“Contented cows may be giving more than milk these days,” reports the High Plains/Midwest Ag Journal. “Their manure could help to turn the lights on at farms, thanks to a project being undertaken by the Texas Water Resources Institute and Texas Cooperative Extension.”
The Institute has received a grant from the Natural Resources Conservation Service to test an on-farm manure-to-energy conversion system for future use on dairies across Central Texas. Dr. Saqib Mukhtar, Extension agricultural engineer and co-author of Manure to Energy: Understanding Processes, Principles and Jargon (from which the illustration comes), is one of the project leaders. “We’re trying to find out if we can benefit the environment by diverting some of the manure that is being applied to waste application fields,” Mukhtar said.
The grant is funding construction and testing of a portable energy generation unit called a “thermophilic digester and fluidized bed gasifier system.” The portable unit will us an anaerobic digester to produce methane and carbon dioxide from cow manure.
Liquid manure will be treated with naturally occurring bacteria, and the resulting biogas - mostly methane and carbon dioxide which is produced from anaerobic digestion - will be used as a source of energy. The second part of the system is a gasifier that partially heats the biomass but does not burn it, turning solid manure into a usable gaseous product called syngas, which can then be processed into other fuels or products by chemical conversion, burned to heat a conventional boiler, or even replace natural gas in a gas turbine.
So, to summarize: Dairy cow poop gets turned into fuel, which can be used to power the dairy farmer’s home, barns and irrigation pumps.
The system seems to have one big advantage over other plans to collect cow manure and transport it to big manure-to-energy plants: manure is 90 percent water and very heavy, making it costly to transport. This proposed system allows for recycling cow poop on-site.
Prediction: Someone is going to make a business out of building, installing and maintaining cow poop-to-energy systems on dairy farms.
Suggested marketing slogan: Cow poop - The Other Natural Gas.
