Friday, March 29, 2024

New plant to make renewable power using biogas made from cow manure

The energy crisis is the concern that the world’s demands on the limited natural resources that are used to power industrial society are diminishing as the demand rises. These energy sources are in limited supply. The solution is not additional fossil fuels but instead putting efforts into the energy transition.

Anaergia, a Canada-based company that provides clean energy solutions using organic waste streams, has now announced the plans to construct a 1.2MW biogas plant in Kasaoka, Okayama, for the Japanese firm Toyo Energy Solution. The facility will produce renewable electricity using biogas made by anaerobically digesting cow manure from Okayama Prefecture farms.

The biogas plant is expected to head off about 13,500 tonnes of CO2 emissions from the manure and from fossil fuels that would have been used to generate the power, the equivalent of taking about 2,900 cars off the road for a year.

According to Anaergia, the facility will anaerobically digest about 250 tonnes per day of cow manure from the region and use the resulting biogas to fuel a combined heat and power generator system. The system will produce about 1.2 megawatts of clean, renewable electricity, enough to power around 2,200 homes annually.

Anaergia will design, engineer, install, and commission the plant. Toyo will serve as the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contractor. The new facility will use Anaergia’s advanced anaerobic digestion technology and other proprietary resource recovery and treatment equipment.

“Wastes such as manure, sewage biosolids, and food scraps create two-thirds of all point source emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 85 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Stopping these methane emissions from waste must be a central tactic in curbing global warming,” said Andrew Benedek, Chairman, and CEO of Anaergia. “This new bioenergy plant will not only help Japan reduce methane emissions from manure, but it will also reduce the need for LNG to generate electricity. We look forward to building many more plants in Japan with our partner Toyo Energy Solution Co., Ltd. to help the nation meet its carbon neutrality goals.”