From the UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO and the “what’s that smell coming from the furnace?” department.
Farm manure could be a viable source of renewable energy to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.
Researchers at the University of Waterloo are developing technology to produce renewable natural gas from manure so it can be added to the existing energy supply system for heating homes and powering industries. That would eliminate particularly harmful gases released by naturally decomposing manure when it is spread on farm fields as fertilizer and partially replace fossil natural gas, a significant contributor to global warming.
“There are multiple ways we can benefit from this single approach,” said David Simakov, a professor of chemical engineering at Waterloo. “The potential is huge.”
Simakov said the technology could be viable with several kinds of manure, particularly cow and pig manure, as well as at landfill sites.
In addition to being used by industries and in homes, renewable natural gas could replace diesel fuel for trucks in the transportation sector, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.
To test the concept, researchers built a computer model of an actual 2,000-head dairy farm in Ontario that collects manure and converts it into biogas in anaerobic digesters. Some of that biogas is already used to produce electricity by burning it in generators, reducing the environmental impact of manure while also yielding about 30 to 40 percent of its energy potential.
Researchers want to take those benefits a significant step further by upgrading, or converting, biogas from manure into renewable natural gas. That would involve mixing it with hydrogen, then running it through a catalytic converter. A chemical reaction in the converter would produce methane from carbon dioxide in the biogas.
Known as methanation, the process would require electricity to produce hydrogen, but that power could be generated on-site by renewable wind or solar systems, or taken from the electrical grid at times of low demand. The net result would be renewable natural gas that yields almost all of manure’s energy potential and also efficiently stores electricity, but has only a fraction of the greenhouse gas impact of manure used as fertilizer.
“This is how we can make the transition from fossil-based energy to renewable energy using existing infrastructure, which is a tremendous advantage,” said Simakov, who collaborates with fellow chemical engineering professor Michael Fowler.
The modelling study showed that a $5-million investment in a methanation system at the Ontario farm would, with government price subsidies for renewable natural gas, have about a five-year payback period.
A paper on modelling of a renewable natural gas generation facility at the Ontario farm, which also involved a post-doctoral researcher and several Waterloo students, was recently published in the International Journal of Energy Research.
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Have the universities sunk this low? Chinese peasants have been using manure to produce cooking gas for only God knows how long.
Being something of a literalist, I have difficulty with the the term “renewable natural gas”. To me “renewable’ implies that once one has used, in this instance, the gas it can then be restored to its original state – made new again – and re-used. Perhaps the University of Waterloo needs to invest in a good dictionary.
And “renewable natural gas” made by using chemicals! Chemicals… what are they thinking. Scientists… /s
Charles Darwin was writing a book when he died.
He regarded it as vastly more important than anything he or anyone had previously published.
Today’s homework and wonderation for everyone:
Why?
What could be even more important than ‘evolution’?
Clue: It was going to be all about earthworms
Anaerobic digestion has been the sensible thing to do with sewage for decades. The downside is that the resulting gas has a low calorific value because it contains CO2
Where this proposal gets interesting is that plan to add hydrogen and use another established process, methanation, to turn the CO2 into more methane. The problem is the cost of the hydrogen, which they propose to get by electrolysing water using intermittent electricity. Not only is electrolysis an expensive way to get hydrogen but if the plant is only going to operate part of the time it needs to be large and it needs to have a lot of hydrogen storage so that the methanation can continue where the electrolysis is shut down.
Like a lot of other ideas today it requires massive taxpayer subsidies to be viable.
They should leave manure out in the field where it is consumed by earth worms which indirectly enriches the soil.
People who have no clue about soil enrichment should be kept miles away from policy makers.
The solids and liquids left after anaerobic digestion are an excellent fertiliser and they do not have the odour and health problems that spreading raw sewage on fields does.
The residual fertilizer is N-heavy though as the C has gone into the methane. Nobody likes to mention that.
feliksch, fertilizer doesn’t need *any* carbon, and untreated manure simply decomposes in place. Putting that carbon to good use simply makes the nitrogen more accessible to the plants. Of course, the dosage on the fields must be controlled at a useful level, but that’s true for any fertilization. “Nobody likes to mention that” because it is irrelevant.
The trouble is that with intensive farming the runoff can be too polluting, preprocessing and extracting energy at the same time can be beneficial.
Dried dung is used for fuel by a billion people.
‘Researchers at the University of Waterloo are developing technology to produce renewable natural gas from manure’
Seems like they are trying to complicate the mundane.
One wonders what ‘renewable natural gas’ is. Producing natural gas from manure is not enough, apparently.
Manure if valuable stuff. George Patton when fighting in France in WW I and WWII noted that one could judge the relative wealth of the farmers by the size of their manure piles. Why use it for heat if you have other sources?
What will the organic farmers use for fertilizer?
Model a dairy farm. Assume a spherical cow.
That’s not new technology. Microorganisms have been doing it for at least a billion years.
“to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.”
This is how the propaganda machine works. Every article presents this “fact”, so that the average person simply doesn’t question it.
Does use of the “renewable natural gas” produce less CO2 per unit of energy than the use of natural natural gas?
Robert Crosby, an engineer in Alaska has made two-stage methane digesters that separate the process into two steps, the first producing CO2, the second CH4 of much better quality than single-stage digesters. By venting the CO2 through an ozone scrubber, all odors can be destroyed. The direct-from-digester gas is about 2/3 of pipeline quality and no hydrogen or sabatier reactor are needed.
http://biorealis.com/digester/digestion.html
His bottom-up, build-it-only-if-it-makes-sense philosophy appeals to me-
http://biorealis.com/philosophy.shtml
For the people objecting to manure digestion because it is a good fertilizer, removing the CO2 and methane actually makes the other nutrients in the manure more available, and by getting that decomposition done in a controlled fashion, can reduce the unpleasant smells otherwise emitted by manure spreading (provided the CO2 offgas is treated with ozone).
It’s NOT a zero-sum game; putting manure (both human and animal) through a digestion process before use as crop fertilizer extracts useful fuel, kills pathogens, reduces odors, and make nutrients more available. I’m dismayed by the lack of understanding shown by some commenters above.