Turning Waste Gas to Clean Energy: Brooklyn’s Newtown Creek Wastewater Plant Converts Harmful Methane to Renewable Natural Gas Fuel
One of the miraculous things the NYC Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) does to make life possible for the 8.8 million residents of this city is to process 1.3 billion gallons of sewage daily across its 14 wastewater plants. But they can do even more for New York by harnessing a byproduct of the wastewater treatment process and using it for renewable energy. This enables wastewater plants to fight climate change, divert waste from landfills, and improve air quality and respiratory health.
The Newtown Creek plant in Greenpoint, the city’s largest wastewater treatment plant, is already demonstrating how this works. Its iconic egg-shaped tanks, called anaerobic digesters, process sewage sludge and food waste and capture the methane biogases emitted as the waste decomposes. In the past, you would have also seen a flame atop a tall stack, where excess methane that wasn’t used to heat the plant was “flared,” i.e., lit on fire.