Today I found myself reviewing three reports. One of them is a report on sustainable production and consumption in Africa, which I have written about before.
Last time I wrote about bioslurry becoming organic fertilisers. This time, I'm going to borrow the story of byproduct, biogas. Please go back to the basic and read what biogas is!
Biogas production is a biochemical process without oxygen, using bacteria to convert complex compounds into simpler ones, producing a combustible gas. Cattle produce manure, which is fed into a biogas digester and converted into biogas and slurry. The biogas is used for cooking, cooling and other electrical appliances. The slurry is used as a high-quality organic fertiliser.
Biogas technologies typically include a fixed dome, floating drum, flexible tube and large steel or concrete digesters. Fixed dome, floating drum and flexible tube digesters have been designed and installed for domestic and commercial use. Also, large steel/dome digesters are often used for large scale commercial biogas production and power generation. Such examples are the Biojoule Kenya biogas plant in Naivasha, which uses floral waste to produce biogas for power generation and the Kilifi Sisal plant biogas. The Gorge Farm Energy Park plant has a 2.2MW 50% of its generating capacity to the farm and the remaining 50% to Kenya Power (Bonface 2015).
Large scale (>100 cows) dairy farmers can adopt commercial biogas technology in the circular economy. The government's standardised feed-in tariffs allow dairy farmers to earn extra income from biogas production and sales to the power generation and transmission grid.
Benefits
- Provides clean energy that can be used by farmers to replace firewood and farm machinery with electricity.
- Mitigates greenhouse gas emissions by capturing and burning methane to produce energy.
- Strengthens the financial position of dairy farms by saving money on electricity and other energy costs.
- Improves the general environment of dairy farms by reducing odours and the likelihood of waste-related infections.
- Local innovations will be introduced to support some dairy machinery, such as pasteurisers, flour millers, and sterilising equipment.
Disadvantages
- High capital investment for small and commercial scale digesters.
- Additional labour required to manage the biodigester.