KEM,

While I was looking up information about manure digestion, I came across an interesting claim: After you cycle manure through anerobic digestion (i.e. to get the methane out), the slurry afterwards has the same fertilizer value as it had before.

I am a little out of my field but this claim is counterintuitive. If it true, this is a win-win situation for the farmer, he gets the methane for power generation and his fertilizer too.

Since you have a farming background and are an organic gardener, do you have any insight?

Regards,

Bill

Golly Billy, when I was a kid we piled that shit up in a great big pile in the barnyard, far away from the milking stalls area of the barn. In the Spring, we'd fork the cow and bull shit into a manure spreader, we never said the word SHIT, it was manure.

Anyway, then we'd pull that spreader with the Farmall-H tractor out to the fields and spread it, that machine would chop that shit up and sling it all over the area and let the sun purify it before plowing it under. I don't think anyone even thought about methane gas, it didn't smell like gas, it smelled like shit. But you know what? After living on a farm for just one day, you don't even smell it. It sure smelled a lot better on the farms than Detroit or Chicago did. __ Now Pig farms, they have a different smell. __ WOW.

RIGHT!!!!!!!

Ignore the ignorant, Billy, and I believe you are correct when you imply complex thoughts require a more complex writing style. Proper syntax, spelling, and punctuation are essential, too.

One thing that bugs me to no end is people who do not understand that a lack of proper form (ie not capitalizing the first letter in a sentence)seriously detracts from the message trying to be conveyed. It might be acceptable for people such as e.e.cummings, but not very good for effective communication in general.

Whenever I see someone begin a sentence with an "i" in lower case it indicates to me they are either poorly educated, lazy, very young, or have little to say noteworthy of serious considerations. Of course there are always exceptions to rules.

Don't change your method of writing, Billy, especially for our good friend KEM, the jokester in our midst, and I believe KEM will aso agree. Right KEM? :-)

Kem,

I do tend to write convoluted sentences but stupid people are not interested enough in their world to study and post on CD.

To rephrase my last post:

sjc may be right. The 250kilovolts may be a typo. If it is, as he suggests, 250kilowatts, this is a big operation, not just a hobby farmer.

I doubt if you could cover your costs doing this in the US. If the government were to put a subsidy on cow pie power similar to the one on wind power, it might be able to work. Another option would be to pay farmers to collect and destroy the methane.

The methane coming off of the manure is not pure. It is mixed with CO2. It is expensive to get the CO2 out so it is not practical to just add the poopie power gas to the natural gas pipeline.

Better?

Regards,

Bill

Billy, would you plese write, so stupid people could understand what in the hell you are talking about?

This has its place. It is another revenue source for the farmer, but so is selling biomass. Getting energy in this way is very inefficient. It is much more efficient converting biomass to methane by gasification and catalytic conversion.

We probably use way too many animal products as it is. As long as we are going to continue to use crops and energy to raise millions of farm animals, I suppose doing something like this is better than nothing.

There was a science program that showed the "carbon footprint" of a cheeseburger. It was HUGE. All the energy that goes into growing the wheat, raising the cattle, making the beef, transporting the ingredients and so on was staggering. Among cars, coal fired power plants, cheeseburgers and other activities we consume a lot of of energy and emit a lot of pollution. Not to say that we should not do these things, but cutting back just a bit might be a good thing.

sjc,

Your point is well taken on the distribution lines. If this farmer is putting out 250kw, he does not have a little operation behind the barn with a couple of cows. That is some pretty serious power generation.

I haven't run any numbers but I doubt if you could make a business case for this on a commercial basis in the US with the current electricity market. If there were some sort of payment for avoiding methane emission or a production subsidy for the electricity (as is currently used for wind power) generated from manure digestion it might be viable.

Using the methane locally is probably more practical than trying to collect it and sell it to the natural gas grid. The gas coming off a digester is about 60% methane and 40% carbon dioxide. Getting the carbon dioxide out of the mix would be pretty capital intensive for a small operation. As is, the gas would not be acceptable to the grid operators.

Bill

I took it as a typo and assumed 250 kw. 250 kv lines are not brought to farms anywhere, as far as I know. In the U.S., district lines might be as high as 5kv, I believe.

At any rate, it sounds like the group thinks this is a good thing and maybe we should do a bit more of that here.

I could say the same of you Billy, but the difference there being, you're intelligent and wouldn't get into a bull pen. P/S, I was eight years old.

