The concept is as easy as it is beautiful: Farms, especially livestock farms, produce huge amounts of organic waste and manure. The manure and organic waste are usually collected in storage tanks, and might be used as class B fertilizers on fields. However, this “garbage” has more potential. It can, through the process of anaerobic digestion, be transformed into biogas, which consists of approximately 60% methane gas. The methane gas can be used to produce heat and electricity, or as fuel in cars.
Let me explain a bit more the beauty of this concept, and how far it can go. A normal livestock farm in Scandinavia has somewhere about 60 cows, which produce enough manure per year to equal 80.000 kWh. That in turn is enough energy to power three to four houses for a year. But it doesn’t stop with manure, you can take this concept further and smart farmers can open up new revenue streams. Organic waste from communities can also be digested by these plants, and as cities need to pay to have their waste on a landfill a smart farmer charges less than the landfill for taking the organic waste. A cycle in a Biowaz reactor takes 28 days, and the biggest one can process 2000 m³ per year. In case you’re wondering what happens with the solid waste which comes out of a reactor, well, that is class A organic fertilizer. Our clever farmer would use it on his fields or sell it. The gas he can use to heat and power his house, and if there’s a feed in tariff he even can make money with his electricity.
Quite obviously I am very excited about this technology. I think its such great technology that I am surprised that only so few farmers in Finland pick up the technology, less then 20 is what I read the last time. Biowaz seems to have realized the potential of this technology, and made it easy for farmers to build a reactor, thanks to their module-based components. It seems they are targeting primarily the Nordics, and are planning to expand to China as well. Personally I think German, French and Polish farmers should be a good market as well, since they still do have substantial amounts of agriculture in these societies. Because the agricultural sector is struggling with low prices for their products, the possibility to enter the energy production market as a side business could mean that farmers could once again rise to valued members of the society. I do hope that Biowaz succeeds with their goal to make the view of a biogas reactor on a farm as common as a tractor.