Cow Manure --> Electricity 519
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."
Re:pollution? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Methane wasted at many facilities (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Nothing new (Score:5, Interesting)
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!"
Re:Nothing new (Score:5, Interesting)
There are a number of reasons why. As urban areas grow there is less space to spread the shit around. You have to put the manure somewhere. If you don't have alot of land readily available then you have to haul it off. So lack of open land is driving up the cost of manure disposal, making electrity generation a more cost effective option.
Between the cost of fuel going up and the cost of complying with EPA regulations drive the price of electricity up.
Wait about 10 years probably most dairys and landfills will be doing this.
This leaves CO2 (Score:2, Interesting)
But of course I don't know shit about chemistry.. so I could easily be wrong.
How about hydrogen-generating microbes + garbage? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Biogas power generation around for decades. (Score:5, Interesting)
The method has been around for decades indeed, but it isn't economical to doing it on a large scale. But things are slowly changing, it seems, in the right direction.
Re:Inefficient (Score:2, Interesting)
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...
Re:veganism (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:veganism (Score:3, Interesting)
*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).
would it be possible? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That's because you set up (Score:3, Interesting)
Methodology (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Methodology (Score:3, Interesting)
The main problem is that you usually don't get enough off gasing from even a large landfill to build a very large power plant. The economy of scale is very difficult to achieve.
We have gotten really good at burning fossil fuels and providing large quantities of energy very cheaply. It is difficult to compete. I would love to see this type of thing take off and I would definitely like to see things like solar energy develop more fully. Its just that it is very hard to beat the economics of fossil fuels. It will probably be that way until we start to run out which probably won't be in my lifetime.
Re:technically does this shit hit the fan? (Score:3, Interesting)
The part I like best is that the CO2 produced is not only less of a greenhouse gas than the mathane, but since it comes from the grass and grain that the cows ate, it is completely renewable, and we can take it back out of the air by growing more grass and grain.
It would be interesting to see how much of my natural gas bill I could save by digesting lawn clippings, old newspapers, and other garbage I would normally have dumped in a landfill. By skipping the cow phase, I lose the milk, but I should get more methane per pound of grass.
The data here [dabney.com] seem to indicate that pig and chicken farmers would get twice the methane that the dairy farmer gets. And handling the waste from pig farms is a big problem that this may help solve.
More info here [energy.gov].
Cows per home (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:being done all over (Score:2, Interesting)
I suppose I should just leave the bulk of your comments alone and just accept them for what they are; your opinions. You make some valid points to be sure, but perhaps extrapolate them too far. But, I said I was going to leave the comments alone so I will proceed to my question.
I am curious as to the design of the digester you came up with. Single stage, multi-stage, plug flow, batch, continuous flow, what? Also, I am curious as to what kind of efficiencies you experienced in terms of cubic feet of gas produced per lb of volitile solids, composition of the gas, etc.
I own and operate a dairy and poultry farm, and am designing a digester system that will hopefully process both manures, thus explaining my interest.
It should probably be stated that one reason that technology such as this is slow to take off is because it is, like so much in agriculture, *expensive*. (or can be) Sure, you or I can go out and cobble together a small scale digester to prove the concept works, scaling it up to process several tons of material per day can be a different story. So, before we criticize the farmer for not thinking outside of the box, or being stubborn, or whatever, think about living his life. (granted, you say you have worked on farms, so perhaps I am puting words in your mouth, if so forgive me) There is only so much money that the owner/farmer can have to invest. Does he put it in things "proven" to provide a return on that investment (doing things much like he always has), or try new, unproven, technologies? (thinking outside the box) With todays slim margins the choice is difficult.
Bah! It is midnight and my fingers are refusing to work properly, and my brain is shutting down. Perhaps in the morning I will remember what I wanted to say.....
Re:Inefficient (Score:3, Interesting)
There are *tons* of cows in the US. According to this report [usda.gov], 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.