Hey, your longer one was an interesting blog. Glad you're here.

It is true! Kem, you've been slinging bull shit since you were a kid!

Kem,

I have always been facinated by alternative energy technologies. One of those technologies, nuclear fission, has provided my career but I have long been intrigued by other technologies as well.

India has been doing anerobic digestion of cow dung for over 150 years. (see www.mothercow.org). They have a serious doo-doo problem with an average of more than 2 cows/person.

There was a very funny episode of "All Creatures Great and Small" years ago in which a bloated cow was vented and it ended up blowing up the barn because the farmer lit a cigarette while the veterinarian lanced the cow.

There was a story years ago (it might have been in the original Whole Earth Catalog) about a guy either during or right after WW2 in England who converted his small car to run on chicken manure. He just filled a pot in the trunk, added water, waited a few minutes then tootled on down the road.

In all seriousness, if we can prevent the emission of methane it is far more valuable in the battle against global warming than an equivalent weight of carbon dioxide.

Bill

BTW Billy, my farts don't stink, so they must be pure methane and Co2. Silage for milk cows is almost pure corn, we mixed ours with ground up sugar beets and soy beans. We also fed our cows soy beans along with lots of hay, our cream always tested the highest in the state.

We always gave our cows a cupfull of silage at milking time. It was like moonshine and they expected it, it relaxed them. Our prize bull John loved me, I always snuck him a cupfull on my way up to the haymaw, which I forked down the hay chutes. I could ride bare-back on John and everyone else on the farm was scared to death of him. Therefore, I was the one who cleaned the bull pen every day.

~HI LOBSTER~. In our school, they taught us that Little Boy Blue was under the haystack, with Mary Mary Quite Contrary, insurng he lived up to his name. __ Contrary Mary suffered from dyslexia. It was a very progressive Adventist school. The principal's daughter loved pears and she sure always showed it.

Billy, what are you doin here? This article is not about atomic power. Are you expanding your views? BTW, a lot of people have accused me of being full of bull shit, so maybe I do have four stomachs.

Some thoughts on such farmstead power production:

By collecting and burning (either in a fuel cell or a conventional engine) methane from manure you are doing two good things. You are generating renewable electricity and you are preventing the release of a potent green house gas. The electricity is presently the only part of this activity which has an economic reward but the avoidance of methane emissions is probably the greater contribution to humanity.

This activity would not be adaptable to most cattle farming in the US. Most of our cattle are range fed and the manure is too widely distributed to be reasonably collectable. It is only when beef cattle are being finished in a feed lot or when dairy cows are in the milking barn that the manure would be sufficiently concentrated for this type of processing.

Factory farming with livestock caged would probably be more amenable to this type of waste processing. The manure from factory farming is most frequently regarded and treated as an environmental pollutant and hazard rather than a resource.

Note for Lobster: Healthy cattle are not fed corn. Cattle being finished in a feed lot are, in fact, fed corn. It fattens them up and marblizes the meat. Because the corn is too rich a feed, it raises hell with their digestive system. Because their digestive systems are messed up, they are also fed antibiotics.

Kem,

Your burps are not methane unless you have 4 stomachs. (I knew you were weird but not that weird). Life would be more pleasant around some people if their farts were pure methane and CO2. It is the sulphur compounds mixed in with the methane that runs everyone out of the room.

Bill

This story says that the farmer has a stream of 250 kilovolt electricity. This is an obvious indication that either the reporter or the editor (or both) did not know what they were talking about.

If you tell me that you have, like most American homes, both 110 volt and 220 volt outlets, I know how your house is wired but I don't don't have a clue as to how much electricity you use.

Either the wattage must be reported or the current (amperage) and voltage together must be reported to understand the contribution or lack of it from this farmstead.

Bill

bbr,

Franklin Fuel Cells has developed an SOFC that can take fuels like gasoline, diesel and kerosene directly.

http://franklinfuelcells.com/

In this case, you would have synthesis gas from gasifying the plant stalks or methane from this process. Either synthesis gas or methane are directly usable in an SOFC.

By taking the hot expanding gases out of the SOFC and running a gas turbine at the the output, the system can have over 60% efficiency or roughly twice the efficiency of an engine and alternator.

