Latest / The Manufacturing Podcast with Fexingo: Factories, Supply Chains, and Industrial Business / How a Belgian Factory Turns Landfill Gas into Electricity
Transcript
- Lucas: There's a factory on the outskirts of Ghent, Belgium, that runs entirely on electricity made from old garbage. Not incinerating it — capturing the methane that's been seeping out of a closed landfill for the past thirty years. Luna: Wait — they're piping methane directly from a landfill into a factory? That sounds like something out of a science fair project. Lucas: It does, but it's real and it's scaled. The company is called Umicore — they make automotive catalysts and battery materials. Their plant in Ghent sits about a kilometer from a landfill that stopped accepting waste back in the nineties. That landfill is still generating methane, and instead of flaring it off, they capture it, clean it, and feed it into a Bloom Energy fuel cell system that produces 2.2 megawatts of electricity. Luna: Two point two megawatts — that's not trivial. That's like a small power plant. Lucas: Exactly. It covers the factory's entire baseload electricity demand, and on weekends they actually export power back to the grid. Umicore says the project avoids about 18,000 tons of CO₂ equivalent per year — because methane is something like 25 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO₂ over a century, so capturing it has an outsized climate benefit. Lucas: And the economics work too. The total capital cost was around $6 million, and Umicore says the payback period was under four years. When you factor in avoided carbon taxes and the revenue from selling excess electricity, it's actually a positive-return project, not just a sustainability play. Luna: I love that — when the green thing is also the profitable thing. But how do you get methane from a landfill that's been closed for decades? Isn't the gas mostly gone by then? Lucas: That's the counterintuitive part. Landfills don't stop producing methane when they close. It's a slow biological decomposition process that can last fifty to a hundred years. The peak gas generation usually happens in the first five to ten years, but after that you get a long, slow tail. Most landfill gas projects only capture the early, high-flow phase and then abandon the wells. What Umicore and Bloom Energy did was install a dedicated gas collection system on the closed landfill — basically a network of vertical wells connected to a pipeline — and then condition the gas to remove moisture, siloxanes, and other contaminants that would damage the fuel cell. Lucas: If these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, a couple of dollars a month genuinely keeps them going. You can find the show at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: It really does make a difference. Even just the price of a coffee helps keep this ad-free and independent. Lucas: Right. So back to Umicore's fuel cell — the key technical detail is that they're using a solid oxide fuel cell from Bloom Energy, which is different from the proton exchange membrane fuel cells you hear about in hydrogen cars. Solid oxide runs at very high temperatures, around 800 degrees Celsius, and it can handle a variety of fuels — not just pure hydrogen, but natural gas, biogas, and in this case landfill gas. Luna: So it's more fuel-flexible. That seems like a huge advantage for industrial sites where you might have a dirty, low-grade methane source. Lucas: Exactly. The fuel cell reformats the methane internally — it doesn't need an external reformer. And because it operates at such high temperature, it's also very efficient. Bloom claims their systems can reach 60 percent electrical efficiency, and when you capture the waste heat for cogeneration, you can get up to 85 percent overall efficiency. Lucas: Now, Umicore's project isn't the only one. There are similar installations in the US — Bloom has a project at a wastewater treatment plant in California, and another at a landfill in Ohio. But the Ghent factory is notable because it's in a dense industrial area where land is expensive and grid capacity is tight. By generating their own power on-site from a local waste stream, they're essentially bypassing grid constraints. Luna: Which is becoming a bigger issue in Europe, especially with the push to electrify everything. Grid connection queues are years long in some places. Lucas: Exactly. So this model — capture methane from a nearby landfill, pipe it to a factory, run it through a fuel cell — it's replicable. There are tens of thousands of closed landfills across Europe and North America that still have decades of methane generation left. Most of them just flare the gas, which is better than venting it, but flaring still produces CO₂ and wastes the energy. Luna: So why isn't every factory next to a landfill doing this? What's the friction? Lucas: Two main things. First, the capital cost. Even with a four-year payback, you still need to front $5 to $10 million, and many manufacturers are hesitant to invest in something that's not core to their business. Second, the gas quality issue. Landfill gas is dirty — it contains hydrogen sulfide, siloxanes, and trace amounts of volatile organic compounds that can poison the fuel cell if not properly removed. Umicore had to install a gas conditioning system that added about 20 percent to the project cost. Luna: And I imagine the