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Manure-Powered Generators On The Rise
Sunkist writes "The San Francisco Chronicle has a report on Marin County rancher Albert Straus that, after 25 years of work, began using a generator powered by manure. While this type of 'power' has been in use for a while, recent legislation has made it more widespread. From the article, 'The Straus Farms' covered-lagoon methane generator, powered by methane billowing off a covered pool of decomposing bovine waste, is expected to save the operation between $5,000 and $6,000 per month in energy costs.' Let's hear it for poop!"
Shit.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
So if vegetarianism were to become the norm and these maure-power setups become common, cows would no longer be slaughtered, but still they'd still be raised commercially. For their milk... n' shit.
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
...but i'll take a shitload of fuel to power a city.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
That's great and all but what does Tina Turner have to say about it?
What could possibly go wrong?
..and it arrives at the perfect time, the production of bullshit is at an all-time high!
This little midget riding a huge musclebound retarded guy challenged me to Thunderdome!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Oh wait... (or is it "moo wait..."?)
The CO2 produced. Without forrest like we used to have CO2 buildup will not slow down. The need to develope better, safer Nuclear Energy.
So what's the waste generated from this? Obviously CO2, but what else? Is it considered "clean" energy? Is used poop as good at fertilizing as new poop? Would it work with human poop? Can I build a small version myself? Are their poop bylaws? (I can cover my lawn with poop after all..). And most importantly, does it run Linux??
Mod +5 Drunk
I don't know if I believe this article... something smells kind of funny about it.
buh-du-bum-ching
Biomass -> electricity -> EV power / hydrogen production. Nope, you're car will smell just fine.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
... such as the output of Redmond?
When I was a kid we would visit my Uncle's dairy farm. Even with him using a lot of manure to fertilize his fields - getting rid of it all was still an issue. They went to a system where they processed it to liquid and it went into a big liquid manure pond. I can remember watching their dog- walking around on the 'crust' that formed on the top of it. Every so often his legs would slip through. That was a nasty dog.
Eventually my Uncle's family farm went under and was auctioned off. I wonder if this kind of thing would have been enough to keep him in business? He now works for a big giant 'corporate' farm. Truth be told- from a purely economic perspective he is better off. He gets regular vacation (never had that with his own farm) and makes o.k. money.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
a generator I could run off my septic tank to power my house. But my whole family doesn't produce as much poop as one cow. Although when we have TexMex, we rival cows in overall methane production. But who wants to carry a mini-generator attached to their butt?
This ought to help the unemployment rate, as there will be a new employment opportunities in the poop-picking-up field. Someone has got to walk around the field collecting this stuff if they're going to burn it, after all. What a great opportunity! Virtually no training or education requited. If you walk a dob in the city, you are already a seasoned professional, and could quickly rise to management level.
... until they start shipping in poop from India.
I also see a new market opening for human droppings. Why limit ourselves to animal manure? People donate plasma for a pocketful of money don't they? Why not have pay toilets pay us?!
All of this is good news for out-of-work and soon-to-be-out-of-work programmers!
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
On the panel, an electricity meter began running backward, indicating that power originating from a nearby poop-filled lagoon near the town of Marshall was feeding into PG&E's electric power grid.
A well-fed dairy cow produces 120 pounds of manure every day, or 40,000 pounds per year per animal.
These cows are pooping money!
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Manure-Powered Generators On The Rise
Is "generator" really an accurate name for political campaigns?
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Our power company, SRP, does a similar thing with landfills. After the landfill is full, they tarp it and collect the methane in order to generate electricity. Then, a few years later when the methane generation slows down enough they remove the power generation equipment and build a public park on top. Three uses for one piece of land is not a bad idea at all.
