’s probably 40 different technologies to take

advantage of this so this what we’ve done is pretty commonplace but who knows what the future you know there might be some technology around the corner that just flips all this around and we’re doing something else with it you know that’s the one thing that people always ask us is well what are you gonna be doing with trash in 20 30 40 50 years you know the answer is we don’t know you know yeah it’s all about community and everybody are you gonna be sustainable or even a recycle or what are you gonna do and I think the longer we go as society we’re gonna start to figure out what we’re going to do right but I don’t think it’s gonna be unheard of you might see 50 years down the river or remaining landfills you know think of all those resources that are on the way and what it’s creating resources to so we’re creating gas and now we’re creating energy but it is a commodity in the landfill and I think that’s something that people haven’t really scratched around right now it’s looking at a landfill as a commodity and it could

be a commodity for a couple different things right producing gas for the commodities that are actually in the landfill so who knows what this industry is gonna bring but for right now the landfill gas the Energy’s pretty common for landfills and doing something with the landfill gas I know this just from the scrap metal recycling and is you know when they started coming up with the technology to sort the fines and the stainless steel and copper insulated copper wires and all that the sorbets coming off the shredders you started seeing these companies going in mind landfills in these big cities that had big landfills where they’re taking all the shredder fluff so for last I don’t know I’d say 10 to 12 this years they’re going back in the bonus Mobile sort equipment and they’re mining all that shredder fluff back out of the landfill that’s been buried for years and just to pick out the stainless the alumina all the stuff that got missed because they didn’t have the technology to get down to the fines or the ability to pull off the zorb it was stainless the copper wire at the time

you know that any career there any kind of adversity to flip the aluminum stay around for a while but it was never able to get the little pieces you know such a simple simple technology that changed the industry any current you know and who knows what the next thing is gonna be you know that just hasn’t been discovered yet and it might be the simple flip of electrode you know that just like any current that it might switch everything for us it’s grass we’re talking with just cool about the landfill and recycling the waste industry is that’s what you’re saying gets it gets us up every day is it you never know what’s coming think as long as you’re willing to be willing to change you’re not you don’t get to pigeonhole and the way you can do what you can’t do or you’re willing to kind another said eyes get smart people like Nate in here that understand what you just said which is probably over my head but to be able to get that I mean that’s what’s cool about industry so thank you name yeah thanks with it and we’re looking

forward to showing everybody how that works let’s pop the landfill first though it’s all kinda in order of everything that goes out here and that’s a gas is the end of the process so that’s what rapport is the doer these are all the trailers that sit at our transfer stations and we push over the top and fill these up with garbage and then haul them out here from each site and those are not walking fours use your bellies because you guys don’t have a tipper yep we used to have walking bed floors so we still have some 45 footers that are walking bed floors but we use them at our smaller sites we try to get all of our sites using 53 footers if we can just for efficiency there’s our wood grinder right there that horizontal the bellies are cheap virtually on maintenance and we have info is where is there say in Bhopal so it’s it’s only 20 miles away from here too so he does a good job so you can see up here on this part of the landfill – it’s covered in snow now but this is all final closure

on landfill so this is what it will look like for years to come we put the compacted soil layer and then a layer of topsoil on top of that and then revegetate it so that keeps any moisture from entering the garbage it also helps hold the gas in in the landfill so we can extract it so the top soil is what keeps it entering no the compactor does but we put topsoil on so we can get vegetation to grow and it doesn’t erode so it doesn’t erode over time when we dig cells the first thing we do is we go strip the topsoil and then we stockpile that for when we do final closers in the future so it all kinda comes back around the vegetation does have to lock everything into place though so the more vegetation you have that does yeah it does keep the air out once the vegetation what is the sand use so what we can use the sand for typically we use more gravel but we can’t can use this end for putting on the liner so when we put down the liner system we put a protective

layer on top of that which helps yeah so it’s sand and gravel it allows the moisture to percolate through once it leaves the garbage and then run down the liner downhill it also protects you from getting punctures in the liner so if when you tip garbage onto it something sharp doesn’t go down through the gravel or how thick of a sand he’s so 18 inches you know that that picture that’s down in the deal that Nate took with his iPhone so that’s the spot so once we’re done with felt then we come back over the top of that and that’ll be two to three foot of gravel so that’s the spot where we put it in and right here if you look at this line if that’s the end of where we did the final closure so you can see how thick of a compacted layer that is so when we come back eventually you’ll just start right there and start closing a new section regulation the height wise I mean is there a reason why you go to that height right there or just fill it up higher our initial design was done

