Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 07/25/2008 1:13:17 PM PDT by PROCON
NEW YORK - Cows, pigs and chickens in the U.S. produce enough manure to supply 2.4 per cent of the nation's electricity if the waste were converted into burnable gas, an energy option overlooked by the government, researchers said.
Igniting energy-rich biogas in turbines would cut U.S. global-warming emissions from power generation by 4 per cent, said Michael Webber, lead author of a study published today in the Institute of Physics' Environmental Research Letters. The paper is the first to assess the nation's ability to use livestock manure as a renewable fuel, said Webber, assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
"It's a big enough number that we care,'' Webber said in an interview. "There's enough potential for biogas manure that it might be something policy makers consider.''
Farmers who already use systems that convert animal waste into fuel see thin profits, said Susan Wood, chief executive officer of SCC Americas, a Houston-based company that develops projects to eliminate greenhouse gases from farms, landfills and coal mines. Wider use of livestock excrement for fuel won't come without stronger incentives, she said.
"It'll probably take a dramatic shift in the carbon markets and in the price of carbon before people start looking at this on a regular basis,'' Wood said in an interview, referring to the price of a permit to release carbon dioxide, that main gas blamed for global warming.
SCC Americas is unit of Sindicatum Carbon Capital, a London- based developer of projects to curb planet-warming gases that's backed by Gulf One Investment Bank and American International Group Inc
(Excerpt) Read more at nbbusinessjournal.canadaeast.com ...
Ping!
Who run Bartertown?
“Wider use of livestock excrement for fuel won’t come without stronger incentives, she said.
“It’ll probably take a dramatic shift in the carbon markets and in the price of carbon before people start looking at this on a regular basis,’’ Wood said in an interview, referring to the price of a permit to release carbon dioxide, that main gas blamed for global warming..”
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So, as in T. Bone’s windmills, all it will require is the Iron Fist to make it feasible...
Cat pan ping.
I can barely stand to clean the kitty litter box.
Throw in dog and cat poo and send me to Mars.
Clean? It depends on which part of the process you look at. The gas produced might burn with minimal pollution, but you’ve still got to deal with the leftover trainloads of processed crap. A dirty job, I’d say.
There are technologies out there. I know of one that is in the financing stage where it is anaerobically digested in an enclosed container. I saw it processing horse manure. The methane flowed out through the gas line and at the end of 2 weeks what came out looked like topsoil. There was no smell and I even took home some of the “end product” to use. I had no trouble growing plants in it.
The irony of the environmental movement is that they’re advocating (here) poop->methane digesters, but they are highly abusive of “factory farms,” which are the only facilities where this makes sense.
There are a GREAT number of small livestock producers (especially in the midwest and east) who have small herds on small plots of land (less than 100 acres). There’s no economical way to gather this cow poop off a pasture area, put it into a methane digester and make this idea work.
Where this will work is:
1. Feedlots - the bigger, the better
2. Packing houses
3. the big California/Dutch style dairies (found increasingly outside California - we’re talking thousands of head on less than 300 acres)
4. Farrow-to-finish pig farms, with thousands of head under one roof
5. Big poultry operations
These “concentrated animal feeding operations” are good candidates for digesters and biogas production. But even in the most successfully widespread implementation, I don’t think we’d reach as much as 65% of any class of livestock.
These huge CAFO operations are critically dependent upon cheap transportation fuel (diesel) to haul in feed, because they use more feed than can be produced locally. So if road fuel keeps going up, I think the good candidates for biogas production will become less popular with producers.
2.4%? It’s a start. Now use human waste.
What a load of crap!
All I can say is ? this is a very crappy situation.
That's great to hear. If practical (scale, cost, etc) it would be a great way to recycle nitrogen. Maybe someone will come up with a catchy name, as has been done in similar cases (Milorganite for Milwaukee sewage sludge fertilizer, ZooDoo for recycled zoo animal wastes). It would make for an interesting competition. And we'd need to suggest a Grand Prize.
Yes. There’s a big plant that is using fairly recent technology in King County, WA doing exactly this: using urbane sewage to generate methane.
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