In India, they call them gobar gas plants (more details in a 1971 Mother Earth New article). As long as one keeps the 30:1 carbon/nitrogen ratio, they can consume other organic waste too (grass clippings, urine, food waste, etc.). The only problem with them is that they tend to create hydrogen sulfide that makes the gas highly corrisive to iron equipment (some people use a filter of steel wool to remove the H2S).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
This maakes no more economic sense the last "power from poop" story:0 9/182320 6
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/
On a more serious note, it sounds like a win-win. If waste-lagoons are being covered and methane tapped for energy, it stands to reason that it will reduce both potentially global-warming inducing methane releases into the atmosphere (yes, it will be released as CO or CO2 emissions eventually from combustion, but by displacing other fuels it will be a net win, and please, let's not have the conversation about whether global warming is real or not today) and reduce noxious emissions, a win for the neighbors of big farming facilities.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Now they can put all that bull shit which they pile on to their assignments to good use! Finally, a use for humanities majors other than staffing McDonalds!
http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/11/12/manure031112e -electricity.htmi ews/c3Views200309.pdf/ ap_gas_45671.aspc owpower.jhtml
http://dnr.metrokc.gov/dnrp/press/2003/0717methan
http://www.climatechangecentral.com/resources/c3v
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/11/11272001
http://www.riverdeep.net/current/2002/03/032502t_
RoseColor red={0, 0xffff, 0x0000, 0x0000};VioletColour blue={0, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0xffff};find / -name *mybase*|chown you
cows would no longer be slaughtered, but still they'd still be raised commercially
I see this as more of a way of recycling. Crap is a by-product of an animal using energy. The actual energy needed to produce that crap is immense. Think of the grass that has to grow and the nutrients placed into the soil, then what your body can't use is the crap. When it gets down to it... we would probably save money, and resources just growing tress on that land and burning those(skip the cow). The benefit to the current setup is that we can raise the cow, eat em, and then recycle the by-products.
I think a variety of energy-producing methods is a great first step towards lessening oil dependency. It doesn't have to be one size fits all: for some areas, solar would work well, others, wind or thermal. Less chance for monopoly that way as well. Then, we could use the oil that was still around for the situations that truly required it. Now if we could just get the prices down for the equipment it takes to use alternative sources....
They're getting energy from what was considered to be a waste product. If they weren't doing this, we would have to make larger nuclear power plants, or whatever other form of energy product you feel is acceptable for the environment.
This is a win-win situation, for those involved -- they de-water the waste, compact the waste for easier removal, and get energy back in the process to help offset the operational costs for the process.
For those who didn't take sewage treatment classes in college, there are four main types of setting -- type 1 is for things that accelerate from gravity (sticks, rocks, etc), type 2 is things that floculate (clump together as they're falling), type 3 and 4 are not typically done in a water treatment plant as they don't happen quickly enough. So, what they do is syphon off the 'mostly' clean water at the top, and dump the sludge at the bottom... but the sludge at the bottom is still mostly water, which is heavy, and bulky. Depending on the area, they'll spread it out to dry in the sun, or use anaerobic digestion (such as in the bottom of a pond), to get it to compress further.
And let's not forget that composted manure makes great fertilizer, which the farmer might otherwise be buying for the plants that go into feeding the cow. It's all just an example of a nice little ecosystem.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
...a beowulf cluster of these? Pew!
"With net metering, small producers like Straus can reduce or erase their energy bills but cannot be paid for pumping excess energy into the grid. Net metering has been available to owners of home solar systems for several years."
Why do we allow laws that strip us of potential income, and benefit companies like PG&E?
You are probably right. I personally doubt that the amount of energy produced by a methane powered generating plant in a feed lot would equal the cost of the energy consumed by farmers raising crops and shipping crops to the feed lot. This is more of a way to minimize the loss of energy from our fuel dependent farm economy.
So, basically it runs on bullshit? Looks like SCO may have a business model after all...
"Bob fell into the manure pond yesterday."
"Can he swim?"
"No, but he sure went through the 'movements'!"
*ducks*
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
Collecting methane at sewer plants and from city dumps is being done on a large scale at over 200 US municipalities. It works quite well.
World wide there are literally hundreds of thousands of them (methane digesters using arobic 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.
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".
Right.
The 21st century will belong to those who can think out of the box and stop making money for THE MAN, who work FOR THEMSELVES, and stop supporting those brane dead politicians and political parties who are in THE MAN's pockets.
HOW'S MY POSTING? CALL 1-800-POSTING
This is yet another reason why we have the "Sonoma Aroma" in Marin / Sonoma County.
