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Cow Manure --> Electricity
jmtpi writes "ABCNews has a story about a dairy farm in Minnesota that uses its cow manure to generate enough electricity to power the farm plus 80 homes and create fertilizer. There's also a more detailed story."
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If you read the article, you'll see that they're not burning the manure, they're simply expiditing the anaerobic processes of bacteria that consume it. In fact, the farmer touts "odor reduction" as a benefit of the process.
> I'm sure burning this stuff will be creating
> lots of pollution, oh well earth has to end
> some day
No, this is BURNING the pollution. Methane is the pollution produced from rotting cow manure. Burning it reduces it to heat, water and carbon dioxide. Much less harmful to the environment.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
Not to mention Heifer Project International has been teaching folks in the Third World(tm) how to do this for years on a small scale, mostly for cooking and heating fuel. Some livestock manure, a metal barrel with a lid, some water, and a rubber hose to siphon off the gas. Cheap, and efficient!
Cole's Axiom: The sum of intelligence on the planet is a constant. The population is growing
China and India have been at the forefront of biogas power production for decades.
In 1979, China had an estimated 7.2 million biogas plants, fueled primarily by pig manure.
In the same year, India had 80,000 of its own biogas plants fueled by the defecation of the sacred cow. (Holy Shit!)
They've even been doing this in the US for quite some time. Here is another article that provides an excellent explanation of the process, costs, and capabilities of such a system.
Nope. Think of it this way:
1. Cow eats grass.
2. Cow produces waste.
3. Bacteria degrades waste to methane.
4. Digester burns methane, produces CO2.
5. Grass absorbs CO2.
6. Go to 1.
Ideally, no more CO2 is produced than was in the grass anyway, so this process adds no more CO2 to the atmosphere. Furthermore, methane is very clean-burning, producing very little in the way of noxious by-products. In fact, since the grass produces energy from sunlight, you could think of this as a type of solar power!
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Why not just burn coal?
Because farms don't produce coal. Farms produce manure (as waste), and the manure produces methane, wich is a smelly pollutant.
What these farmers can do is turn that smelly waste into a profitable ressource.
coal?
It's just as bad for the environment
No, its much much worse for the environment to dig out buried carbon and release it into the atmosphere than to prevent the release of methane in the atmosphere.
I don't really want to smell the fumes of burning shit, thank you!
Yes, you should thank them, since they are saving you from having to smell those fumes by transforming the manure in a closed system and then burning the methane quite thoroughly. Methane then ends up as water vapor, CO2 and energy.
Wich is much better smelling than raw manure.
Now, had you read the article before trolling about coal, you'd have known all that.
You can't take the sky from me...
Well, IAARCE (I am a Registered Civil Engineer), and yes, this does work with human waste. In fact, it's probably being used at your local wastewater treatment plant now to power their pumps and such. It's as very common way to reduce -or eliminate - electricity costs at treatment plants.
It also works at landfills. Methane is extracted from the landfill, and used to turn generators. The electricity is fed into the power grid, and the power company pays the landfill operator (usually the county) for the juice. Here in Northern California, the power company (Pacific Graft & Extortion - AKA PG&E) is legally required to purchase the power.
-Ax
We *did* do this 20 years ago. It *is* old news.
Sheesh. Doesn't anybody read Mother Earth News anymore? Are we so focused on what might be coming out tomorrow that we've completely forgoten what we did yesterday?
Farmers have been doing this for over 100 years. Henry Ford promoted it as the ideal way to provide for our energy needs before WW1.
During WWII you could buy units on trailers to pull around behind your car, pile the shit in,a nd get a few miles of driving out of the resultant outgassing.
The only "conspiracy" here is that people no longer want to acknowledge that shit even exists and would rather go to war and die over a bit of oil than shovel a bit of their own shit.
Napoleon considered the most valuable men in his army the people who cleaned the latrines. They didn't *bury* the shit, they collected it for use.
Napleon's army made much of its own gunpowder while, ummmmmmmmmmm, "on the run," as it were.
Cows aren't the only biological device which can serve as a very efficient refinery of raw materials.
KFG
This results in anerobic decomposition, which produces methane. In additon to being a very effictive (bad) greenhouse gas, methane is smelly. Also, the resulting composte can have weeds and pathogens in it.
This results in carbon dioxide and high-quality compost. CO2 is a much less effective greenhouse gas than methane, so this is a pretty good choice. There was a recent
This is the most complicated method, but it's pretty rockin'. You end up wth the CO2 and high quality maure, but also with a bunch of electricity. Basically, it's a short-cycle renewable loop. Grass takes energy from the sun, CO2 from the air, and nutrients from the soil, and makes more grass. Cows eat the grass and make more cow, milk, and cow poop. You sell the milk, and turn the poop into CO2, soil nutrients, and electricity. Lather, rinse, repeat. The only significant input is sunlight, the only significants outputs are milk and electricity.
It is actually very common to burn these waste products to create electricity. I've been involved in several of these projects myself.
One project involved modified diesel engines that burned landfill gas to make electricity. The other involved piping landfill gas to an existing power plant to burn in the boiler.
In both cases these projects would not have been economically viable except for govt incentives, tax credits, and environmental regulations.
While it may sound appealling to use this free energy source, it is actually pretty expensive to make it all work. The electricity produced ends up costing more in the long run than regular old power from coal or natural gas.
The landfill gas is usually pretty nasty and it is difficult to keep things running. Everything corrodes quickly. These facilities also produce very little power, on the order of 10's of MW whereas a large coal unit is usually 500MW or more. Diverting your maintenance people to the little installation to keep it running is very inefficient. It is much better to keep them working on the large units.
use 4x75 A/C in the car (4 windows down at 75mph). Similar for the household.
Windows down in the car is great around town for saving fuel. On the highway the increased aerodynamic drag reduces fuel consumption to a degree comparable to running the a/c compressor. If you're already hauling around the a/c, you might as well be comfortable on the highway.
You can learn more about it here: BioGas in India
that would probably be degrees fahrenheit, as at 100 Celcius the bacteria that help create the methane would simply die, while 100 F is near the the body temperature of a warm blooded animal (like a cow)