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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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I thought the future was going to get bigger, brighter, better, and flying (cars). Now as I get older, and understand more about population issues, it seems we are going to have to come up with more and more clever ways of re-using waste products. I suppose this is better in the long run (?) but hopefully I will still be able to drive a flying, shit-powered car before I die. Hopefully I can get the OUTATIME vanity plate someone else in my state does.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
Anyonw here qualified to know if this could be applied to human waste?
I would imagine we get a lot less methane out of ours, but these guys seem to be making a fair bit.
Also does anyone know what kind of pollution levels these things create? It seems like it would be fairly clean but I'm not an expert on burning shit.
-Nex
This sig has been deprecated.
Because coal needs to be mined. A dangerous and environmentally unfriendly activity. The shit is already on hand, why not just use it?
With a proper plant with proper filters, I can't imagine that burning shit is going to be problem. Can't be anyworse than having lie on the ground.
RTFA-
it gets heated up, not burned; no byproduct, and the power from the manure goes to keep it hot. So as long as they can grow food, they have power.
The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life- the terror of art. -Franz Kafka
The methane is being generated no matter how you look at it. So the question is do we just let it escape into the atmosphere or do we burn it, producing energy + H2O + CO2.
I think this is a great way for these farmers to make some extra cash.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
The cows are primarily being used to produce milk. Generating power is just a benefit of recycling their shit. Either way, the same amount of wast is produced, but one way we are doing something useful with it.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
I'm talking about longer term solution. This isn't one. The farmer is calling this the "way of the future".
I don't think cows enter into the "way of the future" in any fashion.
Even producing enough electricity to power their own farm and a few more homes doesn't make up for how inneficient it is compared to other solutions, namely ones that don't include drink milk.
This is my sig. The post is over.
I hope no one really thinks this is a good idea.
We'd be better off using the land wasted on the cows, to produce biodiesel.
You like beef? How about milk? Butter? Cream with your coffee? Cheese?
Guess what, all of these things come from cows! We need cows on hand to make them and we might as well get even more from them while we're at it. You can only use so much fertilizer, so what are we going to do with the rest of the manure? Throwing it out is the pinacle of idiocy. We went to all the trouble to feed the cows the food so let's use what the cows didn't.
Biodiesel is great and all, but I can't eat it. I can eat cheese and beef. With cows we get food AND some electricity to boot.
So this might not be the most technologically amazing invention, and it's clearly not going to solve the world's energy problems. But it is an inspiring example of how a few individuals can actually do something less destructive for the environment without being mandated to do so by government regulations.
At the risk of sounding trite, consider what you can do to have a less destructive impact on our planet, even if it doesn't involve thousands of gallons of shit a day.
Here in central Arkansas, the municipal waste treatment facilities (at least one site) use the gathered methane to power the entire plant, and also supply power to the local grid.
Cuts costs a bit but doesn't generate a profit (good thing too, or it'd vanish into the city bueracracy thanks to some weird rules!)
Nuclear energy isn't renewable, but it provides a large amount of power in a small amount of space.
Nuclear reactions occur with the fission of uranium-235, which is an extremely rare kind of uranium. However, reactors that are known as "fast-breeder reactors" take in the much more common version of uranium, uranium-238, and "breed" plutonium-239, which can also be fissioned.
There are a few problems with wind and solar power. Sure, they're cheap and they're clean, but a person has to keep in mind that the sun doesn't always shine, and the wind doesn't always blow. So to deal with this, you now need large batteries to store massive amounts of electricity to be used when solar and wind are unable to generate electricity.
Another inherent problem with solar and wind is the amount of space vs. the amount of energy produced. Both solar and wind energy need large amounts of space to create anywhere near the amount of energy that nuclear produces.
What about nuclear waste?
Spent nuclear fuel rods are solids, not liquids or gasses, so they don't "leak". In the past 35 years, there have been over 3,000 transports of nuclear waste across the country totalling 1.7 million miles. There have been 8 "accidents", but none of them ever resulted in any fatalities, environmental damage, etc. The containers that store nuclear waste are DESIGNED to be put through some serious abuse. They're made to sit through jet fuel at temperatures of over 1,200F for long periods of time. They make these things to withstand freefalls from 70 ft up, which is something like the equivalent of a 120mph head on crash.
Nuclear power rocks.
The manure is not burned, rather it is "cooked" at 100 degrees (C or F, dunno), and the methane is collected. Yes, methane. Natural gas, in other words. Not the cleanest stuff ever, but it's definitely better than coal.
:-)
Also bear in mind that most of that methane would end up in the atmophere if it wasn't burned and would be a whole lot worse, envirnmentally speaking. Generating electicity *and* helping to prevent polution. It is good to see something like this
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
- The storage of nuclear waste is something that *cannot* be thought through and planned completely, because of the ultra-long storage times involved (e.g. many tens of thousends of years). The oldest structures the human race built are, what?, 4 thousand years old, and look at their condition.
- Fast-breeders sound attractive, but with people like GWB still running the show I would not want to produce more Plutonium, it can be too easily used in nuclear bombs.
- Maybe it is time people should consider doing something about the other half of the equation: energy-consumption. I've replaced all my lightbulbs with compact fluorescent lights, bought an energy-efficient fridge and washing machine (got me a rebate from the power-company, too). I also switch off all equipment with small power adapters when not in use, they consume a small load 24/7 which adds up. I *halved* my electricity bill, and that is without *any* change in my lifestyle or level of comfort.
Another idiotic thing is cooking and heating homes electrically. Electricity is the highest form of power, and it is wasted on heating. Cooking on natural gas saves money and is much more efficient.