You'd think the Sonoma Aroma would smell like wine and vineyards. Nope. It smells like shit.... especially in the summer. Nothing beats endless acres of giant turd piles baking, up wind, in 95 degree temperatures.
If you've ever wondered what it's like to live inside of a fart... move here.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
To increase productivity and save power, management has upgraded all of our chairs to toilets. Each bowl says "Is this good for the company?"
Well, damn - I wish somebody had said something sooner... I just threw out a whole diaper genie worth of potential air conditioning...
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
See the Green-E website. Many landfills already extract their methane emissions. This is good even from a global-warming perspective, as methane is also a greenhouse gas. Finally, the EPA has tips on reducing methane emissions from livestock themselves, as opposed to their turds.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
> Still pretty sh*tty in terms of greenhouse gas emissions so it wouldn't help meet Kyoto targets
On the contrary. First, it would cut HC4-emission, which is an even more effective greenhouse gas and listed in the Kyoto protocol. Second, it could reduce CO2 emissions, as the energy is produced locally and cuts the transport losses.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
The article talks about using a covered lagoon full of shit to collect the methane as the shit breaks down. The article said a well fed cow craps ~120 lbs/day.
How does the shit get to the lagoon?
At 120lbs/day/cow, moving that shit around could require a lot of energy. Are they only using the shit from the barn? Is there someone riding the range looking for shit? Are the cows wearing shit bags like horses in the city do? Are they doing anything to catch the cow farts (100-200 liters/day/cow according to the article)?
Well, I guess it was more than one question...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Since cattle need to drink water, they add to the load on fresh water demands. Cattle consume from 1 (for a 1 month old) to many gallons (for a lactating cow) per day. Ref: Water intake and quality for cattle
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
a use for my powered manure generator.
They still use it as fertilizer. While it's sitting in the lagoon decomposing, they capture the methane (instead of letting it outgas into the atmosphere). Then they take the good stuff out of the lagoon and spread it.
There are many pig lagoons in rural NC that are problematic due to the 'factory farms' that are being run by some large corporations. Seems like this might be a good alternative for them while sparing their neighbors from the smell and run-off of their operation.
My next Slashdot post will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Replacing the cow might have its features, though. The cow is actually the indirect consumer of grass; the grass is first consumed by bacteria which convert its cellulose and other things to simpler carbohydrates and proteins (like growing mushrooms on straw) and then the cow digests the results. There isn't anything standing in the way of us growing such bacteria in vats rather than in cows and then feeding the results to e.g. fish, getting closer to the 2:1 feed/meat ratio than the cow's 8:1.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Goes by the name of "gobar gas". "gobar" means "animal shit" in Hindi. Was pretty big in the early eighties when the government planned this as a way of electrifying villages. Still used in places, but guess it does not meet increasing energy demands for pumpsets (irrigation), crop threshers, etc. Electrifying all of rural India is still an unfinished task.
You can make up for this with the difference between wholesale and retail (avoided) cost and other things, though. The analysis isn't trivial.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
from the article:
"This naturally occurring methane is a potent greenhouse gas, estimated to be 21 times as damaging to the ozone layer as carbon dioxide."
Perhaps, given the topic, it is appropriate that that the article itself contain some bullshit. But that statement is excessive.
Greenhouse gasses DO NOT deplete the ozone layer. A single egregious falsehood within the article undermines the credibility of the entire article; The author has demonstrated that she can not acurately report important facts, therefore all statements made in the article fall into question.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
This is shitty energy, who's gonna use it?
it really just depends. One, you don't have to use manure, you can use a variety of any biomass that will anerobically digest, which is hmm, all of it. One idea I heard of was from jaque cousteau, his was to use kelp, because of it's incredibly fast growing nature and the make-up of kelp makes it ideal for digesting. It seems industrial hemp would be ideal, too, it's cellulose production per acre/year is amazing, and it doesn't require that much fertiliser, you could get by just plowing under 1/2 the plants every year for that, then re apply the slurry as well. If you could see in meat space how much quite useable burnable gas you get from even a small amount you'd see it's very practical and economic. The deal is, the big energy companies CAN'T send you a bill for it,because you can own it, so no way will this be pushed officially by the government or it's controllers, big industry, that much. They *dig* having you pay forever into their monopoly, both with cash and with mindshare. It's the same with solar, with wind generation, etc.