Water treatment and landfill programs should be done, even if they just power themselves. I just wanted to point out the magnitude of energy use in this country. If we can use a little less fossil energy because we use this methane, that is good. Some people might think that these programs are the solution, they can be part of a solution. Like so many things that we can and are doing, they all help.

Thanks george w. bush, for the eloquent expression of your latest ideas.

From which end of your alimentary canal was it expressed?

lizard, please provide a link (or google inputs) to the hydrogen injection information.

Thanks.

sjc, I like rmi.org's negawatts which you say the present U.S. Administration does not mention.

The administration also dares not mention negaconsumers. A world of one-child (It would be a Onerful World) families would have a magnificent positive impact on the environment but the impact would be delayed.

World-wide, there are currently enough young girls who have not yet given birth to increase the human population for several decades having only one child each.

Why does the administration they not mention negaconsumers?

It requires the consumption and taxed-away excess production of millions of producing, consuming individuals to provide for each mega-millionaire. AND WE SURELY NEED MORE OF THOSE.

Technology exists to inject small amounts of hydrogen into the cylinder to create an almost 100% combustion, increasing mileage and reducing pollution to almost zero. At the end of a run this vehicles tail pipe is not hot and can be grabbed without problem. This technology would reduce the profits of oil companies so it has been bought and made to disappear. Expect more of the same.

The company I work for and other local companies got together and built landfill gas projects at 3 local landfills. The landfill gas is 50% methane which is passed through special membrane filters that only pass methane and then it is sent into the nearest gas pipeline.

The smaller of the plants produces enough gas for our plant which uses over a million cuft per day. The landfill gas used to be burned off at the landfill previously. So instead of 2 sources of CO2 emissions, it is now one.

lobster February 14th, 2008 11:26 pm "At one time every kid knew cows weren't to be pastured in the corn."

We shouldn't be feeding any kind of grain to cattle. Cows are grass eater pure and simple. You haven't eaten a good tasting steak till you eaten grass feed beef. Grains will fatten them up quicker but fatting them up is all your doing. Actually good quality pastures will beef up cattle just as quick as grain feeding. If the ranchers would spend more time on improving their range instead of supplementing the cows diet with grain we would all be better off.

sjc_1 February 14th, 2008 1:08 pm "I think you need to go through the numbers. Most waste water treatment plants make enough methane to power the plant and that is about it. It take billions of tons of matter to make the energy we need to do the job. All the people and cows in the U.S. are not up to the task."

It doesn't matter if it would just make enough to power the plant. I personally think it would make some excess. What's more important it would be a better method of handling the waste. The waste would be converted into a very good by-product called compost. Compost is a far better product to spread on the land than untreated manure. It could easily be spread on public parks without any damage to anyone or nature.

Plus there are other animals to be considered such as chickens. Chicken manure is one of the worst manures you can spread on the ground. Once it's composted though it is far better than commercial fertilizers for spreading on the land.

I agree we can't use this method to supply the whole country with energy but it would help in decreasing our dependence on foreign energy and make the country a cleaner place.

I've been talking shit for years. This is the energy source that isn't going to run out and that we all contribute to, (even the libertarians). From each according to their bowels, to each according to their need. A vital part of the needed restructuring of our country for the new environment is to build publicly own boimass plants and generators in every region and to have them connected by a national power grid. We could run the country independently including electric transport systems.

Well methane doen't smell, gases associated with it do. Forget that Chem point.
YES methane can and should be used. Without a push and subsidies from the Government it can't happen on the large scale NEEDED. THIS Govt is opposed to all this green/60's stuff going agains big business (producing Ur own energy at the farm? that is a communist concept for sure!).
Methane can also be produced from digestion of sludge resulting frlom waste water (sewage)treatment. Instead in the US it is dehydrated (cost in energy) and dispoded of in landfills, or worse, incinerated (huge energy waste). urban sludge digestors are cheap to build and operate, they produce large amount of methane + alittle of other gases.
It does supply energy directly as fuel for boilers suppliying heat to part of cities in France. Amounts of CH4 from sludge, on a single site, are huge and were already cost effective in the early 70's...
We know we can do it. Who in CONGRESS IS PUSHING IT? WHO HAVE WE ELECTED WHO WILL EVEN MENTION IT?
Environmental Engineers have known of the technique for decades so some in Congress know. WHOSE INTERESTS DO THEY SERVE?
A former Env Eng.
Chris

Electricity is not Necessary for Civilized Existence.

