Japanese chemists study biogas upgrades using industrial waste heat.

[NNadir]

Renewable energy from bioresources such as organic wastes, landfills, and agricultural residues are attracting considerable attention through growing concerns of global energy and the environment because bioresources are carbon-neutral and potentially minimize fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. However, the efficient usage of bioresources poses major challenges. First of all, the heating value of bioresources is generally 20-80%of natural gas, and many materials are flame resistant. Diverse composition and both the moisture and energy contents of bioresources further complicate the situation. Those “poor” resources are typically upgraded primarily for desired purposes. However, reforming reactions generally require a high temperature heat source (ca. 800 °C), in which a large part of the initial fuel must be burned out, losing enthalpy of the initial fuel. Although conventional catalytic reforming presents a promising option, further improvements of existing processes are demanded along with an increasing demand for bioresource use. More recently, atmospheric pressure nonthermal plasma systems such as Plasmatron1 and Glidarc2-4 are used in economically competitive plasma fuel converters. Electrical energy consumption of those plasma reactors is typically less than 10% of the heating value of the initial feed when those plasma reactors are combined with partial oxidation...

This sort of thing of course can greatly extend energy efficiency while providing an opportunity to use low grade gas sources such as those produced in landfills for energy purposes. Gas leachates from landfills, sewage treatment facilities are important contributors to the methane generated portion of global climate change. Burning them to CO2 actually reduces the global climate impact, since the global warming potential of methane is much higher than that of CO2. Of course it also produces some energy.

This is from the ASAP reports of Energy and Fuels. Here is the abstract:

http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/enfuem/asap/abs/ef050141s.html