Second,to get back to some farm savings, although the nitrogen level % remains the same in the manure and water slurry after digestion, it is in a more available form to plants than normal aerobic digestion or composting (farmers just shoot this stuff back on the fields now, with conveyor spreaders or flail spreaders). I have read it is as high as 600% better with anerobic digestion, so you get significant savings on fertilizer (which is a HUGE cost now and going up because artificial fertiliser is made from natural gas), which is what's done with the slurry after it has exhausted methane production potential. And last, it is "relatively" cheap to build these things,and they are incredibly scalable, there's a size and technique to fit any size operation, from joe water buffalo rice farmer on up. There are hundreds of thousands of them around the planet now,of various sizes,just not much in the US, so here it's stayed mostly "experimental",and they have to "study it", etc, that's all, any place else it's just normal, and sunlight is an excellent conversion tool for getting solar energy into various useful products. It's very productive sunlight is,a great energy conversion tool, especially with living plants, and it's the only practical fusion generator we have, and it's "free and open source", the government or industry can't charge you for it directly. They will play act at supporting it, that's about it, it doesn't lend itself to monopoly control, so they spread a lot of economic FUD around it.
Remember, farming has always been profitable and useful,well, from obvious reasons, food is kinda nice, even before modern techniques were invented, so it's quite do-able. Look at giant forests, grow all on their own, no high tech anything needed for them to grow, just water, dirt, sunlight, air, done. They are just huge biological manufacturing plants, quite sophisticated really, and that's all any farm is, a biological factory, and there's various ways to cut costs and remain profitable, ONCE you as joe big farmer STOP being brainwashed by monsanto and the energy companies and the equipment companies and the banks. You have to break that mindset of "dependence" first before you can wrap your brane around "how to do it" better. That first step is just too much for most people to get over. It's not really their fault, it's how they were taught, and what the "approved" techniques are as taught at ag colleges and in industry orgs. There are VERY few independent farmers around, the vast majority are really just coporate sub contractors and have to follow these corporation rules. The guy I work for owns three large farms, he is controlled by his suppliers and marketing org down to an obscene picky little level like you wouldn't believe on how to run his farm, or he can't market, and that's the biggest problems farmers have now, and they get trapped into it, go along, or go broke. Once in and in debt, they are trapped, it's almost like a form of serfdom on a large scale. It's a hard
But in feed lot operations all over the state there are a high density of cattle, where collection of the waste is not only economical it is probably essential.
This my not ever see wide spread use. decomposition ponds as described inthe article make lots of methane but much more pollution. manure may be natural but when it decomposes it makes massive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus waste. in the case of pig manure they actually add phosphate to the diet of the animal. when decomposed and freed of the organic poop all these fertilizers readily leach into the ground water and if allowed into the surface run off. this process is of course accelerated buy the fact the the poop is in a liquid state. and most ponds are lined with clay or plastic. this is not a perfect barrier as clay leaks and plastic degrades. concrete would be better but is potentlay very costly. if the basin of the pond leaks it will allow the liquid fertilizers to pass into ground water it make it unusable as drinking water (nitrates in water can poison children quite easily). As surface run off this form of pollution has lead to massive eutrophication damage of rivers and lakes. eutrophication is when it turns water pea green with algae and then all that growth dies, decays and sucks up all the oxygen killing the water body.
Another interesting bit is that at least in the USA many agricultural soils are quite rich in nutrients, such as phosphorus. in places like the midwest were dairy and pig farms are common manure is often liquefied and spread on fields. this is good fertilizer but in the case of pig manure it actually leads to phosphorus overload of the soils. so in Essence we don't need to do this but farmers need to get rid of the manure. this has lead to increased P contamination of water ways as well. id expect that their deodorized doncomposer sludge and water will be no different.
these facts have been know for quite some time. already there is allot of legislation on the books or in the works against liquid manure holding ponds. The elimination of fertilizer runoff into the surface and ground waters is also heavily regulated. i suppose that if done right this can work but it is not as easy or as low cost as it may seem. maybe a centralized facility can buy manure and process it in large scale for methane and be safe and then market the byproducts as assayed fertilizer. but allot of small unlined pond operations randomly spreading sludge and runoff can easily lead to trouble.