(thought I'd remind folks of that)

-matti

What is not mentioned is that in Europe this is heavily subsidized, meaning the public pays for it, while agribusiness profits.

The Sierra Club pointed out that even if all the 7,000 farms in the U.S. cited by the EPA as "good candidates" were to use the technology, they could only produce 0.0002 percent of all energy consumed in our country today ( Germanys 1% is for electricity only).

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/01/07/eco.about.manure/index.html?iref=newssearch

If the 4 giants four giants that control 64% of hog production - Smithfield Foods, Tyson, Swift and Hormel are not doing it, then it is probably not profitable enough. It's that simple.

We do not need another industry that privatizes profits with little public benefit, but which is subsidized with our tax dollars. If it was profitable without our money, agribusiness would do it on its own.

" And it's also green on the homeland security scale. Big centralized power plants make attractive terrorist targets, but small biogas generators scattered throughout the countryside don't."

Right, scare us into wanting to pay for biogas. Get stuffed.

I believe there is plenty of oil and that declared Oil reserves, and supply, are being artificially controlled to drive up the price by creating the market perception there is a shortage. This serves to inhibit growth in the developing world, depress our own economy to keep the people distracted trying to make ends meet, and gives Big Oil greater profits, and creates a national security crisis which justifies to our military the need to grab Iraq and occupy it and keep their oil from China and islamic extremists.(The pentagon uses more oil each day than many countries)

Our proven reserves today in the US are almost the same as in 1948. How can this be?. For one, Big Oil does not like to increase its declared proven reserves as this reduces it depletion allowance (eg if they have 100 million on income on oil sales oil sales, but their proven reserves decrease by 30 million, then their taxable income is reduced by 30 million). Also, shrinking reserves mean higher prices. In other words, there is a financial reason for understating our reserves, as well as global reserves.

Then there are oil reserves in deep oceans and other areas of the world that are untapped but expensive to recover or in countries we do not control-yet. Add to this oil sands, oil shale, methane hydrates, all of them can be tapped into once oil really does become scarce and prices high enough to justify the cost. Oil from Oil sands is already being extracted and Oil shale can supply our energy needs for 110 years but would require nuclear energy to make it practical (no sense using 2 barrels of oil to get 1 barrel).

If oil was really such an issue, wouldn't we announce a War on Oil Dependence and a national commitment for a Manhattan Project,in order to make oil a secondary transportation and energy source within 20 years?.

Of course not, even though we may indeed have such a project, because doing so would cause oil prices to take a big hit, and so would Big Oils profits. Worst of all, people and countries would have more money to spend on other things that help people, like food, and make them harder to control.

How would we pay for this project, assuming we are not already paying? We can create our own money and stop borrowing from the Fed money they create out of thin air, and we do this by nationalizing the Federal Reserve system.

Of course, the Federal reserve system is the means to keep the living standards low with taxation, interest, and inflation and thus transferring Americas wealth to the international financiers in order that they may build the new world economic order that will enslave the world with debt.

As Henry Kissinger once said, control the oil and you control nations, control the food, and you control people. High oil prices means poorer nations, and people can not afford as much food, since energy inputs for food are significant today, food prices go up. This allows us to intervene and loan them money, and keep them dependent on the USD which is required by OPEC to buy oil.

High oil prices are a win win for Big - Oil, Bank and Agribusiness cartels, not to mention the Military Industrial Complex which has made a pile out of our War on Terror

This theory also ties into our sudden turn around on nuclear energy in the 70's and that very suspicous and conveniently timed TMI accident.

More information is here.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8070

Instead of looking for a one size fits all, we need methane powered electricity generators on farms, solar collecting roofs on every building in the sunny southwest, tidal turbines by the coasts, wind farms in the mountains and the plains and also for them to be incorporated into ALL new office buildings. Many sizes for many (differing) strengths and conditions.

No, one size won't fit all but doing each separate smaller one adds up to one hell of a lot when combined overall. The one size fits all solution, as yet unavailable, is seeking the $$$ first rather than first ameliorating or solving the problem. Oil is a one size fits all used everywhere in the world and so is very profitable for the stockholders. They seek a twin to that economic system, as if their profit is more important than survival... even their own.

Searching for the one size solution is delaying our sanity, if you ask me. But since you didn't ask me ...I'll tell you anyway. As yet the search for the big profit one size fits all solution like a hydrogen cell or the amazingly rapid turn towards ethanol is still a search based on targetting the big money first.

