EXPLOITING METHANE FOR ALTERNATIVE SOURCE OF ENERGY

I really loved to hear when politicians, ministers and even salesmen talked about exploiting energy or obtaining electrical from anaerobic digestion processes. It makes me wonder which end of their bodies are doing the thinking and talking. All of them have a very optimistic and simplistic view of exploiting the methane as the alternative energy source and to feed the electricity obtained into the national grid.
In any proposal it is very important that the economic and technical viability must first be established.
Let us look at the palm oil industries where there are talks about obtaining or trapping the methane generated. Mind you, the palm oil industries in Malaysia is not one or two years old. It is a very well established industry that has spanned several decades. Despite all these years they are still having problem of how to treat the palm oil mill effluent and exploit the methane gas generated.
I find it very hilarious despite having more than 400 palm oil mills, about 95% are still operating without methane trap.( (http://www.mpoc.org.my/Government_Incentives_for_Palm_Oil_Millers_to_Trap_Methane_Gas.aspx)
What it implies here is that most of these palm oil mills are not having real modern anaerobic digestors to treat their wastes anaerobically but rely more on a series of stabilization ponds or anaerobic retention ponds.! Who can blame them? After all it is always cheaper and easier to let the wastes be collected in these ponds.
Now, the trouble with these anaerobic retention ponds are:
1 They are not operated or maintained efficiently
2 They are not equipped with methan trap such as methane hood to trap the methane
3 These retention ponds are not functioning optimally in terms of its various parameters such as ph, temperature, mixing, loading among others
4 I have my doubts if their desludging are carried out regularly….
A good anaerobic digestor producing methane efficiently would not give out that much offensive toxic smell generated by the hydrogen sulphides! Methane or even CO2 is odourless
Now we come to the second problem. It is not easy to generate electricity from methane gas. The methane gas has to be collected in substantial volume. It has to be scrubbed and removed of its water and sulphide content. It then need to be be compressed if they are going to use the gas directly. If they want to convert to electricity, the methane gas has to be used to drive the boiler and the steam generated used to turn the turbine to generate electricity! Electricity does not come from methane directly!
It requires so much investments and technical input, and if the process is not stable we have stucked anaerobic digestors!
This situation will even become worst for landfills. Please read my blog on the landfills…




Type rest of the post here.