It may help to save the planet but how competitive a price will it be?
Poop to save planet as boffins devise bullsh*t way of extracting gas
Despite emissions from intensive animal husbandry often being fingered as a cause of climate change, researchers have suggested a new way that manure could be a source of renewable power. A team at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, is studying ways of extracting natural gas from bovine and porcine excretions. …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 14th March 2018 13:21 GMT Voland's right hand
It may help to save the planet but how competitive a price will it be?
Depends where. There are places where it is the difference from being able to operate or not. Holland for example is exceeding by 40% the rate at which it can get rid of manure legally. Also, what works for cows and pigs may probably work for humans. As a result the ungodly amount of poop cities like New York and London produce today only to go into landfill (that is where the solids from the sewerage works go to at present) may end up being processed usefully.
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Wednesday 14th March 2018 13:58 GMT Charlie Clark
Lots of methanation processes are already in practice and, a bit like biofuels, they sort of rely on subsidies to turn the hydrocarbons used to make fertilisers into hydrocarbons for fuel. This is financially not sustainable on a large scale but can make sense in some situations.
Speaking as a bit of a hippy: we really do need to clamp down on some of the subsidies for renewables which are having lots of unintended consequences such as pricing food farmers out of business.
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Wednesday 14th March 2018 13:35 GMT Pen-y-gors
Re: Ok, but...
Good point. But will all the 'solid matter' be converted into biogas? Presumably there will still be a solid residue containing Nitrogen, Potassium, Phosphorous etc which will be a great fertiliser (and probably smell better than the slurry the farmer next door has just been spreading)
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Wednesday 14th March 2018 13:53 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: Ok, but...
Economics already dictate that artificial fertiliser made from oil — oh the irony! — is cheaper than recycling shit, which is why countries like the The Netherlands and Germany are busy poisoning their water table with nitrates from the run-off. And if you think NOx is bad in the air, just wait till it gets in the drinking water!
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Wednesday 14th March 2018 18:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Ok, but...
They can buy in manufactured fertilizer than has cost energy to produce and transport therefore further sustaining the economic cycle by creating a market for the energy the poo produces. The capitalist dream, someone will get rich... my money isn't on the poor farmers or cheaper electric bills for the many.... :D
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Wednesday 14th March 2018 21:43 GMT mr.K
Re: Ok, but...
You still get all the fertilizer here. During the digestive process the body breaks up the food and extracts nutrients. A lot of energy rich molecules can't be broken down in the digestive process and is sent down to the large intestines. There bacteria that are able to break down and feed of the left overs thrive. In return they break out vitamins etc that is extracted by the body. Crucial when it leaves the cow, in this instance, there is still a lot of fibres left that are continued to be broken down in a process that produces a mixture of carbon dioxide and methane. If you collect the manure in tanks, collect the gas produced and then use it as fertilizer makes no difference than if use it as fertilizer straight away and gas will be released straight into the air instead.
I don't know if I quite see the big breakthrough here though. Basically what they are doing is collecting the carbon dioxide in the biogas, enriching it with hydrogen and producing methane. A well known process I would think. And it requires an energy input so where is the benefit?
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Wednesday 14th March 2018 13:38 GMT Pen-y-gors
Re: Crap Digesters
So you just fit the cows with a reverse gas mask that traps the burps and routes them into a giant gas-bag on the cow's back. Then it can be added to the biogas process.
And the gas mask should be easy, as CH4 is lighter than air, so the cows can wear a giant bubble helmet, open at the bottom (so they can graze), but the methane will just float to the top of the helmet for extraction.
Boy, the brain is cooking on gas today! Now, where's that pad of blank patent application forms?
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Wednesday 14th March 2018 13:33 GMT Doctor Syntax
Taking a look at what they're doing, I see that the "anaerobic" digester produces carbon dioxide as well as methane. So, using energy from ??? they convert it to methane which can then be burnt to produce energy (and, incidentally, get the carbon dioxide back). It's the Underpant Gnomes' version of the perpetual motion machine.
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Thursday 15th March 2018 15:42 GMT Doctor Syntax
"Not quite - it's not a closed system, so it's not perpetual motion. The sun adds energy to the system, so it's not impossible."
The sun adds the initial energy. But on this scheme, having burnt the methane (including the methane produced as such by the digester) they have CO2. And as this is essentially a system for using CO2 and hydrogen (from ???) and more energy (from ???) the only limit to repeating this indefinitely is ??? As I said, the Underpant Gnomes version of perpetual motion, powered by ???
