Jed Rothwell wrote: > > Frederick Sparber wrote: > > > > I see also they are getting methane from landfills. That's great, but > >there > > > are not enough landfills provide all the energy we need. > > > > >Plenty of Feedlots, Dairies, Poultry and Hog Farms to help out there. > > Sorry Fred, but the numbers simply do not add up. Compare the amount of > energy you consume as food to the amount you consume as gasoline, natural > gas and electricity. A person eats 2,000 kCal per day (8.4 MJ), and the > average American consumes 928,000 btu per day (979 MJ) (Annual Energy > Review, Table 1.5). Let us assume that in preparing food and rearing > livestock we throw away 10 times more energy than we eat, in the form of > garbage, and manure in feed lots. This is highly optimistic, because > animals convert food into tissue and metabolism very efficiently. Even with > this rough estimate, we are still off by an order of magnitude: 84 MJ > versus 979 MJ. > I said Help Out, Jed. Almost all of the farm wastes that undergo anerobic bacterial digestion end up adding to the methane/CO2 burden of the atmosphere. Why not get the energy from it (Bio Gas) and let the carbon-neutral CO2 and the H2O go back into the cycle?
A primer on what a low cost Bio Gas Generator can produce whether on the family farm or an agro-business air-groundwater polluter: http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/farmmgt/05002.html And: http://www.csu.org/environment/energy/ "Bio-gas is derived from digesting biosolids from our wastewater treatment plant. Colorado Springs Utilities uses the gas produced from this process to run four boilers and two combustion turbines. Bio-gas heat energy produced at Colorado Springs Utilities produced enough bio-gas heat energy during 2001 to heat approximately 3,600 households for a full year." Ever been in Colorado Springs in the winter? :-) Frederick > > - Jed >
