Nothing to do with heating, but

Harvey Ramer

here's what's happening on quite a few of the local dairy farms.

http://go.socialnewsdesk.com/r?p=18546289&pg=a0205914-75eb-4fa7-901c-103553bf7e78&sn=2032

Solid_Fuel_Man

Now that's not the kind of"solid fuel" I work with!

JUGHNE

So we are catching up with the third world.
About 42 years ago I lived in India for 6 months.
There was something referred to as "Gobar? Gas Plants" (digester).
Simply take a 8' diameter open tank and bury or berm it into the ground. Then take a 7.5' domed tank, turn it upside down and stick it into the 8' tank. With a trapped opening under the water line you throw in all the cow dung you can collect. Add a little water. Plus put the family toilet above it, (squatter floor opening), so all night soil and urine ends up in the tank. Top tank was painted black for solar gain. Eventually methane was produced and captured in the upper dome of top tank. The methane gas would be pressurized and attempt to raise the upper dome. A 1/2" pipe tap on that and the gas could be used for cooking or lighting.

This may sound like an insignificant issue. But it had several purposes.
1: It produced cooking gas, without this the women and children had to walk miles to collect firewood (we would call kindling here) to cook meals. They had to travel farther every day as the fuel became scarce, leading to more deforestation of a country that was once partly forested.
2: Also the digester produced sludge that was richer fertilizer than raw manure.
3: Manure was no longer being burned for cooking, (imparts a unique flavor to your chapattis and dal (lentils).
The smoke put off by burning dried dung caused a severe eye irritation leading to blindness in some cases, let alone simple air pollution.

Cow dung was a coveted commodity in that part of the world.
In New Delhi you could buy yogurt in a dish made of leaves. As you walked down the street eating it with your own traveler spoon a cow was following you. When done you dropped the leaves on the ground and the cow quickly ate these up, as with any organic item that hit the ground. Banana peels etc. The lower caste "collectors" followed the cow waiting for the deposit on the pavement. This was quickly gathered up barehanded and put into a basket. At the end of their day the soft dung was made into patties (again by hand) about 10-12 inches in diameter and stacked for drying to be sold as fuel. There would be cone shaped stacks going up to 10' high for drying.

Then there was the "night soil people" possibly the lowest caste. They were not usually seen during the day. Hotels and houses in the city had the toilet on the top floor. Just some form of catch basin for your use. Early morning, before sunrise, the night soil people would come and collect it to be taken away and never seen again.

And those Sacred Cows we in the west can not understand, they would return to their barn looking for real food/feed at night and get milked and again in the morning before they were set out to the streets to wander unmolested. A native friend told me that after the cows no longer produce milk or calves they are sold to the Muslims, who appreciate beef. This is not an advertised transaction or widely know to the locals.

Well after this trip thru many countries, one understands why we have plumbing and sanitation codes. I painfully gained immunities to many "bugs" and seldom suffer any aliments that might put others down.
We here take so much for granted.....but think about the fact that you can go to 98% of this country, drink the water and not get deathly ill.......far from it in many parts of the world.
We push a lever and our "night soil" goes away and hopefully never shows up to plague us again.
We don't know how good we have it.

I better go before starting another chapter..

BobC

In Korea I had locals outbidding each other to clean out the site outhouse (deluxe two holer). The locals collected the night soil to fertilize the fields with. If I had to go into the HQ in the summer it was a joy to be driving the jeep behind a honey bucket, it was 26 miles from the site to HQ.

When you first got off the plane at Kimpo there was "something in the air" as the song goes. IF you weren't careful you'd get a bit of Montezuma's revenge from local food or untreated water. After you were in country for a few days you got accustomed to it and things settled down. I used to buy vegetables and fruit from local markets for site personnel (we got the meat from the mess).

I enjoyed my 13 months over there, it's a pretty country with kind hardworking people. My only other "foreign" adventures were in NJ and Georgia.

Bob

Jamie Hall

Methane producing digesters -- in various forms -- are actually more common than realised. At least three of the sewage treatment plants I operated in by gone years had them. One of them used the gas as part of the fuel for an on-site gas engine generator. The other two it was burned and used to heat the digester.

