Company says its award-winning tanker can move manure to a digester and return digestate to a farm more efficiently
LANGHAM, Sask. — A key piece of technology important to the success of biogas digesters in Europe is now available in Canada.
Advance Tank Production Ltd. has built a rapid loading and unloading tanker that makes moving manure quicker and more efficient.
The tank was made by the Saskatchewan company, a division of Advance Engineering Products, and won the top award in the equipment category in the 2024 Ag In Motion innovation competition.
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Biogas systems in Europe are increasingly centralized or community based, meaning farmers move their manure to another farm or facility where it is put through a biogas digester.
The manure is processed by the digester, with nutrients concentrated and methane captured either for conversion into electricity or used as natural gas on the farm or in a natural gas pipeline system.
The digestate is then moved back to the farm, where it is spread on land as a high-value fertilizer or separated from liquid with a screw press and dried for use as bedding.
There are few biogas digesters in Western Canada, but several dozen operate in Ontario, mostly on individual farms. There are also many biogas digesters in the United States.
Mike Frombach from Advance says a greater emphasis on managing nutrients effectively has increased interest in biogas digesters.
Advance partnered with VM Tarm, a Danish company, which provided the back end of the pumping system. Denmark is a world leader with more than 100 biodigester systems installed. VM Tarm provides pumping systems and transportation tanks, including for the biogas sector.
“There are quite a few biogas companies from Denmark coming into the Canadian and the United States market,” says Frombach.
The cost of moving manure is a barrier to a biogas digester reaching a profitable scale. The Advance Tank Production system aims to help solve that problem.
Large digesters could use six of the trailers to keep their operations running, says Frombach. The trailers could also make sense for individual farms that are digesting manure from other operations.
The system was on display at the Ag In Motion farm show near Langham, where the company demonstrated the rapid speed of loading and unloading liquids from the three-pump tank system. A crane arm stretches out from the tank and can be raised or lowered into the source or destination for the slurry.
The tanker will unload at about 15,500 litres of water per minute and loads at about 12,500 litres per minute.
The operation is set up so the driver doesn’t have to leave the cab, which can be appreciated in extreme weather, says Frombach, but it also can help alleviate bio-security risk if the driver visits multiple farms.
Frombach says other uses include helping to manage floods and fighting fires. Adding a four-inch nozzle onto the end of the hose enables the system to spray water from 160 to 170 feet.
