[Digestion] Negative Biogas Press

[Alexander Eaton]

Hi All,

I have received this from a few people now...it is clearly circulating
widely.  I have plenty of comments regarding the soil aspects, and certainly
some of the AD sludge contents from industrial or black water plants is a
bit beyond my expertise, but I would certainly appreciate some comments from
this group, especially any Germans that can comment on the YouTube part.
This guy clearly is now against biogas, and it would make sense to have some
good responses to this type of thing.

Best

Dear Kamal,
Dear All,

Besides the clear and proven advantages of biogas there are at least two
extremely severe problems:

Organic matter that is converted into gas is no longer availabel to produce
humus, so there are reports from farmers that the soil is getting less and
less producticve. Rich soil may be far more important that the relatively
litte amount of gas. Composting expecially with earthworms and additon of
some charcoal dust (can easily be made from straw, rice husks instead of the
terrible burning) ideally plus stone dust can be far more beneficial with
rising productivity for food and more biomass and is simple, too. At TUHH we
are now working intensely of also composting urine and mixed excreta
stabilised by lactofermenters together with woody wastes to make more soil
as I want to work with ecolocical agriculture and not do industrial
agriculture with addion of fast fertiliser. Biogas can be a threat for long
term food security and you will have to pay for the gas with more and more
fertiliser demand, less water reproduction, flooding through compacting
soils.

In Germany (see   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cNyyU3zcXY sorry in
German) (and probably elsewhere)  there are dramatic problems with the
masses of heavily subsidised biogas plants for food to energy producion
where *Clostridium botulinum *is growing rapidly under anaerobic conditions
producing the highly toxic substance, there are hundreds of farms where all
milk cows are dying and the farmers are ruined, even they became ill
sometimes. The reason are fodder fields that are fertilised with the sludge
from the biogas plants. The very dangerouos botulinum toxin (misused by
people who hate aging by paralysing nerves in the face thus turning it into
a mask, then called botox) is only showing effect after many month so the
effect is often not related to the cause.

I used to be very positive towards biogas and have planned and built them, I
will not do this anymore except for some industrial wastewaters. Maybe also
for sanitation in areas where the soils are super humus rich already and
botulism can be avoided safely.

Kind regards

Ralf

For Discussion of Anaerobic Digestion <digestion at lists.bioenergylists.org>

-- 
Alexander Eaton
Sistema Biobolsa
IRRI-Mexico
RedBioLAC

Mex cel: (55) 11522786
US cel: 970 275 4505

alex at irrimexico.org
alex at sistemabiobolsa.com

sistemabiobolsa.com
www.irrimexico.org
www.redbiolac.org
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