it was done artfully first EDX and partially just from the footprint that we have so that we don’t have too steep of slopes so at some point you top out without having steeper slopes we’re actually doing a study right now we purchased additional property that we’re gonna expand our design plan and with that we think we’re gonna have the ability to go up another 80 100 feet higher as well and gain space on top of cells that we’ve already built in the expenses we’ve already talked about airspace that’s the name of our game is how much garbage can you fit into one cubic yard of airspace so the more compact you can get that in the more weight in one cubic yard of airspace the better off you are and the more efficient you are so you know when you’re designing something you don’t want pyramids all over the place right or you don’t want something that looks like it doesn’t belong so we’re built right into this beaut right over here and eventually when we build everything out it’ll look like it’ll essentially look like one big BA so like all this wood

chip right here is the purpose of that just for roadway right now or is it just that’s just some there’s that that’s unit me yeah so we use this for that time because the wood absorbs the water we’ve got a real weird soil matrix out here and when are when we get muddy or our soil just expands and it gets my it’s just real it’s a pain in the butt to get into so our guys like to put the wood chips on there and then it absorbs the water and then you don’t deal with the mud as much as you would otherwise we do but everything that we grind here at the landfill we keep on site for operations and all of our other sites we do sell them and we sell out all the time but here we use them on-site for operations yeah they use them for bet a lot of them like from the stuff that we buy we only do one grind so if you look at it it’s not great if we reground our stuff they could use it for bedding and other stuff but the stuff that

we do you can see some of it right there it’s not super uniform they use it for pivots or their pivot tracks are because they get big ruts in their fields so they just so I’m sure is a dumb question but we came out here last time there was a crapload of seagulls right and I assume that the winner kills the drill on the seagulls or I mean you’re still getting some saw that hot guy at that that BSU thing yeah we don’t get there’s not many santim come out that stick around in the winter here they migrate south but they’ll usually come back in the spring time and then start coming looking for the food source that they remember yes we bought that Falconer out here though and as soon as they unleash the Falcon these birds just went crazy yeah they were just like what is this Falcon doing here basic I got a chance to talk to him for a while but he basically said that if he brings it assistant president I don’t you know do you guys want to take some video of this dump and let’s get up

there by the truck and let him get out we’ll tell him not to dump until you’re ready if we could get like out by that blue over by the other tippers yeah yeah yeah that’s a great idea what makes you go digging cat she’s like one of those al John for the cut so we used to be with Al John for a long time they’re a little bit smaller than this they didn’t the size up that they had they put in a different transmission and a different inch so it was really powerful but it was really slow and we just couldn’t deal with that plus al John was bought out al John went through some weird yeah you know I know I would that’s why we miss Sierra yeah Baylor’s that’s the big reason why we went to caterpillar because we had spots where we couldn’t get parts for like six months and it was like rinky-dink part relays and stuff yeah so you typically see it depends I mean we’re probably doing 30 to 60 unlike a super busy day we you know five six years ago we had days where we

wouldn’t even do 20 in a day like 17 was a pretty like normal day we had a day a couple weeks ago where we did like 22 and one day from Twin Falls transfer station just a couple weeks ago I did like busier in the spring time yeah as soon as it is strictly population driven as a project driven like with so it’s driven the increase is it like industry driven the good drives that would rise higher for people houses or industry altogether yeah an industry that comes in and you’ve got the house that makes sense yeah but in that we can tell from the industrial side because that’s an actual roll-off comin out right we can in its a lot more volume coming out we also can tell from the increase in just solid waste at the transfer station but direct call the industry waste I mean it’s it’s a lot and I have to commend the economic development in you know not industry but entities in our seven counties they’ve really done a good job on recruiting good companies in and working with us and it’s it’s been really good I

mean because you hear about it you know the average person creates X amount of trash per month you know week here whatever that is I’m super curious is that number of getting bigger on a per person basis is it going it means with all the recycling that’s going on is it is it coming down or is it you know as has anybody ever ran that calculation for feel puffy period as EPA the last time they ran that figure was years and years ago I just was reading an article and I think it was like 4.5 pounds of trash a week do you remember whatever it is whatever that whatever that EPA default was this study was finding out that it was almost double what EPA said on what the normal person was disposing of I don’t know how much you know information or data or if it was a report that would stand up to anything but I’d say you’re probably bet little these things you know people are wearing you know the fashion it’s throwaway fashion right they wear a t-shirt they travel somewhere they buy it they wear it a

