Former landfill site to produce ‘green’ electricity for Northern Ireland capital

Giant’s Park on the North Foreshore is to become home to a gas-powered electricity generating facility that will extract methane rich landfill gas through a system of underground pipes to produce ‘green’ electricity.

The plant, which will extract gas from Northern Ireland’s largest landfill site, the Dargan Road site, is initially expected to produce about five million watts of electricity per hour – enough to power up to 6000 homes.

It is part of a major redevelopment of North Foreshore’s Giants Park, which when completed will include a 220-acre public park alongside a 120-acre Environmental Resource Recovery Park.

Waste to energy engineering company, Renewable Power Systems Ltd (RPS), has been hired to design and build the landfill gas-powered electricity generating facility on behalf of Belfast City Council. The multi-million pound project is being financed by Ventus Funds, run by London based specialists Climate Change Capital.

Belfast City Council is working with Northern Ireland Electricity to install a new cable and electricity sub-station to allow electricity generated from the landfill gas station to be exported onto the National Grid, along with other ‘green’ electricity.

The council said it was backing the project because of its environmental benefits but also because of its revenue-generating potential for the city of Belfast.

“The electricity generating facility at Giant’s Park will be of enormous environmental and economic benefit to Belfast,” said the city’s Lord Mayor Councillor Tom Hartley. “It will help create a brighter, cleaner and greener future for the city by eliminating the escape of potentially harmful greenhouse gas. It will further produce a significant income to the council which is good news for our ratepayers.”

According to RPS, if all the methane gas a landfill site produces can be collected useful power can be produced from the biodegradable waste in the landfill with no net impact on global warming. 

Typically, landfill gas is comprised of 60 per cent methane and 40 per cent carbon dioxide. Methane is a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide, but if it can be collected and turned into electricity this can have a dramatic effect on greenhouse gas emissions and offsets fossil fuel consumption and the carbon dioxide emissions associated with this. One megawatt of electricity generation from landfill gas over a period of 10 years prevents the release of 35,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel power stations over the same period, according to RPS.

“The generation of electricity using the methane rich gas collected from landfills is the waste industries least known success story,” commented Andy Leach, managing director of RPS.