If they mandated use and provided subsidies for installation of solar roofing in a state like Arizona... tell me that Arizonans wouldn't ALL have virtually free air conditioning all day? Some act like that doesn't matter but then with true disconnect say individuals (sans solar) should cut down their electricity use ...say by using less air conditioning.

As yet we depend on the big boys to come up with their solution in the face of alternatives which are already available. Meanwhile... the toast is starting to burn which will happen if you leave it in the toaster too long.

As the north polar ice cap threatens to melt away completely in summer within TEN years... the big boys assure us that we can't just rush into ... saving ourselves.

Survival has to be highly profitable or no deal? Who knew?

sjc_ AND OTHERS: Cows don't eat corn. This rhyme is a nursery joke. At one time every kid knew cows weren't to be pastured in the corn.

"Come blow your horn.
The sheep's in the meadow;
The cow's in the corn."

You see, Little Boy Blue was under the haystack fast asleep.

I think car seats should have a mandatory gas evacuator via tube and an onboard humanure composter that feeds into the engine air intake, and beans required for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

but I'm just a nutjob anyway.

sjc;
I guess you would be trading one polluant (CH4) for another (smog). Not the nicest choice. Are they getting anywhere on fuel cells that can handle gasoline or other light hydrocarbons a refinery can produce with a balance of finished products? Is it possible?

Next time wear a helmet and don't go to Taco Bell first!

Methane is 23 times more potent as a GHG than CO2 and you are right, using it is better than emitting it. I would rather clean it and use it in Solid Oxide Fuel Cells than put it in an Internal Combustion Engine. You create no smog producing NOX with the fuel cell and it is more than twice as efficient.

Which brings up the topic of pollution. What controls does the farmer have to have on his engine generator? When there is a power outage and company diesel generators come on, there is a major smog problem. Local generator engines do not have the same pollution controls that autos do.

Oh my gosh BBR you were right. I did on a skate board and it ran me into the wall. ___ Those short hairs now are gonna itch.

There are lots of old garbage dumps where the methane is being used in power plants. Staten Island has a large one near the Outer Bay bridge area. I actually believe they did that because of the fear that half the island would explode someday. I remember the constuction workers found a lot of half buried bodies out there when they drilled down to the gas, it was one of the Mafia's grave yards.

Kem Patrick:

Light a candle and bend over. Try not to catch your pubies on fire. Ask your wife how big the flame was, and then try a burp.

(Tried once by some goofy Boy Scouts staying at Fort Belvoir. That Captain was pissed!)

Its better to capure methane and burn it to CO2 anywhere its produced, even if savings on purchased fuel or electricity are modest. Methane is a much stronger GHG than CO2. Its produced anyway, might as well get rid of it. I believe landfill methane in Pennsauken, NJ is sent to a company called Aluminum Shapes that makes aluminum hardware for swimming pools. I'm sure that is just one of hundreds of examples.

Every once in a while you hear about a farm hand suffocating from methane when he goes to shovel out the manure pit. Every farm with such a pit could have a small generator as described in the article.

Aren't my farts methane gas? How come burps aren't? I agree they have a different odor. ___Usually.

canuckchuck: "I think burning ANTTHING for energy causes greenhouse gases". Actually the net greenhouse gas production is zero. Plant matter absorbs C02 from the atmosphere, it is eaten by cows, expelled as methane, then coverted back to C02 and released into the atmosphere. Leaving it as methane is worse since it is a more potent greenhouse gas.

Yes Big_Money! That's the point, it's no single solution. A broad portfolio of conservation plus renewables is the key. This could be part of that.

Wind, Solar, geo-thermal and tidal are the key. If we don't soon have a massive world wide program to use those fuels for our power plants, we human Dodos will go the way of the birdy Dodos.

We must stop burning off the forests also and have electrical powered vehicles. If we don't do those things, the really big stored up gas, the methane in our oceans and the Arctic perma frost, is going to erupt into our atmosphere and kill us. __ All of us.

Imagine that 1 ton of corn stalks could make more than 100 therms of methane (natural gas) through gasification. Now take that same ton and feed it to a cow over several months. I would doubt that you could get 1/10th that much methane.