couple times and then it’s gone it goes somewhere you know that’s going to be the next thing that you hear about is what do they call it textiles textile recycling is going to be the next thing that you hear about like why why do we have so much textile way see like your right yeah you see that I mean think about all the single-use plastic stuff coffee cups or the Kerry camp you know there’s just been so much in so many inventions that innovate but they might have a little bit more waste with it too so I see we talk about their debut is it’s time everybody’s trying to figure out to save time and when you save time generally are going to create waste somewhere along the line somewhere along there’s ways this get generated and in all in an effort to save time writes a coffee you never used to have to take up all that what’s a go I think you’re doing good if we’re not if you’re super focused on highly read society write everything that we deal with as pushed by society right we didn’t do that we’re

just dealing with it yeah already talked about it when times are good people are using more single new stuff more stuff so they’re there how much they’re getting right up for a day goes up comment thanks befall Donna stop they’re getting stuff in bulk we’re getting things that aren’t in little single-use packet oh I never thought about it that way yeah totally makes sense so we see those shifts here you know tonnage wise you say that it’s low with the price of scrap oh yeah right everything last batteries it’s everything yeah so my predecessor Terry he did a little study with the ADA County deputy director probably 10 11 years ago and it was solid waste volumes following the Dow Jones and the solid waste volumes were good 9 to 12 months ahead of what was happening in the Dow because it took you know a year for that to catch up with the economy and it really is true you think about it and we bit we and we still see high volumes coming out you know that’s why everybody right now is talking about wins the recession going to hit well

it all depends on where you live right but right now with our economy I see us still having our solid waste volumes and still strong so I feel like it’s still at least 9 to 12 months she’s there I think it’s going to increase twenty-five percent in two years we plan we’re doing a 20-year plan right now but we plan every year we look at it we look at the budget time and we’ll make sure sorry so that’s probably 20 tons at 20 25 tons were about a thousand ton per day landfill 9 about a 900 actually we were 900 last month in December and that’s generally a pretty low month so when it when you’re talking about landfills anything under about 500 is a fairly small landfill anything from 800 to 1200 is a medium sized landfill and then anything over 1200 is a fairly good-sized landfill by gaeta County they do about 1,500 tons a day so what about here what did your say you’re big you know an East Coast landfills there’s it what are your big landfills doing a day your what is the Las Vegas

landfill um I guess so they got like they have nine tippers they’re runnin like ten compactors and it’s 24/7 they got lights on at night what’s your hours here we do ten hour days six days a week okay when I thought all dipping at the end of the day Oh we have to cut off our hour and a half before controller we got it we talked about zero in ten or so we don’t attract or begin like that by the regulation standpoint is Idaho they make it easier or tougher to operate in and some of the other states I mean Idaho milan’s feel standpoint I think that they make it easier than a lot of states mostly because you know in Idaho’s legislature says that we will not be more strict or less strict than the federal rules so whenever we have solid waste rules coming out on a federal level the state adopts them and it forces them okay but they don’t go up it won’t be moisture in them yeah they can’t go above and right now with the governor going through with his red ribbon initiative I mean he’s just

striking laws out left and right so they went through it Nate and I went through our regulations and we went through what we were doing something else too at the same time we’re also on the air side of things we deal with a lot of air well so we’ve got a solid waste side we’ve got an air side and but they stripped a lot of the regulation out I mean it was like a third of the overall laws that were on the books last year they got taken out they said if there’s duplicate of measures or if they don’t need to be on there take them out so I know is the most business-friendly state to do business in right now but now’s ours or duplicate it you know we like we like the way it is with I know that’s a possibility you can adhere the minimum regulations but then because we’re efficient we have the ability to go above yeah on things that we and I think that’s what gives us in a lot of business a lot of industry is if you put so much regulation on what this this

lawmaker feels important or this lawmaker feels important and they direct all their energy towards these few things that makes you inefficient on the whole grander scheme of things it makes you inefficient on what you could be doing over and above to really take care of your industry because you’re just trying to put all your efforts to taken care of what some guy was really important to end versus what’s important to the industry as a whole right and most people want to do the right thing I mean I understand really wants to do the right thing and do what they can afford to do to help out but sometimes you get but you still have to keep the lights on we’ve got stuff seventy-five people that require a paycheck we still have there’s so many pieces of part of that puzzle that you forgot the one thing that I do have to say though is even with the regulatory framework the way it is right now if there’s any changes to the industry they know that DEQ knows that we’re organized and we’re going to come to the table and we’re going to be