*something from "nothing" is great, except when "nothing" it is more than you can pay....
Regarding Net Metering, you asked "Why do we allow laws that strip us of potential income, and benefit companies like PG&E?"
Well, it's actually a bit more complicated than all that. One of the major problems with building a new generator is getting that generator to play nice with the existing transmission/distribution grid. This business of connecting the generator with the grid is called "interconnection." It's not an easy thing to interconnect a generator, and hooking up new green power technologies is especially troublesome. (Wind is the most difficult, with solar being the easiest.)
The federal government has been working on creating new standardized rules for interconnection of small (read: green) generators, but it's an incredibly complicated process that's taking years to complete and isn't even done yet.
So, what does all this have to do with Net Metering, you ask? Well everything.
Net Metering is a state jurisdictional program (meaning each state has its own rules) that avoids the whole interconnection process. While you are still hooking up with the grid, the power flows involved in a Net Metering program are so small in comparison that the process is much quicker and much, much cheaper.
The deal is however, that you cannot export (meaning feed energy into the grid) more power than you consume over the course of the billing period (usually a month).
Take a photovoltaic system - during the day a well built system (and we're not talking people who are entirely off the grid here) may both supply the energy needs of your house and produce some extra energy. That energy is sent out to the grid. Your electric meter essentially runs backwards for that period of time. Then, at night, you resume taking energy from the grid to run your house. At that point your meter is running forward and your bill is increasing. Say over the course of a month you take 1000 kw of electricity of the grid at 8 cents / kw. Usually your bill would be $80. But, over the course of that same month say you pumped 100 kw of energy back into the grid (for a net consumption of 900 kw) - you would receive an $8 credit off of your bill.
Now take the example of Farmer Brown who wants to turn shit into gold (that's the phrase the brochures use - "shit into gold"). Say he (through whatever means) puts 10,000 kw (or 10 MW) onto the system - all of a sudden he likely no longer qualifies for a net metering program and has to take the trouble of actually entering into an interconnection agreement and conducting studies to make sure he's not going to fry some lineman somewhere further down the grid (or more likely, simply overload the local lines and fry a small portion of the grid). Sure, he'd love to use net metering - the utility is required to buy whatever power he produces, the price is set at the retail price for electricity, the price of interconnection is cheap, but he's no longer eligible. So he has to go through the interconnection process, find buyers to buy his energy at wholesale (either by himself, or more likely through what are called "Aggregators"), and he's basically in the energy business with all the regulations and resonsibilities that entails.
But don't feel too sorry for Farmer Brown -- turns out that one of the major expenses in running a dairy farm (who knew) is electricity! Most spend thousands and thousands of dollars on their electric bill every month - so to the extent they can offset even a portion of that through net metering, that there shit really is golden!
They had the goats in a pen elevated off the ground so that they could collect their waste and fertilize stuff with it. Leaves that had fallen off plants were turned into windbreakers. There was even a little symbiotic relationship thing going on between the banana plants and a smaller shrub. EVERYTHING was linked into each other, and according to the farmers there, this kind of farm produced a lot more than the typical kind they've got there, and it requires less work. Now THAT'S engineering.
When life gives you poop, make poop juice.
- This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along, move along..
I've got a few PV panels and the rest of the rig for my solar installation(it's mounted on my RV now since we moved and got a small house), a small wind genny, and two fuel gennys,one a 120 VAC output and one just a 12 VDC. So even if the grid completely poofs I have *some* power available and it's *paid off*, I own it. And I'm at the bottom of the economic food chain in the US income-wise, so if I can do it, almost anyone can to some degree, we just need to get the interest up to a critical threshold, like what happened with computers. Look around now, 20 years ago hardly anyone owned a personal computer, now its ridiculous common. We CAN change if we can bypass big government and big energy FUD that we got to "study it" for another 50 years. We done did studied it since the 60's, time to build a lot of them, IMO. Let's get it on, time to act, not think about acting.
In california it's taking off,look at the example in the article, because they got burned, bad, relying on government and big business to be honest and fair and to watch out for the poor peepuls, phooie, they BURNED the folks out in cal, so you have more awareness there of the importance of backups, and diverse sources.
