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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*
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
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.
... the power of bullshit.
If we could round up all the politicians in DC, we could power the world.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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
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
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
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
Remember, when you leave that cow manure alone, you are leaving it alone with Osama bin Ladin.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
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.
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.
--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.
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)
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.