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Wednesday 14th March 2018 17:17 GMT Lars
Re: Crap News?
Indeed, lots of pig farms produce their own energy like that using diesel engines turning generators. In some countries they are payed if adding to the grid. Could it be that the news here is that the gas is bottled or something. Anybody tried with a match down there, (no I haven't)
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Wednesday 14th March 2018 21:52 GMT Peter Stone
Re: Crap News?
In the late 60s I worked for a firm that produced electomechanical automatic voltage regulators, amongst other things. Within nine months the role of service engineer was thrust on me. One place I went to regularly, was the sewage farm at Kingston upon Thames, along with others up Cheshire way. these produced thier own electricity using usually four alternator sets. These were powered by the gas produced from the plant. The engines driving the alternators were ex submarine engines. The starting procedure was to first start turning the engine over using compressed air, the diesel fuel was used to get the engine running up to speed, usually no more than two-three minutes, then it was switched over to gas which ran the set until it was stopped.
At the time I was doing this I thought about using a similar setup to produce electricity for use by the country, but was told at the time, it wasn't viable. But I've aways thought it would be a viable form of electricity generation, in these times.
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Wednesday 14th March 2018 15:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
The electricity part is kinda new
The reality is that people have been turning manure and water into biogas (methane and CO2) for decades.
The problem is that there's enough CO2 coming out with it that some engines won't run on the stuff. Some do, but they tend to be lower power-density.
If you want to be able to replace geologic natural gas (you know, stuff which comes out of the ground) with biogas, you need to find some way to reduce the CO2 content.
What this process does differently is use hydrogen and energy to turn much of the CO2 into methane as well; this is known as the Sabatier process. This reduces the CO2 content and improves the methane content, with the result being interchangeable with geologic natural gas. Because there's already a significant methane content, you're getting more energy out (existing methane + Sabatier-generated methane) vs energy in (running the Sabatier process).
Show me a good, cheap way to remove the CO2 and do something useful with it and you won't need this. That's been the rub; separating CO2 from other gaseous mixtures is not easy or cheap.
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Wednesday 14th March 2018 18:12 GMT Stevie
Bah!
"New way"?
Gercha!
I saw a design for a methane digestor in either the Domebook, the Whole Earth Catalog 1976 or An Index of Possibilities: Energy and Power back when I were a student at the University of East Climategate.
"New way" my pig's arse!
Now get that cow off my lawn!
Horsewhipping too good for 'em fought on the beaches in my day a good thrashing etc more etc.
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Thursday 15th March 2018 03:42 GMT The Oncoming Scorn
The team are positively giddy with excitement.
"I'm quite dizzy with anticipation... Or is it the wind? Hey! There really is a lot of that now, isn't there?"
I'm also put in mind of the line from the radio series of The Mary Whitehouse Experience, on the subject of cows\MCD's beef with the increase of flatulence & methane "that it's colourless... Just as well really!".
Not to mention the exploding cow on "All Creatures Great & Small", I'll stick with the icon I originally chose, as the "coat" icon suddenly is looking suddenly & suspiciously like Christopher Timothy approaching a cow's bottom with a well soaped arm.
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Thursday 15th March 2018 14:36 GMT Peter Christy
This article dates from 1971 - and Harold Bate had been running his car for some time then!
https://www.motherearthnews.com/green-transportation/chicken-manure-car-fuel-zmaz71jazgoe
A few years back, when petrol prices were getting close to £1.50 a litre, I deliberately bought an old carburetor car with building one of these in mind! The price of fuel collapsed before I got round to it, but I still have (and use) the car - just in case!
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Pete
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Thursday 15th March 2018 19:51 GMT Phukov Andigh
farmers been doing this for years
if you see what looks like a black inflatable greenhousy bag over a large concrete rectangle, you're seeing a farmer that's capturing methane to run generators to power his stuff.
been a thing for years. Y'all city slickers need ta get out more, I reckon! *spit* *chews on straw*
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Friday 16th March 2018 02:55 GMT Lars
Re: farmers been doing this for years
While this thread is getting a bit old, perhaps we should also remember that while it's so fun, and we seem to do it all the time, that is, the "it was known years ago, and my grandfather did it too" there is a new generation of kids who don't know it.
Certainly is would be wrong to suddenly stop talking about things we already have seen and done before because we are afraid of somebody pointing out "it's old news".
As funny as it sounds, education is really all about old news, enabling us to make more old news.
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