Two trains each day pull into this tiny hamlet tucked deep within the Columbia River Gorge. They carry more than 12 million pounds of garbage that is transferred to a fleet of trucks, which crawl up a cliff-side road full of hairpin turns to the top of an arid plateau. There, an armada of excavators, bulldozers and compactors work to spread, crush and bury this trash.
Now, this giant landfill is the source of pipeline-quality natural gas — enough for some 19,000 homes to operate furnaces, stoves and water heaters each day. This is the same stuff produced elsewhere in North America by fracking. But here it is generated from the decay — deep underground — of food scraps, dog poop, yard clippings, paper and other organic materials mixed in with the trash.
The landfill gas is owned by the Klickitat Public Utility District, which raised some $40 million to build a processing plant to strip out gas impurities. The production helps fuel a high-stakes political battle unfolding in Washington and elsewhere in the nation over the future of gas utilities in a century of intensifying climate change driven by the global use of fossil fuels.