You have a major reduction of energy through the cow. The cow has to stay alive, keep warm, produce milk, cheese, beef and hides for the markets. If we did with less animal products we could have much more energy to run our economies. But it is not an either or situation.

We can have the corn for the people and the cattle and the corn stalks for fuel to heat our homes and run our cars. Not bad for the same land, water and fertilizer used.

ummm...I think burning ANTTHING for energy causes greenhouse gases...why not go with wind, solar, wave and tidal action based power??

what is this fetish with burning stuff?

KEM read the headline like I did - Fart power!

It is much more tasty and satisfying to use carbohydrates like ethanol (mixed with water and other items) as a major source of transportation fuels. It does require limiting range and a healthy dose of exercise.

Any engineer should tell you that a vehicle to payload mass ratio of 20:1 is insane except for the most expensive and demanding applications (of which space travel is the most expensive). Yet, in USA, this number is common, and the average may well be higher.

For most people, eating organic means a trip to the local whole-foods store—and, often, a hit to their wallets. For the Dervaes family, eating organic only requires a trip behind the house. The family of four raises three tons of food each year—enough to supply three-quarters of their diet and maintain a thriving organic produce business to boot.

Jules, along with his son Justin and daughters Anaïs and Jordanne, lives on one-fifth of an acre in suburban Pasadena, California, and cultivates about half the property, or one-tenth of an acre. Given that the average American's diet requires 1.2 acres of farmland per person, the Dervaeses are eating quite well off one-fiftieth of the land the rest of us require.

Let's put those numbers—one-tenth of an acre, three tons of food—in perspective. Granted, comparing monoculture (single-crop) farms with the Dervaeses' (300 varieties of flora and counting) is literally like comparing apples and oranges. As a means of comparison, the California Department of Food and Agriculture reports that most California corn or rice farms produce an annual yield of less than a half-ton per acre and the average bean farm one-fifth of a ton per acre. The Dervaeses' operation is about 60 to 150 times as efficient as their industrial competitors, without relying on chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

For more on this story, see:

http://www.naturalhomemagazine.com/Garden/2006-05-01/Pasadena-paradise.aspx

Exactement, sjc. Not only is it greener and more cost effective, but so much of it is in the hands of you and me. While my hippieCommieLiberal governement has offered tokens of support for my efficiency efforts, the big win on the money side is the shrinking bills. Not only is the watt not used the cleanest, the dollar not spent is also not taxed as any other income would be.

Don't wait for the government. (Do I really need to even say that?) Slash your energy waste in a million ways. It helps everyone except those who you're pissed at.

This is what the Rocky Mountain Institute (rmi.org) calls "negawatts". The most cost effective watt is the one that you do not use. Conservation is many times more cost effective than production. This is something that the present U.S. administration does not mention, because it does not make more money for their friends in oil and coal.

And now a plug for my favorite free form of energy - CONSERVATION.

Have you completely weather sealed the place where you live? (Question does not apply to people who live in idyllic places and have no heating or air-conditioning equipment - or who live in nice new uber-efficient homes)

If not, do it. Read about how on the web, set aside a little bit of money and a fair bit of time, and do it.

Reducing your energy consumption by 10, 20, 30, 40% is a heck of a lot easier, cheaper, and better for the environment and the economy (if not the GDP...) than getting that wasted 10, 20, 30, 40% generated in some "preferable" way.

Here is the EPA's list of methane-producing sources in the US.

http://epa.gov/methane/sources.html

It includes a high percentage of methane gas emissions for coalbeds and rice production as well as a number of other sources I'd never have thought of.

In the United States, the largest methane emissions come from the decomposition of wastes in landfills, ruminant digestion and manure management associated with domestic livestock, natural gas and oil systems, and coal mining.

I think you need to go through the numbers. Most waste water treatment plants make enough methane to power the plant and that is about it. It take billions of tons of matter to make the energy we need to do the job. All the people and cows in the U.S. are not up to the task.

One farmer may be able to create 250 kw of power, but that is only 1/1000 of a very small gas turbine power plant. Most of those are on the order of 300 megawatts and that is considered a small plant. So now you need 1000 of these farmers to equal only 1 very small power plant and there are 1000s of those plants required to power the country.

You can collect it with socks? Well that would be much more comfortable, I have plans drawn up for a rather complicated gizmo, valves, tubing, gages and a holding tank with a pressure relief safety valve.

Shit, never mind.

