page_title: Keele Valley landfill
section_title: Landfill gas collection
hierarchical_section_title: Keele Valley landfill / Operation / Landfill gas collection
caption_attribution_description: The Keele Valley Landfill
context_page_description: The Keele Valley landfill was the largest landfill in Canada and the third largest in North America during its operation. It was the primary landfill site for the City of Toronto and the regional municipalities of York and Durham from 1983 until 2002, and was owned and operated by the City of Toronto. It was located at the intersection of Keele Street and McNaughton Road in Maple, a community in the northeastern part of the City of Vaughan in Ontario.
  In 1985, the initial portion of a landfill gas collection system was installed to reduce emissions and associated odours emanating into the nearby community. This has been used to generate electricity, which it has continued to do since the landfill's closing, sufficient to power 20,000 homes.
  The facility is registered in the National Pollutant Release Inventory, with site identification number 7371. The site emitted about 410 kilotonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gases in 2011.
context_section_description: From 1985, a system to collect and flare gas was installed by its operators to mitigate the potential effects of landfill gas, including methane, which constitutes 47% of landfill gases at this site. This system was installed in progressive stages until 2002 as the waste accumulated in the landfill. In 1993, Eastern Power Developers won a bid to develop an electricity generation station at the landfill, which it built in 1994 at a cost of $30 million. By April 1995, it was in operation, selling electricity to Ontario Hydro's electricity distribution department (now Hydro One and the Independent Electricity System Operator).
  The landfill gas was collected from the site and diverted to a central blower and flare station via gas transmission pipes. Most of this gas is then directed to the electricity generating station, which has a peak generation capacity of about 33,000 kilowatts. It generates 274,800,000 kilowatt hour of power annually, delivering 31,370 of continuous power. Five percent of the collected gas is combusted and flared.
  It is a combined cycle plant consisting of two 1 MW gas turbines, two boilers which operate on landfill gas and recovered waste heat, and one 30 MW steam turbine. The pipe system extracts 17,005 standard cubic feet per minute (119 million cubic metres annually) of landfill gases from the collection field, which consists of "over 40,000 linear metres of horizontal gas collection trenches and 80 vertical gas collection wells installed within the landfilled waste". Circling the site is a 10,000 linear metre dual header piping system which is used for the transmission of gas from the wells and trenches to the flaring station.
  The power plant emits nitric oxide for which it has an emission allowance from the Ontario Emissions Trading Registry. Nitric oxide is an air pollutant which has a participatory role in ozone layer depletion and which may form nitric acid in the atmosphere, resulting in acid rain.
  The city of Toronto receives approximately $1 million in royalty payments annually for recovering the landfill gases which are used at the power plant.
caption: The Keele Valley Landfill main station is visible with the nearby power plant
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