A recent BLDBLOG post gave me the motivation I needed to do some photography and (brief) posting that has been on my ‘ought to get to that at some point’ list for six months. Last fall I noticed a lot of digging and pipe laying near home and on my drive to work. I was curious, but didn’t figure out what was going on until a story on the radio clued me in. The University of New Hampshire and Waste Management are collaborating on a project: EcoLine.

In 2008, UNH will become the first university in the U.S. to use landfill gas as its primary energy source. In partnership with Waste Management of New Hampshire, Inc., UNH launched EcoLine, a landfill gas project that will pipe enriched and purified gas from Waste Management’s landfill in Rochester to the Durham campus. The renewable, carbon-neutral landfill gas, from Waste Management’s Turnkey Recycling and Environmental Enterprise (TREE) facility in Rochester, NH, will replace commercial natural gas as the primary fuel in UNH’s cogeneration plant in January 2009, enabling UNH to receive 80-85% of its energy from a renewable source and sell additional power produced to the grid by mid-2009. Construction began in 2007 on thelandfill gas processing plant in Rochester that will purify the gas and on the 12.7 mile underground pipeline taht [sic – glad I’m not the only one taht does taht] will transport the gas from the plant to the university’s Durham campus.

I took some pictures this morning between deluges as I ran some errands – slide show is below. UNH’s cogen plant’s website is here. In a laudable bit of transparency (way to go!) they allow you to log in to a guest account on their monitoring system – the diagrams in the slideshow are screencaps of the monitor that I grabbed. If you’re really curious – I’ve mapped the pictures on Flickr – you can click through to see where this is happening.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.