The State of California is now using a satellite to spot greenhouse gas emissions from space, and one of the first problems it has pinpointed is in Yolo County.<\/p>\n
Trucks dump tons of trash each day at the county landfill near the city of Davis. All that waste is buried underground, where it produces methane.<\/p>\n
Landfill director Marissa Juhler says the facility has more than 150 extraction wells to capture methane, so it doesn’t escape into the atmosphere.<\/p>\n
“There are greenhouse gases like methane that are really detrimental to the environment,” Juhler said.<\/p>\n
However, sensors onboard the state’s new satellite spotted a plume of methane gas leaking from the landfill and drifting over nearby farmland.<\/p>\n
Landfill crews actually spotted the leak a day earlier, which was caused by a broken well cap. The problem has now been fixed, but they say it shows the value of using new technology.<\/p>\n
“There could be landfills out there that are not doing the proper monitoring that definitely need that extra oversight,” Juhler said.<\/p>\n
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) is spending $95 million on the methane monitoring satellite.<\/p>\n
“Landfills are the second biggest source of methane in the state,” said Cliff Rechtschaffen, a CARB board member.<\/p>\n
Last week, the board also released more stringent methane monitoring standards, but Yolo County has some concerns over the cost.<\/p>\n
“We think it’s going to be far more expensive,” Juhler said. “It could be an extra dollar on your garbage bill each month. It might be an extra $4. We don’t know.”<\/p>\n
The state’s new regulations and space-based surveillance are part of a goal to reduce methane emissions by 40% by the year 2030.<\/p>\n
“If the state finds it and it’s detected, we’re going to fix it,” Juhler said.<\/p>\n
So what happens to all that methane? Yolo County actually sells the gas to SMUD, where it’s used to generate up to five megawatts of electricity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The State of California is now using a satellite to spot greenhouse gas emissions from space, and one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70395,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,17133,41473,1744,14771],"class_list":["post-70394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-methane","tag-satellite","tag-space","tag-yolo-county"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70394\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}