Biogas Flows Through Germany's Grid Big Time

[jpak]

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/story?id=53075

The biggest biogas plant in the world to feed gas directly into the national gas grid is set to go into operation in eastern Germany at the beginning of 2009.

The plant at Konnern will feed 15 million cubic meters (m³) of biomethane into the national grid for use by customers anywhere in Germany. Experts say it is the start of a boom in biogas as the country's energy providers increasingly look to home-produced biogas to reduce their dependence on natural gas imported from Russia.

In 2007, there were 1280 megawatts (MW) of installed biogas capacity and about 3,750 biogas plants in Germany.

As much as 20 percent of Germany's natural gas needs could be supplied from biogas by 2020, according to Andrea Horbelt of the German Biogas Association.

<more>

[Indenturedebtor]

1. Fantastic! I wonder though what the chances are of using agri-waste

Rather than agri-product? I read in the article about using liquid manure, but that is a viable compost/fertilizer as it stands no? Could we use corn husks and the like? Or is there simply not enough sugar in such materials?

[jpak]

2. The major nutrient content of the feedstock manure is not lost in this process

The volatile organic carbon content of the manure feedstock is converted to biogas (CH4 and CO2) but the N, P, S, K and nonvolatile carbon in the remaining slurry can be used for fertilizer (with substantially reduced odor).

[Indenturedebtor]

3. Do you know if they have to use sugar to make it? n/t

[izquierdista]

4. Sugars are not needed

You may be confusing fermentations here. While ethanol fermentation does require sugars, anaerobic fermentation to methane does not. For example, termites subsist on anaerobic fermentation of cellulose, bypassing the starch --> sugars ---> ethanol pathway.

Anything can be used as substrate for anaerobic fermentation. (Well, not antibiotics. I wouldn't want the pharmaceutical plant cleaning out their vats of antibiotics and dumping the washings into a biogas fermentation tank.) But certainly the huge hog farms which have Olympic size lagoons of sewage, they should be made to process that into biogas instead of let it create a health and odor problem.

[Indenturedebtor]

5. Is cellulose basically a really "tightly knit" hydrocarbon?

Please excuse my ignorance. I know just enough to be curious.

[izquierdista]

6. Cellulose is a carbohydrate

Carbohydrates contain carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in a 1 to 2 to 1 ratio. Hydrocarbon refers to compounds containing only carbon and hydrogen.

Starch and cellulose have pretty much the same chemical composition, the big difference being the former is digestible by all the higher animals and the latter only by bacteria. Termites and cows live on a diet of cellulose, but the bacteria in their gut break the cellulose down into simpler molecules that they can metabolize.

[LiberalEsto]

7. All that sauerkraut

How nice that the byproducts of sauerkraut consumption are being harnessed for purposes of good, not evil. :D

[damntexdem]

8. Biogas flows through U.S. Congress big time.

But it doesn't energize anything.

[JohnWxy]

9. I wonder how long it will take us to turn farm waste into fuel?

instead of spending money treating it just as waste material.


more form the article:

"Biogas is the market of the future because it allows energy to be produced and transported economically and in a decentralized way around the country," said Pivi Scamperle of agri.capital, the company that runs Germany's largest existing EU €10 million biogas plant, feeding 6 million m³ of biomethane into the national grid.

The boom in biogas comes thanks to a key technological breakthrough a year ago that allowed biogas to be injected into the natural gas grid and so transported around Germany economically, said Thomas Wilkens of WELtec BioPower, a company that manufactures biogas units.