New Energy Source?

The proverbial crock of shit. Art

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Old news. How about Human waste? There's tons of it, and there are plenty of Digesters installed at waste processing plants that generate enough gas to run their operations.

Cheers

Chopped wet grass produces ~7.8 x more methane per cubic foot than does manure. (195 m^3 per tonne, vs 25 m^3 per tonne).

The king is 'residual fats' at 600 m^3 per tonne.

--Winston

Ensilaged grass is 7.8 x as efficient, and way more pleasant going into the digester. Coming out, it's about a wash.

Pun intended.

--Winston

Wasn't cow farts supposed to be a Major Factor in GW?? A better source for "new energy" is to capture and use the deamon that turns pant legs and shirt arms inside out in the washer and dryer...

ean-energy-bs/

There is a huge amount of energy in all the hot air coming out of politicians, Obummer or Al Bore may exceed a megawatt each.

Folks in India and a few other places have been getting natural gas from manure for years. In Sunnyvale California the same is done with human waste. It converts the chemical energy content into something useful and massively reduces the polution.

Chopped wet grass produces ~7.8 x more methane per cubic foot than does manure. (195 m3 per tonne, vs 25 m3 per tonne).

The king is 'residual fats' at 600 m3 per tonne.

At last! A use for McD hamburger!

--Winston

The nice thing about manure is that its price is often minus so your cost of raw materials makes your profit greater not less.

Mother Earth News covered that subject about 40 years ago.

(...)

Do I have that backwards?

Here's a pickup price for steer manure:

That's $27 a yard. ~110 lbs/cu. ft. = 990 lbs per yard. = 0.45 tonne So sixty smackers gets you a tonne of steer manure. That should yield 25 m^3 of biogas which can be cleaned up to result in 12.5 m^3 of methane.

I can pick up a yard of chopped grass off the street for approximately $0 and earn the thanks of the homeowner and city just about any week day.

That's $0 a yard. 74 lbs/cu. ft. = 667 lbs per yard. =.303 tonne So zero smackers gets you a tonne of chopped grass. That should yield 195 m^3 of biogas which can be cleaned up to result in 97.5 m^3 of methane.

Recapping:

Steer manure: $4.80 per m^3 of methane. Chopped grass: $0.00 per m^3 of methane.

Seems like chopped grass is less expensive.

--Winston

The manure is all in one place. How many homes have a ton of grass clippings by the street? The manure would be loaded with a front end loader, taking a couple minutes. How long would it take you to load all the grass clippings? Some towns have laws against picking you anything left for their trucks. How many tickets do you want to pay?

If you only need a few cubic meters, you're likely correct -- often for small quantities of goods the economics are backwards or at least seemingly arbitrary (e.g., some folks running their cars off of biodiesel are able to freely obtain grease from french fry fryers -- "free fuel").

But if you need to to produce thousands of cubic meters per day, every day... the manure might easily start to look (if not smell :-) ) more attractive.

This is problem with a lot of alternative energy sources... many don't scale well. With the so-called "smart grid" this purpotedly won't matter as much, at least... but I think to date the smart grid has been about 95% hype.

---Joel

Apparently someone is going around the rest stops attaching stickers to the hand dryers in the restrooms that say: "Push here for a brief message from your President"

I keep the chopped grass on my lawn. My guess is that yours is knee deep in bullshit.

Did you have a question? :)

--Winston

Thus the new chains and padlocks on those "waste" grease drums.

See, every month, I pay an extra 25% surcharge on natural gas because I *always* exceed the first 'baseline' quantity tier. Once, I actually got to the third tier! That was an awe-inspiring bill.

I don't really need gigawatts. I need 15 therms a month to keep me on the first tier. A one gallon slurry jug should produce upwards of 18 therms a month for three months before recharging.

Not a chance. If your digester uses free fuel and produces 7 x more methane than my digester (that I have to pay to fuel), I'm gonna have a rough time convincing you to swap with me, yes?

I don't know anything about that. I get uneasy when I see a computer running a slot machine or a gas meter though. :)

--Winston

None that you or DimBulb could possibly answer, no.

That is only the price when you want it. When you have a lot of cows, you have it but don't want it. When the supply is large and the demand is negative, the price tends to be low.