Presentation: 2025 ND EPSCoR Annual conference 

October 21, 2025, NDSU Memorial Union, Fargo, North Dakota

Life Cycle Assessment of Biogas Utilization in Refuse Power Plants

Combining fossil and renewable resources in power plants offers potential to achieve negative CO2 emissions. However, limited availability and processing demands of renewables, necessitates integrating non-renewable resources to facilitate this transition. One promising solution lies in co-firing waste coal with biogas while utilizing carbon capture and storage (CCS). This approach provides a remediation pathway for reducing waste coal quantities and providing greenhouse gas mitigation strategies. This study was based on waste coal power plant models in West Virginia and Kentucky. Life cycle assessment (LCA) was used to investigate the environmental impacts of co-firing biogas from various sources including landfills as well as anaerobic digesters fed by animal manure, municipal solid waste, and wastewater sludge. The assessment followed a cradle-to-grave approach and covered impacts from the biogas production, burdens from waste coal extraction, transportation, combustion and CO2 emissions, including avoided emissions. A combustion model was constructed for the power plant, with the mass and energy balances utilized to compile the LCA inventory. The findings indicate that negative emissions up to -289 kgCO2eq/MWh can be achieved when co-firing mixtures of biogas (30wt%) from various operational systems with waste coal and capturing 95% of the CO2. Co-firing waste coal with (23-29) wt% biogas also achieved negative CO2 emissions. Though, the other environmental impact categories like acidification and ozone depletion potentials increased with the increased biogas feed ratios and using CCS, the large GWP reduction provided significant offsets, underscoring the advantages of the co-firing approach.