| | |  Editorials | Environmental | November 2009 
Biogas Wrongly Ignored as an Alternative Source of Energy
 Warren Weisman - Register-Guard
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November 03, 2009
Eugene, Oregon - If you have never heard of biogas, you are not alone. Widely used throughout Europe and Asia, this little-known alternative energy source produces many times more British thermal units than solar panels or wind turbines, at a fraction of the cost.
It could be a part of Lane County’s energy future.
Biogas is a combination of gases, consisting mostly of methane, produced during the natural decomposition of organic matter in an airtight environment. Methane is the same flammable component found in the fossil natural gas — only instead of taking 65 million years to make, biogas can be made in 48 hours to 72 hours.
Biogas can be used for cooking, to power stationary electrical equipment and even as fuel for vehicles, no different than natural gas. A biogas flame looks just like the natural gas flame on a kitchen stove.
Biogas is by far the simplest energy to produce. It can be made by anyone in their own backyard without any special equipment or chemicals whatsoever. This gas can be, and is, made in an ordinary trash bag with kitchen scraps in it.
Sweden, for example, shares with Oregon vast forest and agricultural resources with few domestic natural gas deposits. Today, more than 51 percent of Sweden’s natural gas is biomethane from organic waste. Oregon could very easily use biogas to free itself from dependence on Canadian natural gas and eliminate the need for a liquefied natural gas shipping port.
In addition to creating clean-burning energy, the biogas process also eliminates harmful pathogens and odors. The biogas process, called anaerobic digestion, has been used as a part of municipal wastewater treatment throughout modern history. The famous gas lamps of Victorian England were fueled with biogas from the city sewers.
Most importantly, the biogas process produces high-quality, nitrogen-rich fertilizer that can be used to replace chemical fertilizers made with fossil fuels. Unlike compost, biogas slurry is a liquid and can be applied on a commercial scale with existing farm equipment. The fertilizer replacement value of biogas slurry far exceeds any potential revenue from the gas itself.
Today in Lane County and Eugene, the Short Mountain landfill and the Eugene-Springfield water pollution control facility both capture biogas from garbage and wastewater. However, as with all other such facilities in the United States, they produce only a fraction of the potential energy from biogas and destroy all of the beneficial fertilizer produced by the biogas process.
The metropolitan wastewater treatment plant employs expensive, complicated Reagan-era treatment processes that consume all of what little gas is generated. By comparison, wastewater facilities in Sweden combine food waste and waste from local agricultural to improve gas yields, all while using more efficient and environmentally friendly treatment processes.
Short Mountain suffers similar shortcomings, in that proper mixing of feedstocks for maximum gas production cannot be obtained. So all beneficial fertilizer is unrecoverable and lost.
The $100 million bond now being sold by the Metropolitan Wastewater Management Commission to expand its existing treatment capacity very easily could cover the cost of converting the Eugene-Springfield wastewater treatment to a more energy efficient system similar to those in Europe and Asia, where biogas use is maximized.
Instead of saddling ratepayers with a dinosaur until 2025, the Eugene-Springfield area could enjoy a world-class wastewater system that pays for itself in less than five years, all the while generating enough biogas to run the entire plant and fuel all 100 Lane Transit District transit buses with clean-burning, carbon-neutral biogas.
Short Mountain is on the backside of its bell curve of gas production and at the center of a heated debate between Lane County and the Emerald People’s Utility District over its little remaining biogas. An infinitely more efficient process of waste management would be to separate organic waste within Eugene, Springfield and Lane County at the source, rather than using fossil fuels to truck it to a landfill where invaluable nutrients would be lost.
Today, Oregon and the United States are decades behind the rest of the world in biogas, and falling farther behind every year. This simple process remains mysterious and esoteric to politicians and university professors, even though it is easier to create a fire with biogas than it is with wood.
Today, there is not a single employee in the U.S. Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Agriculture who actually knows how to make the gas, which is critical to understanding how to plan an effective biogas program.
As a result, when one hears a list of available alternative energies, the simplest and most abundant of all — and the only one with a realistic potential to replace petroleum and coal while there is still time to do so — remains a footnote.
Eugene’s Warren Weisman is the project director of Complejo de Energía Renovable, México, a biogas cogeneration, education and training facility planned in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. |
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