Brown Power
Posted by Glenn on March 4, 2006 - 9:36pm in The Oil Drum: Local
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: biomass, brown power, manure, oil, peak oil [list all tags]
The NY Times is really starting to get the complexities of examining potential alternative energy projects. Despite the obvious toilet humor potential of the subject, they had a serious editorial today about converting manure to power:
As a livestock farmer and environmental lawyer, I've paid particular attention to discussion about using manure as "green power." The idea sounds appealing, but power from manure turns out to be a poor source of energy. Unlike solar or wind, it can create more environmental problems than it solves. And it ends up subsidizing large agribusiness. That's why energy from manure should really be considered a form of "brown power."
The article goes on to say that subsidizing manure to energy projects may artificially increase the size of livestock farms, which has all sorts of impacts on energy consumption and the local environment of those farms. Indeed, subsidies continue to skew all analyses of different project's true value.
I couldn't agree more with the last paragraph of the article:
Using manure as power sounds like a good idea, but it's not. The energy that can be generated from manure is not worth the expense. And by lowering industrial animal operations' cost of production, subsidizing manure power pushes family farms further toward the brink of extinction. Our money would be better spent investing in truly sustainable, sensible ways of producing energy and food.
As I mentioned before which was picked up by the local political blog - Gotham Gazette, we need a common understanding of the boundaries/terminology of a proper EROI analysis of alternative fuels to decide where to invest our resources. At least if everyone can agreed on the terms of the debate we might actually have one!
I suspect fertilizer is the better use for it.
A. There needs to be large scale livestock farms so we might as well collect the waste and convert it to local energy.
OR
B. The best model is sustainable organic agriculture where crops and livestock co-exist or livestock is raised free range.
I prefer B. In that context, manure is not concentrated enough to make it's collection worthwhile.
My advice is to dont bother if A or B is best but make the equipment movable and recycleable if the site it was used on ends up being outcompeted.
I suspect you are right. The two most petroleum-dependent industries are transportation and agriculture. People seem willing to accept that transportation is going to have to change fundamentally, but not many think the same about agriculture.
C. The best model is to size farms such that energy from manure and other byproducts can be captured and the nutrients recycled. The actual division between grazing/feeding hay in barns is part of the determination of optimum size.
I beg to differ a bit. The die-off of pathogenic organisms depends on the HRT (hyrdraulic retention time) and temperature of digester operation. The most common are plug flow mesophilic systems operating at about 100F and pathogen reduction is only several logs. The thermophilic systems, operating at 140F or higher, essentially produce a sterile product.
With respect to reduction of nutrient content, the most important impact may be the potential reduction of soil carbon, which has an adverse impact on both soil productivity and atmospheric CO2 level. The impact on soil health and productivity is likely a major weak point of all non-food energy production schemes; some refer to these as "dirt burning".
Take a look at:
Building Soils for Better Crops http://www.sare.org/publications/soils.htm (in print and on-line)
The Soil Biology Primer http://soils.usda.gov/sqi/concepts/soil_biology/index.html
Glomalin: Hiding Place for a Third of the World's Stored Soil Carbon
http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/sep02/soil0902.htm
Soil Carbon Center
http://soilcarboncenter.k-state.edu/
Several blogs that cover topics in this area are Muck and Mystery http://www.garyjones.org/mt/ and Transect Points http://transectpoints.blogspot.com/
Sure beats cutting down your forests to brew tea.
However, in a systems economy, we are then have energy as the sole output, and are lacking in milk, cheese, steak, and dogfood.
As Ive said - its all going to come down to tradeoffs.
I think the real questions should be what is the best use of different types of land to sustain human life as best as possible.
Though a philosopher might transpose your question to 'what is the best use of different types of humans to sustain land life as best as possible'
A thread that seems to go through the author's argument is that small private farms can't afford to install digesters or other energy recovery means, that they only make sense for large factory farms, so promoting digesters only encourages the large factory farms. Well, I would think that the large factory farms (some call them animal concentration camps) aren't going to go out of existence any time soon, so why not at least have them recover some of the energy content of the manure? The evils of large factory farms do not in and of themselves negate the benefits of performing some energy recovery.
It should also be pointed out that anaerobic digestion for the purpose of stabilizing waste and generating methane is hardly a new technology and is currently being practiced at probably thousands of sewage treatment plants and feedlots around the world. There is not much that is untried and ground-breaking here.