a part of that wheel making process so instead of try to step back and be like oh why I don’t want to work with those guys you know they’ve been really good to say come to the table you want to hear what you’re saying and we want to work with you so I’ve really appreciated that from our standpoint – can they get it – they don’t want to impose laws that people aren’t going to adhere to because understand so if you come up with something that works for everybody ringback down to the landfill glass to energy where are we headed now now I’m just gonna run over by some of our conversion programs we call diversion but essentially it’s recycling it’s all stuff that were cover ting out of the landfill and reusing or sending off for recycling I think a lot of the public don’t realize right there goes backdoor gets buried and this is lots of tonnage you know this is a lot of volume that were saving not only saving in landfill but that we’re moving somewhere else – Roble stuff like you’re selling it too far for this year I mean you know

it sucks being read but here’s the thing – but I think I think this is why that’s such a like aha moment is we did 250,000 tons of solid waste last year but we recycled and diverted over 40,000 tons when you look at that you know and then you hear like a city and their recycling program say well we recycled 2000 tons last year so that’s good but we recycled 40 cents so my point is people don’t think of recyclers or people that do landfilling as recycling right but we’re probably one of the biggest recyclers in the seven counties because we’re doing more volume than anybody else in recycling you know yeah and that’s an aspect of our job that nobody even looks at this isn’t just solid way this isnt the sexy recycling you know it’s not the plastic in the paper but this stuff is a lot of volume that’s the government side of it is you know they’ve teamed up with the Republic’s and the big the big corporations of the world and they decide to push that form of recycling because it’s like you said it’s sexier and it’s

pretty years it’s easier to discuss but you you get down to the nuts and bolts of it you know you guys are talking about if you guys do forty thousand ton a year in recycling and us combined art facilities we do probably 60 to 70 thousand you know done I mean where is that 60 to 70 thousand ton and here forty thousand time and we’re just two players in a big industry if you want talk about recycler you know I don’t know not not an exporting wait you’re saying that agree how ten percent and think about this to think about your you know let’s just say combined we had a hundred thousand more tons a year if that was being disposed of think of how much more landfill space that would take you know over the term of history like let’s go over the landfill gas to energy this is something to a small bed you know we know that we’re paying to get rid of our tires and we know that anywhere from fifteen to twenty percent of the overall tonnage is gonna come from the metal and the tyres so we were

looking at D Rimmer’s you know and for a good one they’re like 40 grand for everything that you would need yeah so I just had my shop mechanic I said look this is what I want what can you do he built one that was three times the size and beefed up better for two thousand dollars versus forty grand you know those men are waiting old equipment equipment yeah so Lorien recycle all the metal now right yeah it’s a V and then you push it with a double it’s just a wood cutter exactly yeah we live together you know there’s a lot of different designs for doing it but for us with what we had that was the easy put away and ours is double ram2 so we took Rams off of an old al John compactor the Rams were just to prop the compactor up to change the wheels we used him like twice ever you know it was a waste of money for the machine but we just took them and pop them on that and said oh we’ll use that he was one of these old I beans as the flame so

if you look up here the the pipes sticking out of the ground with the yellow hose those are all landfill gas wellheads okay at the end of every pipe that we’re extracting gas we can actually balance each pipe lines so different areas land fill up different ages of garbage and different types of garbage even some of them so we’re able to go a couple times a month and turn those up turn them down in order to get a consistent gas coming out of them how often do you have to adjust those we’re required to monthly but we’d usually do it two to three times a month is how often we try to get out there does that change or create the efficiency for the gas coming in to where we’re going right now yeah so the consistency and also the amount of the consistency and quality so 50% methane or higher and then also the amount because it’ll change with the seasons when things warm up we’ll start getting more flow which means we’re starting gotta start popping those back open a little bit slowly so the barometric pressure has something to do with

with the flow is coming through I mean you name it it’s so after its collected there it gets popped into a header system header pipes that bring it over to this first skid this is where that black pipe coming out of the ground is where all the gas from the entire landfill comes in that 12 inch pipe comes out we knock out some initial moisture and a knock out pop and then those are the blowers with those motors on them that’s where it gets transferred from vacuum to pressure also goes in one side out the other side is pressure the old floor where we used to burn the gas at about 1,400 degrees to destroy it before it gets to that point now it goes up that stainless pipe and over to our gas conditioning I met my wife because of this project so I left this project in 2009 now and we installed this my wife was a reporter so she wanted to do a news story on this that’s where I met her so everything comes on this overhead line two more blowers here that kind of step up that pressure

