grabbed by the tabloids

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grabbed by the tabloids

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dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 46207
Location: yes

Posted: Sat Nov 20, 21 5:00 am Post subject: grabbed by the tabloids

gong farming would be a more accurate headline, at that sort of scale and with a constant feedstock the amount of energy they could potentially harvest is significant

if i understand them properly, digesters are creatures of habit and like the same food at every meal

that they have that many moos in places where they can harvest dung efficiently is rather disturbing, but they have, and it seems a useful way to harvest energy from a problem

digesters only work well at big scale with a constant feedstock, biogas from a trench of compost is low tech and has many issues, ditto landfill methane etc
moo leccy is practical and reduces the forcings in several ways
non fossil leccy
no free methane
"greenish" feedstock(it is waste but what were they eating?)
decent quality fertilizer(if the food was not toxic)
a predictable feedstock under the control of the users is necessary to ensure smooth operation of a continuous feed bio-fermenting process
a battery or biocide in a domestic biowastes collection style operation could take out a digester powerstation for weeks and the public are notoriously slack with waste streams(see commercial potting composts, drigg etc)

Mistress Rose

Joined: 21 Jul 2011
Posts: 15965

Posted: Sat Nov 20, 21 10:22 am Post subject:

Anaerobic digesters are a good way of disposing of things like slurry. I think that Arla are saying that the entire herd used for their milk/dairy products amounts to that number, but they are on different farms. A lot of farmers bring their cattle in for the winter, and that slurry does need to be disposed of, so a good way. A lot of dairy herds are housed inside, so produce slurry all year round.

Hairyloon

Joined: 20 Nov 2008
Posts: 15425
Location: Today I are mostly being in Yorkshire.

Posted: Sat Nov 20, 21 2:35 pm Post subject:

Anaerobic methanogenesis is not a complex process, or rather it is, but the bacteria deal with all the complexity.
I believe that it can be quite difficult to optimise the process, but gas can be produced with just a bucket, though not to any extent that it's useful.

I'm frankly baffled as to why we don't see more of it about. I'm sure there are advantages of doing it on a massive scale, but it does also work at a smaller scale.

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28233
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Sun Nov 21, 21 7:57 am Post subject:
Wow, those stats are interesting. Though give weight to the issues of Cow emissions when not done.

Mistress Rose

Joined: 21 Jul 2011
Posts: 15965

Posted: Sun Nov 21, 21 9:11 am Post subject:
Possibly if the dung is spread it won't produce so much methane. I know that wood decomposes to produce carbon dioxide in air and methane in anaerobic conditions, so would imagine that dung would do the same only faster. They have been doing a lot of dung spreading round here this autumn, but a lot of it was humanure, which is rather pongy until it gets washed into the soil.

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