The burning of manure in an energy-recovery incinerator or in a power plant through the mixing of the manure with other fuel is a whole other matter. As I see it, one of the big drawbacks to this route is that all manure has a rather high nitrogen content, which causes the stack gases from such combustion to be high in nitrogen oxides, a major contributor to photo-chemical smog. This is a non-trivial air pollution issue.
The modern mega livestock feedlot is a perfect example of a serious dislocation between sources and sinks. Huge quantities of feed are grown elsewhere and then imported to the feedlot. This feed is converted into animal mass, carbon dioxide, and manure. The animal mass is exported from the feedlot, but the manure remains. It is usually not economically feasible to return the manure (and hence its fertilizer value) back to the producers of the feed. So, nitrogen is leaving one agricultural area and piling up in another. The former is depleted of nitrogen, so synthetic fertilizers have to be used, while the latter has a surplus of nitrogen and hence a serious disposal problem.
Bogus argument. Nothing stops several small farms from cooperating with running a methane plant. It gives more transportation but a giant farm anyway has a long way to get all the manure out on the fields.
I'm not so sure about that myself. Not because I have any delusions about agribusiness, but because the economics will change as oil prices rise. I think the Green Revolution that swallowed so many family farms may unwind, as fuel, fertilizer, and pesticide prices keep rising. Plus there may be a lot more labor available as the economy tanks.
O.K. folks, let's talk. creg says, in the post I am replying to, <Plants need water, nutrients and oxygen>
He left out something pretty important there: Sun, or at least light. Essentially, a manure to methane digester is getting the power of the sun in plants, using an animal as the intermediary. Big deal, you say, but it actually is, because nature has provided one of the few workable ways to convert sunlight, along with the above mentioned ingredients, into a vapor or liquid fuel...something man has difficulty doing by technical means (the only way I know of doing is by electrolysis of water to hydrogen with solar power).
Now, we are taking as for the granted the following:
>Humans will keep eating meat, cheese, eggs, drinking milk, and wearing leather for some time to come. So the need for the plants to feed these animals is a given. The water consumption is a given. The oxygen intake which is converted to carbon dioxide release of the animal is a given.
We will live with those either way. What is not a given is that we will recapture some of the solar power in the animal. This can only be done by (a) working the animal as a beast of burden (don't laugh, it worked for a few thousand years before John Deere was ever born), or, methane capture from the animals waste. Now, it would be different if the methane was not going to be produced anyway. It would be a poor conversion, we all agree, to raise cows as solar converters. But, if we are going to have livestock anyway, the methane recapture is purely that, a recapture of energy (methane) as solar energy in gas or vapor form, ala artificial natural gas, made by solar power.
By the way, despite the media's love of giving the Japanese credit for inventing everything, including the sun itself if they thought the reader would buy it, this technology is already well under way in the U.S.
http://www.distributedenergy.com/de_0601_star.html
Also gaining in acceptance is systems to use methane gas from sewer systems (because we assume humans are going to keep converting food into...uh, you know...let's call it recoverable human solar power! :-)
Another promising area is of course waste landfill gas, which allows the possible recapture of some of our wasteful ways. AGAIN, wasting to produce fuel won't make sense, but if the waste is already there....
Let me close with something of a philosophical point that is troubling to me.
TOD is a fascinating place, I drop by every day. The folks here are bright and well read, educated often in the broadest sense.
Very troubling however is the drumbeat of defeatism. The motto here seems to be "All worship the gods of crude oil and natural gas, and have no other gods before them, because any alternative is doomed to defeat."
Let us try to recall that mankind developed a high degree of cultural sophistication, art, government, education, religion and philosophy MANY CENTURIES before the first oil well was drilled, and sustained the said culture for centuries before the age of fossil fuel.
OIL AND GAS ARE GOOD AT PROVIDING AFFORDABLE, PORTABLE, COMPACT ENERGY. We admit that, we admire that. But the planet Earth is AWASH in a sea of energy, from the sun, the wind, internal geology, the surge of the waves, biotic processes that occur EVERY SECOND on land, under the sea, and even in the dirt beneath our feet....oil and gas are good, on an EROEI basis, but they are just not that dammed good.
