[Digestion] Digestion of Honey Waste

bingham bingham at zekes.com
Wed Feb 16 10:58:30 CST 2011


Dear Anand,
Are you saying you have an AD system that produces Biogas which does not require the expenditure of any energy?
Alcohol can be burned in diesel and gas engines at 100 proof replacing $3.00++ automotive fuel. I do not understand
your point about "use the fuel where it is generated" but one of alcohol's good points is it can be transported
inexpensively or used "where it is generated". With the advent of vacuum operated alcohol distillation systems
direct sun light  is all the external heat that is needed to produce alcohol at 190 proof.

We do not know if the honey facility can even use biogas "as it is",  or has a need for it. Our natural gas boilers cannot use raw biogas
"as it is", we must scrub out all H2S to prevent damaging another boiler and or most of the CO2  to avoid spending 
thousands to modify the burners to burn both natural gas and biogas. I do not know where or how you use biogas 
"as it is" we tried it in unit heaters in our livestock buildings and destroyed them in a year. 

The fact is in the last 45 years, we have found almost no application for the long term use of biogas ,that H2S is not a factor.
Cooking stoves, lighting, boilers, unite heaters, water heaters, inferred heaters all experienced significantly shorter lives from using 
biogas "as it is". Some of the failures were out right dangerous. 

Anand, I believe you are being misleading to the point of being untruthful. This could result in someone being hurt or killed,
who might take what you said "Biogas can be burned as it is" as fact and use it with out precautions.
Standard residential plumbing and appliances contain metals that do not stand up under long term exposure to H2S. Especially in high heat high
humidity conditions. Steel plumbing is used in most places that were setup to use natural gas or propane. To suggest you can just pump
biogas"as it is" in place of other fuels is just wrong on many levels. We are strong proponents of AD but the "Bad Press" the list is 
currently discussing could be warranted in some instances. AD is not the "highest and best" technology for all applications.

Highest and best use principles require the use of an energy audit and some study to determine which system is best suited to each situation. My father, grand father 
and my uncles refused to believe that the effluent from the AD system was better for the crops than the runoff from the livestock buildings. It was only after the areas
around the farms began to build up with new homes and the complaints of smell threatened to shut us down that they allowed me to build our first AD system. They then 
could see an increase in crop yields in later years, (and the smell went away). I know corn farmers that use corn in there pellet stoves as fuel  to heat there house because fuel pellets cost more to buy than they were paid for their corn. 

Brent





  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Anand Karve 
  To: For Discussion of Anaerobic Digestion 
  Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2011 6:01 PM
  Subject: Re: [Digestion] Digestion of Honey Waste


  Dear Brent,
  for alcohol to be useful as fuel, it has to be distilled, which again requires expenditure of energy. Biogas can be burned as it is. So, if you want to use the fuel where it is generated, biogas is more advantageous than alcohol.
  Yours
  A.D.Karve
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