New Biogas Opportunity is Good to Digest
The green energy opportunities of farm waste have been interesting farmers for some years. Modern agriculture produces considerable quantities of slurry which has been stored and spread on the land as required, where of course it has continued to play its part in the cycle of production – saving costs and contributing to efficiency.
Now, thanks to pioneering work by engineers, a breakthrough in the production of biogas using small scale slurry digesters has been achieved, reports Alistair Fell of H&H Renewables, in Carlisle.
Slurry has always held a latent fascination as a potential source of fuel and has been used as such in sewage treatment works in Britain for years, however farm manure has been impractical to recover in any usable way – until, that is, the Feed-in-Tariff was introduced making it financially viable to produce biogas on farms.
Enthusiasm for anaerobic digesters [AD] was quick to bubble forth – especially as energy costs rose, and controversy began to engulf the previously untarnished image of that other form of wind energy!
In an AD plant feedstock (silage, food waste, slurry etc) goes in at one end, and methane gas is produced at the other. The use of AD on farms has been practiced in Europe for over 20 years and it is a well proven technology. The key problem is the cost of developing large scale AD, often in the range of £1-2M.
But though farmers sought other diversification opportunities to produce energy, engineers continued to work on the problem making the AD plants smaller and cheaper. Alastair Fell now reports that a breakthrough has been achieved. “There is now a commercially viable digester available on a scale small enough to work on the average farm. So at a cost of between £150K and £750K, the price begins to smell sweet as well.”read full story
The green energy opportunities of farm waste have been interesting farmers for some years. Modern agriculture produces considerable quantities of slurry which has been stored and spread on the land as required, where of course it has continued to play its part in the cycle of production – saving costs and contributing to efficiency.
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Slurry has always held a latent fascination as a potential source of fuel and has been used as such in sewage treatment works in Britain for years, however farm manure has been impractical to recover in any usable way – until, that is, the Feed-in-Tariff was introduced making it financially viable to produce biogas on farms.
Enthusiasm for anaerobic digesters [AD] was quick to bubble forth – especially as energy costs rose, and controversy began to engulf the previously untarnished image of that other form of wind energy!
In an AD plant feedstock (silage, food waste, slurry etc) goes in at one end, and methane gas is produced at the other. The use of AD on farms has been practiced in Europe for over 20 years and it is a well proven technology. The key problem is the cost of developing large scale AD, often in the range of £1-2M.
But though farmers sought other diversification opportunities to produce energy, engineers continued to work on the problem making the AD plants smaller and cheaper. Alastair Fell now reports that a breakthrough has been achieved. “There is now a commercially viable digester available on a scale small enough to work on the average farm. So at a cost of between £150K and £750K, the price begins to smell sweet as well.”read full story
