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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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Is a crock of shit. :)
Yes, I am a Muslim. No, I am not a Terrorist.
Ahhh the sweet smell of efficency. *takes a deep breath*
*faints*
... the power of bullshit.
Miko O'Sullivan
That's a nice generator...
FOR ME TO POOP ON!
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
...literally
Flying cows replace power transmission lines.
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.
RTFA, please.
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.
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
> 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.
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!
22000 gal manure per day/ 760 cows = 30 gal/cow per day
Doesn't that seem a little hi?
Ever drive by a HUMAN sewage plant? See that orange flame at the top of a tall pipe? That is the same "bio-gas" which is surplus being wasted. See the large spheres nearby? Those are "bio-gas" storage tanks. Many facilities use it to heat the digester tanks to promote microbe growth.
Imagine if human waste treatment were to start generating electricity. Your local water and sewage board could start PAYING you for the privilege of of disposing of your sewage.
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!
If this is such a good idea, and so cost effective, why isn't it being done more places?
"In the USA we don't just waste our natural resources, we waste our waste, too!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
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.
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.
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.
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
If you're extremely patriotic, collect all the cow shit you can and store it in your back yard. You too can help reduce America's dependency on foreign oil.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
In Soviet Russia... ... water and sewage board pays you!
Or is that Communist China?
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
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
As an Environmental Engineer many WWTPs use this technology. The largest problem with it however is hard water (calcium) or silica in the effluent often deposit on the turbine blades of the generator and greatly reduce life. (A pilot scale test I know of ran for about a week then died). And they are not cheap, we are talking about $12M for a small city, it was a pilot, so full scale would probably be about the same cost.
It never pays for the entire process, but it can help to offset costs.
..couldn't that be useful for plants in greenhouses? I can imagine the distorted ecosystem of a greenhouse, where there are hardly any animals to exhale CO2, adding the CO2 left by the combustion of CH4 could have the plants create clean O2 that can be let out into the atmosphere with no further risks thus eliminating all pollution.
But of course I don't know shit about chemistry.. so I could easily be wrong.
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
I still think that converting the Fresh Kills landfill to a facility that captures methane emissions, generates hydrogen from garbage compost, and burns the rest in a euro-style plasma furnace could really help SI, as well as NYC (and probably the country at large)..
;); NYC would get more tax revenue from the sale of power, hydrogen and methane to power generators and municipal vehicles/facilities and taxes from jobs and industry, as well as additional independence from out-of-city power generation and some relief from peak periods of use. NYC would also reduce its payments for handling trash, thus reducing its budget problems. Talk about a win-win-win-win-win!
;)
SI would get cleaner air and jobs in a good local high-tech industry (we'd be HAPPY to import garbage
Just keep Tony Soprano's hands off it
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
- 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.
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.
People who are using the land to feed and power their family may be efficient, but this guy isn't just feeding and powering his family. He is producing dairy products that go into circulation. That is the inefficient and unhealthy part. He's also making a few people on top who have strangled the business from top to bottom, very rich, destroying the sharing of wealth.
The land usage isn't even that efficient. At some point this will be an issue, but currently I guess it isnt.
And did you even read the articles? Even the FARMERS are calling it a farm...
This is my sig. The post is over.
I'll give you all the power in the world you want. It just has to come from this little ball of gas in the sky.
Animals are one of the simplest ways to turn the energy of the sun into food. You're wanting to give up thousands of years of work on the part of your ancestors to make your 'moral' choice.
Go for it, if you want. Just don't expect the rest of us to follow.
The cow-body generates more bioelectricity than a 120-volt battery. And over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of combustion...the humans had found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields, Neo, endless fields...where cow-beings are no longer born. We are grown. For the longest time I wouldn't believe it. And then I saw the fields with my own eyes...watched them liquify the dead...so they could be fed intravenously to the living. And standing there, facing the pure, horrifying precision...I came to realize the the obviousness of the truth. What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world...built to keep us under control...in order to change a cow-being...into this. (a battery)
Bah, we Indians have been using cow manure for a variety of things for hundreds if not thousands of years. I'm not surprised that there is even more useful things we could do it. It's been a replacement for Lysol and fuel. This method is also used in India called Gorba gas. :P
:-) [trans. long life to cows]
They laughed at us when we told them that cows were holy. Guess, whose laughing now?!
Cow Zindabad, Cow Zindabad!
sri
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.
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.
coming from a long line of dairymen...
if you have a dairy, it is not called a dairy ranch, it is called a dairy farm. BTW, the "dairy" itself is only the building where the cows are actually milked, not the whole farm.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Not to mention the fact that it's pretty well documented (so long as you're not a creationist) that the reason man evolved into the thinking, walking*, talking creature you see before you is that we stopped eating grass and started eating meat. Meat is a LOT easier to get your RDIs from, which means your stomach does a shitload less work, which leads to more spare power to evolve a functioning brain.
