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BioDegradable Energy
It would appear that the old adage ‘food is fuel’ could not be truer when we look at it in the context of turning animal waste products in to a usable, sustainable source of fuel. Of course, the two primary sources of fuel on our planet, petrol and natural gas, are both also derived from organic matter that is compressed and heated over thousands of years, so the concept of us using animal faeces as an alternative is not such a big departure from what we currently think of as acceptable. The search for greener, alternative sources of energy could literally be ‘right under our noses’ so to speak!
In theory and in practice animal waste can actually fuel power stations and could even be used as a form of fuel to power our vehicles. It ticks many of the required boxes in terms of being cheap, readily available, and infinitely renewable and most importantly its environmentally friendly.
The secret to dung’s ability to generate power is based on a simple molecule that it shares with our present major source of energy, natural gas – this molecule being good old methane. The great thing about methane, as any schoolboy who has delighted in lighting his own farts will tell you, it’s highly flammable and when you burn it and it creates heat. Specifically, it creates the heat needed to power today’s household boilers and electricity generators.
Ok, so let’s assume it does the job in terms of providing power but why exactly is using animal waste a ‘greener’ option? The simplest way to understand this is to first of all look at why burning natural gas is bad. Burning any methane, be it from natural gas or animal waste, both produce carbon dioxide in to the atmosphere. However, the methane burnt from natural gas has been extracted from the earth where it was previously locked away by fossilisation and therefore the Co2 emissions are actually adding to the amount of carbon already in the atmosphere, this is bad as we all know and is contributing to global warming.
Additionally, whilst carbon dioxide is bad as a greenhouse gas, what is even worse is methane itself. In fact methane is some twenty three times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Ruminant animals such as cows, sheep, camels and goats all belch and fart large amounts of methane as part of their natural digestive processes. This process is easy to replicate using their actual waste products in large, air tight tanks where the faeces are heated to produce a reaction whereby additional methane is released. By burning this methane as a source of power we are not only preventing it from entering the atmosphere naturally (as we know methane itself is a lot worse than the co2 that is produced when it is burnt – much the lesser of two evils) but we are also in turn extracting and burning less fossil methane via natural gas. If you subtract the amount of ‘brand new’ carbon that we would release in to the atmosphere via natural gas from the Co2 which is realised from burning a biogas such as from cow dung you end up with a negative net amount of Co2.
Therefore, the next time you’re walking through a field of cows and step in something unfortunate, instead of being sad consider that you may well have just encountered the faecal equivalent of superman – a cow pat that may actually save our planet.