Medicine Hat, Alta. – Producing methane from manure and other waste products may present value-added opportunities, said an Alberta Agriculture official at a reduced tillage conference.
Matthew Machielse, director of Alberta Agriculture’s Bio-Industrial Technologies Division, said he’s excited about methane as a biogas.
“The environmental opportunities that it may present, plus the economics. We can exponentially change the values of some products in the environment, plus (there are) opportunities where you put a biogas digester with a food processor like Lamb Weston or Rogers Sugar, capturing the methane from some of the wastes coming out and generating electricity or heat needed by the plant,” he said.
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Biogas production involves turning products like manure, municipal garbage or other waste products into methane gas, a valuable energy source. That methane gas can then be used to generate electricity or replace natural gas.
Other products from the biogas process may include liquid fertilizer and compost, water, extracted chemicals like potassium and nitrogen, heat and carbon dioxide for greenhouses or manufacturing processes.
Machielse said Alberta has one large facility, a demonstration scale plant for biogas production in Vegreville and four or five smaller facilities up and running.
Germany, with a different economic and environmental attitude, has more than 2,400 biogas digesters operating. And he said they’re doubling that infrastructure in the next two or three years.
“In Alberta, one of the big costs in the livestock industry is SRMs (specified risk materials). We’ve got technologies that CFIA (the Canadian Food Inspection Agency) has approved, using pressure to kill the prions in SRM material. From that preprocess step, you can put all that material into a biogas digester to create methane,” he said.
“What comes out of that biogas digester is now completely safe to put back into the environment. You’ve captured all the value in methane from that feedstock, instead of trucking SRM into a landfill. We’re dealing with it immediately, and going from a cost to a revenue generator.”
Machielse said his division is putting more resources into this, so it can analyze the feedstocks that go into a digester, then determine how much methane can be drawn out.
“In Edmonton, they’re putting in a syngas energy plant. Edmonton does a great job of recycling, both organic wastes and soft wastes, but they’re still putting 40 percent of their materials into municipal waste dumps,” he said.
“This project is focused on changing that 40 percent down to 10 percent. They’re going to capture 30 percent of that municipal waste to create methane. Instead of a tipping fee going into a landfill, they’re going to capture value from it.
“A lot of the technology is in that innovator stage, but it’s moving into the early adopter stage.”
