Project Members

  • Helena Pliszka (Graduate student, Environmental Engineering)
  • Evan Coffey (Staff, Mechanical Engineering)
  • Michael Hannigan (PhD, UCB)

Project Summary

Project Dates: November 2021 - December 2022

Methane is an exceedingly potent greenhouse gas emitted during biogenic, pyrogenic, and thermogenic processes spanning a variety of both natural and anthropogenic sources, such as wildfires and municipal solid waste and industrial landfills.

Emissions from the latter have been under EPA regulation and control since the early 1990s, following amendments to the Clean Air Act and creation of EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. Though the EPA has approved various monitoring technologies to meet regulation, most waste management companies prolifically depend on manual surface monitoring, commonly flame ionization detection, which has many limitations, such as non-methane sensitivity and difficult operation. Therefore, there is continuous demand to expand past standard landfill operations through research of monitoring methods that increase measurement accuracy while preserving cost-effectiveness and safety.

Partnered with Waste Management and Blue Sky Resources, we will establish a dense network of stationary air quality monitors alongside meteorological instrumentation to measure the spatiotemporal variability of EPA-regulated methane emissions from active, real-world landfills. To reduce the complexity introduced by overlapping methane sources, such as nearby agriculture and oil and gas activity, we will also be measuring other gas traces, such as landfill-associated carbon dioxide, as well as accounting for background fluctuations in methane concentrations.

Though the project only spans conditions within a few U.S. states, our ground-based point measurement system serves to validate satellite and aerial-based landfill measurements, thereby supporting the research efforts of the broader methane monitoring community.

Other Partners

Waste Management

Project Funding

Waste Management