and then it runs through that aftercooler fan and at the chiller system it knocks all the moisture out and then swings back around heats it back up and comes out this smaller line and then we put it back into a twelve inch to head over to the new facility and with this project too and we trying to do as much as we can so all of the pipe installs we did all of the HDPE staff with it all of the earth work over the facility government in company but you’re also your home business that you get it kind of run it just like I would run our business or whatever it’s it you kind of get definitely create some more Myrtle’s but also I think it creates more opportunity if it’s done right if you if you fight the tape and push back and you know you don’t you’re not cooperative I can see how that can create a bunch of issues but if you can figure out a way to get everybody talking the same language then you’re really good like it’s yeah we will do and you know we’ve had people come

out here and we’ve had a private landfill from Salt Lake area come up here one time and they were a private entity and they came up and kind of doing the same thing we’re doing today and the guy said you know this is the most privately ran public agency I’ve ever seen and we take pride in that you know that’s what we do is we want to do it we want to do it right we want to do it quick and we want to do it fast and efficient and so that’s that was a huge compliment for us running monitoring their butt all day or can you just kind of check on it and check so everything’s set up to be repelled so anything you’ve seen here we can access and we can control my phone or laptop at home or from work we are so I’m going to do you have an on-call schedule so that if it’s something you have to be on-site for there’s shutdown that someone’s always optimistic skin it’s explained us how what once you got on and yeah so this so this is one an engine

this is another one that uses engine Diagnostics so it’s got every sensor and there are a lot of sensors on every sensor has an output on here or little to track them or graph any of them to see if there’s new changes set alerts if things go outside certainly and a power saving on the Senate and House that thousand kilowatts work which is about 1,000 homes so with the two the toil of other travels open each individual cylinder and the engine monitor the temperature in moderate knocking the kilovolts going through the spark plugs the spark plug wire now we measure so much that we know what temperature each spark plug is running at at all times I mean you name something that you want to stat on and we’ve got it probably documented and downloaded one thing for instance a lot of good way to devour alcohol temperature at our turbo down if you run it harder you’re gonna pull more air through the engine and actually cooler than the lower setting so what it seems like would be the opposite actually makes for more so when you guys were we can install

this system when you guys have soon went to other landfills and like to see what they’re around how they were doing it was I mean was there one or two of them that stuck out there like yeah that’s the system didn’t want it how did you guys how are you used with determine going this round well yeah if I answer that clicker I say Bennett County did one that was almost identical to this the big thing is when you do a landfill gas to energy facility typically with an entity like us you team up with somebody right they come in and they say hey we’ll build this plant will do it will maintain it but we want to give you a kickback right ten percent of the revenue or something like that that’s not a lot of money for us and Bennett County said we’re going to do it all and we’re going to take advantage of everything so that was really enticing to us and that’s why we kind of followed that model the project and the the type of material that we use the engines are different but it’s kind of the

same idea is we’re doing everything we’re operating everything we’re typically you would team up with somebody and have them operate it we got sharp people here we got people that can do it so we took advantage of it so that’s an affiliate link that said it we’re public so we have to go out on the public bid yeah we set this up not only base we didn’t want to base it on price and and output we wanted it to be what is gonna have the best return for the district over the term of our contractor that own power so we set it up that took all of the maintenance and into fact because you could say well our engine Kostis when we put out this much but it’s twice as much of maintenance if you leave that part out you could you know not how it was going to return so we set it up so that they have to put in all those numbers and show us at the end how much money do we end up with after 20 years that ever gets the most net that wins the bid that’s always

said this is just kind of beneficial in some capacity that you they provide you a lot of that financial data and what they’re willing to do so you kind of get the we were trying to save on the equipment right okay tell me how does this thing really perform and then stick by it yeah right and then we also you know we put classes we did held them to those bids yes we said if it does not perform if you don’t get these heat values out of this engine I think at the Alpen said you were there so it’s just ads it based on return on investment so and we’re spending public money we want the best return on our investment so the best way to get that is set the bit up to make them be as efficient as possible and then they’re competing to be most efficient to get more revenue at the end so it was a win-win for the whole it was it was a lot of work but it was a win-win at the end there some times that I didn’t realize when we were doing this

