According to Winston reed, a Devonshire Cow farmer ‘The poo from four cows can produce enough energy to heat and light a house for a year’. He should know, he’s planning to create energy from the stuff. The thirty-five year old farmer is aiming to build an energy centre on his farm, in a rural community on the outskirts of Tiverton, near Exeter. It will use manure from local farms and waste from local abattoirs and food processors to create enough electricity to light 6,000 local houses and £700,000 worth of heat for local industries. Tiverton's population is only 20,000; it will go a long way to making the town self-sufficient in energy. It will not be the first energy centre like this in the UK. It is however a huge undertaking.
Many environmentalists concern themselves with the animals expelling large amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times more damaging than CO2, however unlike the methane that cows exhale as their stomachs convert grass into milk - which is believed to be responsible for up to a quarter of ‘manmade’ methane emissions worldwide - the gas in their manure, along with all the other organic waste that would otherwise take up space in landfill, can actually become productive.
Essentially this process will solve the issues of food and fuel security by making them more sustainable, at a time when both are in short supply.
The process is based around anaerobic digestion. Organic material is fermented in heated tanks and broken down into methane and carbon dioxide which are the same basic components of natural gas. This biogas can then be burned to generate electricity, or, as many countries in Europe do, upgraded so it could be fed into the gas grid or used in vehicles modified to run on compressed natural gas. The only byproduct of the process is an organic fertiliser.
This process has been implemented for many years in some parts of Europe; Germany has 3,000 anaerobic digestion (AD) plants however the process is fairly uncommon in the UK excluding except in the sewage-treatment industry. However now the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) wants to increase the use of AD. This month, three Defra ministers met with representatives from agriculture, the supermarkets, waste and water and energy companies, as well as local government, to discuss how Britain can match the progress of Europe. The department sees the potential not only in terms of generating renewable energy but also in addressing the issue Gordon Brown highlighted at the G8 summit last month: the amount of food Britain wastes.
According to the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap), UK households throw away almost a third of the food we buy. The CO2 generated in producing food that is wasted, and then the methane it gives off as it decomposes, is the equivalent of 18m tonnes of avoidable CO2 emissions a year. Essentially burning cow poo can provide a great environmentally friendly energy and solve the problem of food wastage; hopefully it will catch on to more farmers like Winston Reed very soon!
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Posted under Articles, Environmental News, Gardening & Outdoors, Gas & Electricity, Renewable Energy
This post was written by Hannah Walker on July 30, 2008