I am *not* a tree-hugger, I just want to see my kids being able to light and heat their homes when their grown-up, too.
Comparisons to the amount of energy that could be generated if you used the land to farm crops that could be used for biodiesel.
You and a lot of other people on here are missing something important here: the farmer's prime goal is NOT to produce electricity. It is to produce milk. And to grow some crops on his 1000 acres. The electricity is just a convenient by-product of the cows, and of the process used to reduce the manure odor so that he doesn't bother his neighbors. I'm sure he has no interest in converting his whole farm to biodiesel production.
Maybe its time for the craftsman/farmer to move on and see what engineers can do.
Speaking as an engineer, we would have a bunch of cross-site meetings with various stakeholders, we would write up thousands of pages of feasibility documents, create innumerable Powerpoint presentations, hire a bunch of contractors and consultants since we don't have the required expertise, then the company would fire the whole lot of us and contract someone from India to do the job because it costs less. They would do roughly the same thing, and in the end the company would give up on the whole project and write it off as a business loss, and nothing substantive would have actually been done.
Actually, a much more simple (and efficient) way of converting the energy of the sun into food is to not produce plants to feed the animals, but to eat the plants ourselves.
Given the same area of land, many more people can be fed by using it for growing crops rather than for raising animals. I'm all for harvesting energy from "this little ball of gas in the sky," but raising animals is certainly not a particularly efficient way of doing it.
--collecting methane at sewer plants and from city dumps is being done on a large scale at over 200 US municiplaities. It works quite well.
World wide there are literally hundreds of thousands of them (methane digesters using anareobic digestion), most of them being single family sized units where the collected gas is burned in small cookers and for lighting.
I built a digester in the mid 70's, was EXTEREMELY easy to make. I worked on a large dairy then, despite running the digester for all summer and collecting gas, just a small display size prootype unit, I could NOT get the farmer to drive over one mile to my cabin to look at it. His stock question was "why aren't THEY doing it if it is so good?" The gas collected was great, basically burned like propane. I tried other farmers over the years,I have yet to get one to take the plunge and actually do anything different, alwatys the same, it ain't in their propaganda magazines for their particular niche for farming. You can NOT get those guys to do anything practical until they get "permission" from the agribiz cartels, and right now, the agribiz cartels want the farmers to buy expensive petroleum and chemical products from them or their country club buddies. and the farmers WONDER why they keep going broke....and they TEACH going broke in the ag colleges, which is AMAZING to me they can suck young guys into doing that.
grumble....
At least this one dairy farmer in the article gets it, it's probably only one in a thousand or less that can actually think for themselves. Work hard, 7 days a week, YEP! They do, been there done that meself. think outside the box? Hardly ever happens, so petrified of their buddies at the co-op and the feed store thinking they are "enviros" or something near as I can tell.
Flash forward almost 30 years now, I get the same thing today, I work part time on a large poultry farm, besides methane digestion I have also asked why they don't use sprouted grains instead of the dismal dried up crap they call "feed" that barely keeps the cluckers clucking. SAME ANSWER, because "they" don't do it, this "they" guy who tells them what to do, it's not in the trade mags so "it doesn't work, it's hippie pie in the sky stuff enviro whackos".
I LAUGH every time I hear of a farmer going broke, because if they only thought just a smidgen outside the box and stepped back from being brainwashed by archerdanielsdowmonsantoexxon, they could make money, and easily. But no, they'll defend practices that they follow that produce for them a lower profit return than their grand daddys got in world war two. Sure, they can grow huger volumes of much crappier food off an acre, deal is, it IS crappier food and they hand over their cash to the big companies, then the bank takes their property eventually. Lead around by the nose don't even begin to describe it.
And I get the same thing from urban internet engineering "experts" who have constantly told me over the years my solar panels don't work, they "aren't practical". Funny, my electric bill is PAID OFF, I don't get a "monthly" bill with no idea what it will be if there's any political or middleman trading shenanigans. but, "solar isn't practical".
Phooie
The 21st century will belong to those who can think out of the box and stop making money for BIGCO, who work FOR THEMSELVES, and stop supporting those brane dead politicians and political parties who are in BIGCO's pockets.
Actually, we don't even need to burn the methane - we can use it as feedstock for production of methanol, or we can thermally decompose it into CO2 and H2 in order to extract the hydrogen.
One of the source documents (from the State of Minn research people) estimates the capital cost to be $300,000 plus an additional 5% to 10% of that number per year in operational costs. At $0.30 per cow per day (from the electric co-op) and 750 cows, revenue is aprox $82,000 per year -- and the co-op is paying retail for the power. Assuming 10% per year depreciation ($30,000) on the capital cost and 7.5% for operation ($22,500), they're grossing a little less than $30,000 per year. AT RETAIL!
If they had to compete with a real power plant, they'd be better off flaring the gas off just like the real sewage plants do.
As a nation, we really are pretty efficient at generating electricity.
Well, it's only cheap if you don't have to pay for the clean up, i.e. emissions in the case of coal or oil, or the use of a non renewable resource.
That unsustainable (some would say short sighted) use of resources can be "economic" has never really been in dispute. At least not in the short run. Witness deforrestation for example. Sicily was clear cut by the Romans, and hasn't really recovered in that respect since. That was great economy for the Romans, but doesn't do much good for the present inhabitants. In effect, the Romans took out a loan against future generations, that they have to pay back.
If coal and oil had to carry (fully) their cost, say including the cost of replacement of much of the energy infrastructure when they've run out, I gather you wouldn't even have to mention "global warming" for the balance to shift in favour of alternative solutions.
Stefan Axelsson