*OK, the grass eaters did walk like us, but they didn't think or talk till they started eating meat (at first simply marrow and brains left by larger carnivores).
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
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.
I don't eat salad. That's what food eats.
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
so... when the boilers burst
the shit hits the fan, eh?
and ecologically friendly PP SUVs would really be transporting a shitload of stuff...
(PP=poop propelled)
______________________________________________
sigamajig...
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.
--would it be possible to get the name of this city so I can do some research on it? I would like to present a proposal to my county commissioners on this. Most of the other sites doing biogas and cogen I found were much larger cities and a population of 10,000 is in the ball park enough for comparison purposes. Thanks in advance if this is possible.
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)
I am not sure if using farm byproducts to produce electricity is new, since I have heard of similar ones before (in documentaries).
Please pardon my ignorance, if I have said something stupid above.
Thank you.
GrimReality
2003-03-09 23:55:59 UTC (2003-03-09 18:55:59 EST)
No, I think you have misinterpreted the article, skewed by your (possibly misguided) personal beliefs on veganism and the dairy/meat industry. You aren't saying anything that isn't completely obvious to anyone with even a basic grasp of the problems the environment faces. The reality is, people want dairy products, and if we are going to have cows around for that, it is much better for the environment if we can do ANYTHING to lower their impact on the planet. It IS a strawman argument, because if we got rid of cows as you suggest, history shows that the price of dairy products would rise dramatically, and the gap in the market would be filled by product from the third world and by farms that would NOT be making these sort of efforts to help the planet, putting the entire industry and our world in a worse situation than it is currently in. Sometimes I wish people (read: hippies) would actually have a clue to how this world works before suggesting childish, badly planned solutions. Getting rid of cows is just not feasible currently while their products hold so much value for the human race.
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...
Nitpick:
I believe that methane isn't the smelly part - it's the sulphur. I don't think that methane has any noticable smell at all. That's why they have to add scents to natural gas lines. If they didn't no one would notice a gas leak.
Last post!
Maybe infernal combustion engines aren't the way to do this. I wonder if using it for direct heat or running a steam turbine wouldn't be better. Of course, the turbine approach only works for a large scale operation. Then too, there are the economy of scale problem. A diesel that's been primarily engineered to burn diesel isn't going to be all that good for burning anything else. A "modified diesel" is probably a good example. A diesel that's been engineered (materially and otherwise) to burn biogas would probably work better. The problem here is that there has to be enough incentive to make a lot of them. Building one or two such engines wouldn't pay off what it cost to design them.
Anyhow, I don't think burning biogas is a bad idea. It will have to be properly engineered and applied to worth a squat though.
Lets see. I run my home on 3000 kWHr/year. For lights, electric stove, fridge, this computer, dehumidifier and central air in summer, for the furnace blower of a gas-fired furnace in winter, for everything. That is 347 watts 24/7. Divide 347 into the 150 kilowatts 24/7 gives over 400 homes. That is 2 cows per home.
I call bullshit!
(Sorry, sorry... +1, Lame?)
--
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]
India has one of largest populations of both people and cattle in the world. So it is not a surprise that bio-gas is being extensively used as a fuel for cooking, lighting and electricity. This technology has a tremendous potential for the third world and India has been exporting its know-how to others.
resurrect my
By my simple calculations, to replace the San Onofre Nuclear power plant near where I live, which generates over 1 gigawatt of power, would require 13.7 million cows.
There are *tons* of cows in the US. According to this report , there were 96 million cows in the US in 1992, of which about 22.6% are dairy cows.
So this could be a pretty big deal (particularly if all cows could be used and not just dairy cows) but it would involve a big fraction of the industry getting involved.
When I toured San Onofre, they mentioned that (1) in California, the power companies must buy power from independent producers at the highest rate they are paying for any power, and (2) pig farmers were selling power to them at that time, and making some pretty good money off of it. That was around 1998-99.
You would think with power costs what they are now, every little farm would be looking into this. I hope they are.
I suspect they are not - or if they are they will find the risks too great.
It would be truely bizzare if we had to genetically breed cows to make them more "gas-y". I can just see it now: dairy cows, meat cows, gas cows...
The one image which keeps popping into my mind when such topics crop up is of starving people in other nations utterly bewindered that we could use all this fertile land...to generate electricity.
Of course the US alone already wastes enough food to save all the starving peoples of the world if we chose to do so - it is just a question of distribution.
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?