It is amazing that if some incorporates a few used 55 gallon drums from a junk pile and some copper tubing to recapture waste gas, it has to be billed pound for pound, jot for jot, into the EROEI equation to prove that the steel in the drums in the junkyard HAD to have consumed energy when they were made sometime back in the 1960's, proving the EROEI balance JUST WON'T WORK FOR ALTERNATIVES....but no one tries to balance the 3 nuclear powered aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, complete with their extreme high tech aircraft, support and defense cruisers, and patrol planes, all running at full steam 24 hours a day against the EROEI equation used to get that dammd crude oil (and what about the ship that will carry the oil, the tractor trailer that will deliver it, and the concrete white lit 24 hour a day convenience store to sell it....the EROEI ON CRUDE OIL IS NOT NEARLY AS GOOD AS IT APPEARS IF YOU COUNT EVERY OUNCE OF FUEL TO GET IT TO AGAINST IT, which is only fair, it's the way the alternatives are counted to dissuade anyone from even trying them.
BTW, where do I go to talk about solutions?
Well, think about it. If most babies are male, then females become relatively scarce and their status and value rises. This would be a bad thing????????
Another form of traditional population control is social stratification. Lower classes traditionally have had much higher death rates than higher social classes--e.g. in early Victorian England. Currently it is an Article of Faith that all citizens (and maybe resident aliens and maybe illegal immigrants) should have all technologically available medical care always and regardless of costs.
If current trends continue, all economic resources would be consumed by medical care in a relatively short period of time, roughly fifty years, depending on which society you look at. I have news: Current trends are not going to continue, but find me a politician brave enough in the U.S. to face up to the necessity for rationing medical care . . . and I'll vote for him or her.
Those who deny reality strike ice bergs and sink.
I have been politically incorrect all my life,and won way more than I lost. Being NPC does not require being a world class jerk (WCJ)--- like Larry Summers, like.
My point is that certain truths are unpleasant to face, such as that if the ratio of males to females is say, three to two, there will be much less potential for population increase than with an equal number of males and females.
Do you then approve of abortion as a means to select gender of offspring? This technique is widely used today in India.
Indeed, many anthropologists argue that this why males are considered superior to females in most cultures. It justifies female infanticide. You can't just tell people they should preferentially kill female infants and expect them to do it. The next generation, when females are scarce and valuable, people are naturally going to start preferring female babies over male - unless they believe that females are inherently less valuable than males.
This is one reason I fear the progress we have made in population control will be rolled back. Available birth control and female empowerment are two factors that have slowed the population growth rate, and I'm not sure they will survive peak oil.
The traditional solution to surplus males is warfare. What's going on in China and India is not going to end well.
The conversion of manures to methane or "biogas" where it can be done, has several positive things going for it.
- We are going to grow animals. We need to deal with the manure. The capture of methane (biogas from manure) for energy kees methane, a potent climate active gas from entering the atmosphere, and puts it to beneficial use. In addition, the methane energy use, electric or other, offsets fossil energy consumption which would otherwise be used and thus gives "greenhouse benefit" by offsetting fossil CO2 as well. The US EPA has its AgStar program to encourage controlled digestion of methane to biogas for just these reasons.
- Contrary to comments, the digestion to methane of organics does not remove the fertilizer nutrient valuem-- manure nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, etc. Digestion to biogas removes only the organic material. The organic material is not used by the plant anyhow, and is useless to the plant. The fertilizer value of the methane is still avilable and can be land applied.
- Operators would certainly not increase animal husbandry and raising animals "for the methane". The methane to biogas can only be an adjuct that can add environmental benefits and renewable energy benefits to animal operations that would take place`anyhow. Manure biogas energy is, incidentally, being embraced across the European Union. The EU treats it as a significant energy resource.
So, having worked in this area for a long time I and regulators regard the "environmental balance sheet" of animal manure digestion to methane energy as being quite positive. One barrier, until recently, has been cost But rising energy costs are rendering more and more manure to methane operations economic. Electricity for onsite use (net metering) and resale of the excess power to the grid has generally been the most practical use of the methane. A current problem is the exhaust emissions, particularly NOx, of piston engines that are otherwise the best perfomers on manure biogas from efficiency and cost standpoints, Exhaust gas catalytic converters can address this but at some cost.It should be emphasized that the US Environmental Protection Agency, California Energy Commission, European Union countries, and many US farm state agencies and utilities selling "green power" are strongly suportive of manure biogas for the renewable energy and environmental benefits.
Don Augenstein
Maybe improvements like cheap clockwork sun-trackers (to avoid the need to stay out in the sun while food cooks) would increase acceptance. Pendulums and escapements are very low-tech.