permitting — you're dealing with a landfill, a gas pipeline, and a power generation facility on an industrial site. That's multiple regulatory bodies. Lucas: Absolutely. But the thing that pushed Umicore over the edge was the Belgian carbon tax. At the time of the project, the carbon price was around 25 euros per ton, and it's been rising since. That made the avoided emissions worth real money. Plus, the electricity they generate is cheaper than grid power in Belgium, which has some of the highest industrial electricity prices in Europe. Luna: So it's a triple win: lower energy costs, carbon tax savings, and a reduction in Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. Lucas: Right. And Umicore has actually expanded the system. They started with one Bloom Energy server in 2019, and now they have four. The landfill gas supply is still sufficient, and the fuel cells have been running at over 95 percent availability. Luna: That reliability figure is impressive. A lot of people assume fuel cells are finicky lab equipment, but Bloom has been deploying these commercially for over a decade. Their installed base is something like 400 megawatts globally. Lucas: Yeah, and they're mostly in the US and South Korea, but Europe is starting to catch up. The Ghent project is a reference case that Bloom uses to pitch to other industrial customers. I spoke to their VP of European operations last week, and she said they're in active discussions with five other factories in the Benelux region that are within pipeline distance of a landfill or a wastewater treatment plant. Luna: So the pipeline is literally a pipeline. Are there any technical limitations on how far you can pipe landfill gas economically? Lucas: Good question. The general rule of thumb is that within about five kilometers, it's worth it. Beyond that, the compression costs eat into the economics. Landfill gas is typically at low pressure — less than one bar — so you need to compress it to pipe it. Umicore's landfill is about one kilometer away, so the piping cost was minimal. But for a factory that's ten kilometers from a landfill, you'd probably need a larger project scale to justify the pipeline. Luna: So the sweet spot is factories that are already located near old landfills. Which is surprisingly common — a lot of industrial parks were built on the outskirts of cities, and landfills were often placed on the outskirts too. Lucas: Exactly. And there's another angle: some factories are starting to look at their own on-site waste. Food processing plants, breweries, paper mills — they all generate organic waste that could be digested to produce biogas. But the landfill gas model is lower effort because the decomposition is already happening naturally. You're basically tapping into an existing methane source that would otherwise be wasted. Luna: I'm curious about the future of this. As the energy transition accelerates, landfills will eventually be replaced by better waste management systems — less organic waste going to landfills. Does that mean this strategy has a limited lifespan? Lucas: It does have a finite window. But we're talking decades. Even if we stopped sending organic waste to landfills tomorrow, the methane from existing landfills will keep coming for another fifty to a hundred years. So it's not a short-term play. And in the meantime, it's a bridge technology — you're building fuel cell infrastructure that could later be converted to run on green hydrogen or synthetic methane. Lucas: Bloom's fuel cells already can run on hydrogen with minor modifications. So a factory that installs a fuel cell today on landfill gas could, ten years from now, switch to green hydrogen when it becomes available at scale. That's a nice hedge. Luna: So the real story here isn't just about one factory in Ghent. It's about a template for industrial decarbonization that uses existing waste streams, proven technology, and a realistic payback period. No subsidies required, at least in a region with a carbon price. Lucas: Exactly. And I think that's why this project gets cited so often in EU policy discussions about industrial decarbonization. It's not a moonshot. It's an engineering project with a clear ROI and a measurable climate impact. They've been running since 2019, the numbers are public, and they work. Luna: I want to look up the data on how much methane is still being generated at that specific landfill. Is Umicore capturing all of it, or just a portion? Lucas: They're capturing about 80 percent of the methane generated. The remaining 20 percent is from areas of the landfill that are harder to access or have very low flow rates. But they're planning to add more wells in the next phase. Their goal is to get to 95 percent capture. Luna: That's a high bar. Most landfill gas projects aim for 70 to 80 percent. The last stretch is always the most expensive. Lucas: Yeah, diminishing returns. But the carbon price in Europe is now over 80 euros per ton, so those last wells might actually be profitable. And the Belgian government offers additional incentives for methane capture projects. So it's a good time to be in this business. Luna: So what's the next episode? Are you going to visit a factory that uses fuel cells to run on biogas from pig manure? Lucas: Funny you should say that — I've got a lead on a dairy cooperative in the Netherlands that's doing exactly that. But that's for next time.