New initiative for biomass fuel
Back in July, I reported on prisons in Rwanda using human waste as fuel. Now a new bill has been signed in Texas regarding how and where biomass fuel can be used. The bill also requires that more renewable energy resources be explored and developed over the next ten years.
In find it funny that the oil cartel (OPEC) keeps raising their prices for a barrel of oil, because by doing so, it makes alternative means of energy that much more attractive. Petroleum is a relatively price-inelastic item. Right now, raising oil prices does relatively little to curb demand, but I think a pricepoint will come where Americans will refuse to pay the exorbitant prices demanded of them. Then prices will come down again, but I the little environmentalist in me hopes that alternate fuel sources are more common before that happens.
But back to science. Researchers are trying to determine the most efficient way to convert waste into fuel.
One set of pens were paved with fly-ash, a byproduct of the coal-fired power generating industry, and the other manure was from unpaved pens. The manure was composted and test results from the two showed a large difference for several constituents measured, especially ash content, Sweeten said.
Ash, an unusable material as far as energy is concerned, was lower in the composted manure samples from the paved pens than the dirt pens – 20.2 percent compared to 58.7 percent. As a result, the low-ash manure had about twice the organic matter and heating value, he said.
Basically, they’re trying to maximize the energy yield by determining what, if any, type of paving should be used to cover livestock pens. Traditionally, the pens are paved with fly ash, but when the pens are scraped to collect the manure, the fly ash mixes with it, decreasing its burnability, and so the energy output per unit mass is lower. But experimental data shows that the opposite happens: there’s less ash in the paved pens than the dirt pens. I don’t understand why this is, perhaps because scraping a paved pen picks up less unburnable material than scraping dirt along with ash. Regardless, more experiments need to be conducted, including tests with composting and partially composting manure to determine how to get the most energy per unit mass.
In the United States, livestock waste is more prevalent than human waste by mass, and there are fewer inhibitions about using it as a source of energy than would be the case if human waste were processed. In many respects, Rwanda has a leg up on the United States as far as social stigmas are concerned.
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Comment by Jon — August 9, 2005 @ 5:19 pm