And de centralised power is better for national security! A few more million points of production spread out over the USA makes it much less likely that if any large plants go out from attack/damage/political & economic shenanigans that it will have as bad an effect. As to selling it, sure! If you have more than what you can use, you SHOULD be able to market it into the grid, or offer it in other ways. The exisitng energy industry has been fighting this for decades now, they do NOT want competition. They got mandated the lock-in generations ago,and they wanted to keep it. It's changing but they fought it constantly and still are whenever they can Now ME if I had a surplus of electricity or burnable gas, I'd use it for more projects/businesses, I wouldn't just sell it, that's just selling off raw materials in a sense, and it's usually a better deal to just keep converting until you have a better, more profitable pr
Many municipal wastewater plants use anaerobic digestion, and methane is the natural byproduct. The research now is trying to increase the amount of hydrogen production as it is more energy efficient and less wasteful.
As for diluting the biomatter anything organic will work and you will get methane. Ask any environmental engineer and we can go on for hours on this wonderful subject.
This is nothing new, only on a smaller scale.
and many of the remnants of the independent ranchers totally agree with you. What has happened over the last 30 years in ranching is that the stockyards and big feedlots/packers conglomerates have monopolized marketing to the extent that a lot of ranchers were forced into selling at a loss, or went under. A few who owned their land outright, and more importantly could still market effectively, have done quite well on grass fed beef, but they are in a severe minority now. I prefer grass fed myself, and I also agree on the economics of using grains for the beef critters-it's quite nuts and wasteful..
On a dairy, it's better to have a larger herd, the equipment costs are (I am being quite broad now)almost the same for a 50 cow herd as a 500, so it just makes sense to try and max out there, even if the daily chores are more. It would also lead to schemes such as the methane plant being more cost effective to implement. With free range grass fed ranching, it isn't practical, your methane producing stock (heh) is not all easy to scoop up, it's all over yonder all over the pastures. On a dairy it is highly concentrated and you got to do something with it. Same with the poultry farmers now, MAN, they get a lot. usually now it'scomposted, then spread, it's held in very large barns for a year or so, various EPA regs and so on to control runoff. I think that's reasonable, although I'd like to see them use more methane production as well, and in fact, that's where a lot of the large methane plants are now.
heh, one of my jobs on a dairy once, head poop scooper in the free stall barn. man, that's a lotta stuff! I used a bobcat to scoop to an underground chain driven dealie that moved it outside and directly into a HUGE spreader wagon. That's exactly why I built that example small digester I was talking about in my post. Saw all that methane gas going to waste, thought it would save joe farmer some cash, maybe get me a raise...maybe.
Nope. too hippy of an idea....
Back to ranching, it's very close to being akin to desktop dominance with the big packers. In fact I'd say it's a worse monopoly than with MS. There are few alternatives, you go with the packers and sell your beef, or struggle spend half your time developing a market rather than ranching. the independnets hate it, but they are enscrewed in it. There's some effort going on now with the independents to get some sort of anti trust relief, but it's a struggle for them, as you can imagine.
And as to land valuation, etc, there's a vital interst there that goes beyond current day to day economics. Food isn't a luxury. To me, it is more important to have widely diverse and localized points of production in "food", same as I mentioned for energy. In a crisis, or say something happens, transportation gets borked, fuel costs skyrocket from some new war, etc(man, if that ain't happening now, sheesh), you are gonna want *real close by* food production. It'll come in handy. The average US grocery store has around 3 days food before they are tapped. In a crisis, you don't want to rely totally on stuff being able to get shipped in from thousands of miles away, not all of it anyway, and with what might get in, you sure ain't gonna wanna pay them prices.
I don't think you can place an adequate $ price on that, that can address the main issue there.. That's why I think nations as a rule should first always make sure they are completely indpendent on food and fresh water and energy supply and a nice bare minimum manufacturing, it is just too critical for national security to ignore or to "farm" it out to another nation, even if it involves protectionism to some degree. Human necessities SHOULD be protected, other products, just "wants" and luxuries, sure, let the market determine what gets done where, no problems there much from my POV as long as the tariffs are equitable.