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Methane Digester -- Anybody use or heard of this?

O

Oldtractorfun

Member
This story was in the local paper. I never heard of one before but the local farmer is having one installed. $1.4 million, power about 500 homes and figures 5 years for it to pay for itself.
If these do work should be a pile of big farmers put them in. Sounds like easy cheap energy if just to power their own farms.
I sure hope it works out for him, might lead to better things for all farmers down the road. Any expences a farmer can save is worth it.
This is in Canada not sure how things work in the USA.
Methane Digester
 
Yes I have heard of a methane digester . a farm family not 20 mile away from me in our county is putting one in now, over half completed. They currently milk 250 cows .Most if not all the tech and parts will come from Europe , mainly German where they are common. They can also be fed corn silage instead of cooking oil to increase the kw output .
 
Suwanne Farms in Obrien, Florida (close to Live Oak ) has one for a beef feedlot operation.
 
a large duck farm near me has one, the gas it emits powers a engine that powers a pump that agitates the pit i believe, the reason they put it in was to help control odors from the manure, they dont make any excess power to sell out of it
 
a few have been installed on (large) dairy farms in WI. Too costly for any but the biggest, and then they usually only get done if there are grants/low cost loans. Takes a bunch of maintainance, but probably worth it if the $$ and manpower is available. I had heard 10 years as a payback time frame.
 
A large dairy near us put one in. It was called a methane breeder here but all the same. They put it in to keep ahead of the manure smell haters that were trying every thing they could to shut them down. After the manure has gone thru the process I understand the bad smell is gone. I also heard that the bulk can be sold for flower beds and gardens. I think they have around 4000 cows. They bought the farm next to mine for the liquid manure and knife it in. The smell is gone is a coupla days after they pull the equipment out.
 
DenDulk has installed them near here at the Belding and Ravenna farms. They haven't got one in at the Greenville farm yet,just 6 miles west of me.
 
Many years ago Mother Earth News Magazine had several articles about building methane digesters on a much smaller scale, for small farmers and homeowners. I never tried building one, but they looked like a person could produce some methane with relatively little investment.

Methane is produced as manure decomposes and usually it just is lost to the air. The digesters capture the methane before it can mix with the air.

I suspect that the large manure producers are trying to figure out how to deal with the manure in ways that the ecology people consider proper. I also bet they are getting federal subsidies to build the huge digesters--and I bet the break even point would be a lot longer than 10 years without the subsidies.
 
Shoot that is old news type of thing. Did a science fair project on that back in 1973 or so. Big reason it is not used much is that it takes high pressure to turn methane into a liquid so storing it is not easy to do. But if it was easy to do any body with a septic tank could have a set up that would at least off set the cost of power in there homes a bit. They have also been looking into using methane off garbage dumps to run power plants
 
Large dairy near here put one in but I heard they had problems. The guy in charge of installing it was using some old technology and didn't get it running very good. The city landfill has a deal with an ethanol plant to run a line out to the plant and sells them the methane for heat in their operation. Was a good deal for both the way it sounded.
 
I remember seeing in Nat Geo magazine, in a middle eastern country. A little mud brick house with an airtight mud and brick cistern a ways from the house. Shovel cow manure in there and cover up air tight. A pipe runs from the digester to the house for cooking and heating gas. a lot easier and cleaner than burning cow chips. :)
 
We're gonna have a commercial one on the edge of my local town in a couple of years. The land has been purchased for it and construction will start next summer. They'll use manure from a local chicken farm along with byproducts from the ethanol plant next door. If I remember right from the newspaper article they can use other feedstuffs too, probably anything that will rot. They call the end product natural gas and it will be injected into the local gas line. Most of it will be used by the ethanol plant.

The local chicken farm had planned to put this plant up themselves to use up the poop from their 6.5 million birds but it's going to end up 12 miles away beside the ethanol plant.Jim
 
On a tour seen a methane digester at the Mason Dixon farm in pennsylvania about 10 years ago.Methane powered 5-6 cat engines.If I remember the intake pipe for methane was about a foot in diameter because of the low pressure.Huge mufflers reclaimed the heat of the exhaust to cook the digesters.All on farm built by themselves, little money invested.
Garbage dump near home has tile buried in it.Collects the methane and they generate electricity. Mark
 
There are a few rusty ones sitting around from the 1980's, the theory is good, but they are a 'fussy' machine, can't feed it & forget it, it takes real management to make it work, lot of babysitting.

Hope they have the bugs worked out & a good process going.

--->Paul
 
Green Meadows farm down in St Johns had one of the very first methane digesters in the country. They put it in seems like back in the 80's but last time I was there, about 12 years ago, it was not being used. They had huge nat gas powered Moline engines running off the methane turning generators. Seemed to me like it worked pretty good back then but got out dated and they never upgraded equipment. If I recall, I saw some of their Moline engines for sale in the Milk Messenger a few years back.
 
Mason -Dixon farms has a methane digester ,startedin 1980 and probably still going ??? ..Least they did when I was there in 2002, They milked 2500 head each day on a state of the art 60 head carousel ,, At the same time they were proving the efficiency of totally automated Milking machines . looked like a swing under table at the drive in restaurant, "Durndest Thang I ever saw " , Cow walked into chute because she felt the need to lactate (some cows got milked every 6 hrs) ..computor read her bar Code , and matched her to Performance , Fed Her accordingly And recorded All info to be looked over by the management , Or in some cases if the cow liked the Game too much the Computor Turned her Loose if she was back too early to be milked .. The M-D Farm used two 6 cyl.Caterpillar Engines to burn methane and make into electric , Sold it back to Local REMC, Owner claimed the engine Oil Was Clean after 300 hrs running .. they are Located on near Emmettsville South of gettysburg PA. astride the Maryland border , thus the name .
 
Methane off BIG garbage dumps is profitable. Several in the Chicago area reclaim the methane from covered dumps. A few others around the world, but the amount of methane in a small town dump won't keep enough engine running to be worth the bother.

Gerald J.
 
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