those swamp coolers that I you kind of feel cold there they’re kicking out 20,000 cubic feet per minute on that you can’t really feel it but the big intakes over the top that’s the air exchanger I mean that’s how much air is moving through there you don’t realize that you know when we had the engines come out here and do some training for all of our guys and when they came and lifted our set up they were like oh god this is great we’ve never seen an install like this putting the swamp coolers in and having the cooler on the intake it makes them run more efficient nobody else that they’ve never seen that before so that so that’s the kind of stuff that we try to do it as efficient from the beginning but then we try to get our engineers together and say okay now how can we make it more efficient you know so that’s the kind of that’s why we like this project so much it’s not just a normal or like a one-of-a-kind for you’ll never see another project like this out there other people

are doing this but not the same way that we are – will that aside pull an air from inside of the building and then Center an outside with an exhaustive creative vacuum inside of the building if you didn’t have those we would create a vacuum and just some dust into the building from outside so by having those push more air you know what’s going out maybe they actually came we’re going to keep a positive around the building a machinist so super close days clean life cells in there so some medical staff there isn’t landfill gas to energy that see these things right here so these are microbes that were teaming up with another company in the area and they have incubated I guess is what you would say methanogens bacteria these crates in these crates yes so these meth antigen microbes that they’ve produced were then taking it out onto our working face and we’re putting that on our working face to try to create more methane nobody else is doing that right now I’ve never I have not I don’t know of anybody that’s doing that do you there I think there’s been some

studies done will you guys do it case study on that yeah we’re seeing right now we’ve got some old areas of the landfill that aren’t great producers so our hope is that hey maybe if we put these methanogens microbes down it might start to produce that methane in his face – usually it’s a breakdown faster they’ll break down at all if it hasn’t breakin that broken down because you know maybe right something could happen they could have some waste but mixed it that mixed in that isn’t allowing it that could have an air pocket that’s completely shut up I mean there’s a lot of things so that’s why we’re hoping we’re trying to get a research permit through the stage to do liquids addition in the landfill to help bring our gas to about them produce gas so we try to Mary is in the landfill that are just dried out city can’t sustain microbes we can actually introduce moisture into that and then with the bounces back up it should be just registers well I could be and just it could be leachate that’s already coming out the bottom we can just recirculated back

through into areas that need it can also be separated of fuel yesterday always water or subject subject ease a lot of free liquids in a landfall so if you bring something in that is a liquid we can’t take it we can only take solid waste so these two you gave power of two thousand points what’s the max and where could they get like 2525 lines again every city when I gave me any per sentence you said that’s what you have for another so right now we’re thinking about it we have to install the third engine within five years so we’re probably going to start going down that path rather soon what does it cost just run our engine you’re probably looking around a million dollars you’re probably a little bit under a million but you’re probably all of the infrastructure included and vice it’s probably a million dollars just be any lines are coming off that motor right running down so there is rations to design our power run wire run cable up to a certain point you responsible yeah we can show that we can show you we’ll walk outside but we’ve got

an interconnect we built the line from that building here so when those cables leave alternators they go into our switchgear room which we have all the controls for Jamestown and those things then it pops out and the Transformers will step that down on the smaller wire send it out on power lines to the edge of our property and there’s think all the that’s where I know probably puts pull we got a place to put a pole and I know power mix the two up our stuff ends here enjoy responsibly so all of these power lines that you see those are ours up until the switchgear the interconnect and I think there’s like two power pairs 3 power pairs on our property that are Idaho powers but anything from that point on is us so we it’s our responsibility to keep it going up until that point anything past that point is I hope our love our type of power and I can’t speak for Idaho power in particular but I can say that like solar and wind are intermittent energy sources where our gases come in you know 24/7 365 so that’s a

source of baseload power they love baseload power projects like this and it’s a renewable resource you know so they really they were awesome to work with we had a good working experience we had no surprises at all they were right up front and they were really good to work with here everybody likes of you know if I’m talking when we do like that like over there they’re trying to create power about Goodman dams or would have anything else to do they’re really smart about it too you know the way they get into a ball purchase agreement is like for us they said look this is a great project right but we don’t need it right now so we’ve got all this power online we’ve got all these customers but we don’t need your power we forecast that we will need your power in three years from now so we’re not going to pay you much for the first three years but when we need your power we’re gonna step you up and we’ll pay you for it so they’re really upfront about that part of the process everything and it works really well for

us you know for us it’s like getting past the first three years of the project is the hardest part once that’s done it’s all you know gravy on top of that it’ll be easy so yeah it’s been a really fun process I think for everybody so thanks for coming down we thank you for listening to another episode of recycled Idaho and as we continue the journey across this great state we look forward to bringing you more stories of people and organizations putting in the work to do the right thing