If you added human manure, you could quite likely power whole cities. Wastewater treatment is a continual headache and a huge expense for cities. In the South and midWest, hog farm wastes could also be composted this way, somewhat alleviating another huge problem for various areas.

And WHY is it that people object when solutions are offered by saying, "Well, THAT can't do everything"? The report didn't make that claim, just that 1% of Germany's energy needs are met with bioenergy.

We NEED different kinds of energy technologies to take advantage of local waste products and other wind, water, or solar energy resources if they can contribute to alleviating our energy dependence on oil.

This is another example of how some other countries manage to champion sensible things without most of us in America noticing it much. Most of us know, for instance, that at least 20 other major nations know how to do health care for half the price here. But few of us know the details of exactly how they do what they do and exactly how they politically attained their systems. Calling all international participants at CD! Details, please. More details. We're a tad dense (not to mention collectively self-absorbed) over here and could use your help. Really. (And, thanks, too.)

Kem, as I understand, only your downstream gas contains useful chemical potential energy. Further, I'm lead to believe that socks are a much more comfortable choice than the apparatus you would need to collect said gas.

sjc, your arguement that you can't power whole cities this way is a dangerous bit of propeganda from Big Energy that is used to dispel each and every practical alternative.

No single solution exists. Yet, enough solutions exist to solve the problem together.

Jeez, I could argue that the none of the things they're using to power this city, hydro, coal, gas, nuke, wind, sun, could power a whole city, because none of them do.

That makes for an interesting story, but you can not power whole cities this way. You can power whole cities by using the corn, wheat and rice STALKS as feed stock for cellulose biofuels. You grow the same crops for feed and food that you always did, but now you have a use for the plant stalks that were just waste.

We can create methane, methanol, ethanol, gasoline, kerosene, diesel and just about any other synthetic fuel by using the synthesis gas created from plant stalks.

This is no modern science, it has been known, proven and used for decades. All we need now is the will to do it on a large scale NOW.

anney, oh my the things that can be done but not talked about. All sorts of things can be burned and/or fermented to generate electricity, and then the heat left over from the generation can be used to heat stuff. Yup, our waste, in all it's unpleasant forms.

I'd like to see them drop energy from that insane "GDP" figure they all worship. If someone wastes energy, it gets added to the GDP. So for the same amount of actual stuff (food, clothing, shelter, gizmos, etc...) you can "increase" the GDP by wasting more energy along the way. Who actually benefits from this? That's an important question.

If suddenly we had micro-fusion AA cells that could power a house and cost pennies to make, these GDP idiots would up and claim that it was devastating to the economy, because, plain and simple, all that money that's not being spent foolishly isn't being spent. Which is a pretty foolish claim. All that human potential that isn't being wasted on waste, would go into something else.

So, to answer your question, "why not human wastes, too" - I'd answer "because humans feel they must waste"

I often pass gas, (both ends), and have wondered if it could be trapped in some manner and saved until there was enough to use in a productive way, such as a foot warmer for example. Having cold feet is said to be a bad situation.

If cattle manure works as an energy source, why not human wastes, too? That would be one answer to the expense of US wastewater treatment plants -- at least some usable energy could be gotten from the deal.

Another wonderful example. So much could be done.

I recently watched a political debate, in which one of the "Fringe" candidates was advocating this kind of thing, plus conservation, as a viable way to eliminate the need to build costly, polluting generating stations. The "Mainstream" canditates agreed that this approach was not consistent with economic growth, and so the debate moved on.

And I've been pretty pissed about it ever since.

This is happening in N.W. Connecticut right now.A large (15 MW)? plant will be utilizing manure pits from dairy farms.The spent slurry solids pressed into fiber pots"poop pots" and the digested liquid spread for fertiliser.The surplus power will be sold to the grid for extra farm income.Decentralised co-generation is the way to go.Look for solar electric cars being recharged by rooftop photovoltaic tiles in the next 10 years.Diesel hybrid heavy trucks are also a reality.Now if the microbiologists perfect celulosic ethanol production and industrial Hemp and algae and phytoplancton can be added to the mix we can end the conflict between food and fuel.We can use marginal and non agricultural "wastelands" to grow energy without affecting food prices negatively.These technologies are not new they just need to be tweaked to todays needs.We need the new "Apollo project" to encourage the investment to get it done !Tax incentives to encourage private investment,and public investments for regional infrastructure. peace