You really don't want to have one blow up, though... and it has happened.

JUGHNE

The Indian ones had the advantage of the local climate, seldom freezing. So some of the gas was not needed for added heat to continue the process. I would hope by now they are a little more advanced. But then locating manure in a country that is predominately vegan might be somewhat of a challenge.

Unfortunately India is surpassing China in air pollution. I thought it was bad in the city 40 years ago but there was an estimate that 1 million a year would die from air pollution.
Nephew who frequents there suffers badly from the air and longs for the clean air of the Twin Cities.

Solid_Fuel_Man

I service a local land fill which burns the methane in a flare. It has been looked into many times to not just waste the gas (and a considerable amount of propane as pilot fuel) but to use it for heat/something useful.

The amount produced at our local has not been enough. When vegetable processing was in its heyday a nearby town built a sewer plantern to handle processing waste and had a large EPDM covered digester to contain the methane. But the facility is gone now and the aged treatment plant is underutilized.

There is a national French fry plant which digests 100% of their own waste and runs a co-gen plans on-site. I have never had the privilege of seeing that.

Turning trash to useful energy has always been a passion of mine. Just as playing with fire and water at the same time!

JUGHNE

Back then you could go to as far as Nepal overland from Greece.
That is what I did for 18 months. Along the way I always had this thought that if you could get the USA refuse/trash/garbage to most of those countries before it started to smell, it would raise their standard of living considerably. Sounds crude but at that time we threw out so much and they made do with so little. It was pretty ingenious what they could with throw away materials.

Solid fuel man you just need to develop a way to burn tires...cleanly.

BillW

One problem with the methane from landfills is that it is heavily contaminated with hydrogen sulfide, which is very corrosive, and destroys metal components in a very short time. To my knowledge, no one has ever figured out an economical way to remove it.

Solid_Fuel_Man

https://youtu.be/TLxU56VcU6w

Interesting...but scary 70psi steam.

Harvey Ramer

I watched the video through and he had it up to 125 psi of steam. Sure hope he pressure tested his boiler at well above that before he started playing with it.

I have this wild idea about building a manure powered generation plant.
Knowing that the raw methane is extremely corrosive, as was mentioned above, I would opt to use a high pressure steam boiler instead of a combustion engine. The boiler would provide power for a steam turbine which would produce electricity. The steam discharge from the turbine would be channeled into a grid of steel pipes embedded in the manure pit. This would act as a condenser and also heat up the manure, increasing the methane output. To my knowledge, pretty much every chemical reaction doubles in speed with every 18 degree temp increase. The condensate would then be collected in a receiver and pumped back in the boiler.

Solid_Fuel_Man

Yeah, I had watched that video about a year ago. Didn't watch it all the way through before I posted it here. High pressure water/steam scares me to death! I was at a hospital doing control work on a chip boiler. They operated it to 70psi. Used for heating, but high pressure for clothes drying and disinfection.

Manure to power is a great idea. I'd almost be willing to relocate to be in on that. I envision lots of stainless piping, and lots of controls to play with.

JUGHNE

Swinging a pipe down on its 90 to look at the 125PSI reading on the gauge would make me a little nervous.

Jamie Hall

BillW said:

One problem with the methane from landfills is that it is heavily contaminated with hydrogen sulfide, which is very corrosive, and destroys metal components in a very short time. To my knowledge, no one has ever figured out an economical way to remove it.

Hydrogen Sulphide is not only very corrosive -- it's very toxic, and the worst of it is that while it smells horrible (rotten eggs) in low concentration, it disables the sense of smell in only slightly higher concentrations -- so you don't know you're dying until you're dead. Great stuff. And no, I don't know of any good way to get rid of it. And it is a real problem in generating power or heat from landfill gas (or anaerobic sewage/manure digestion) because of that.

BillW

Absolutely, Jamie! H2S is as deadly as CO. It lurks in storm sewers, confined spaces holding any kind of organic debris as well as sanitary sewers. On the subject of using methane for fuels, I have seen sewage digester-generated methane used to power big Nordberg radial diesel pumps that sent the treated effluent into New York Harbor.