Biomethane

By Dr. John G. Ingersoll

The production of biomethane, the renewable version of natural gas, from the biological conversion of organic matter at an industrial scale is fast advancing in several areas of the world. A confluence of factors is fueling the rapid expansion: cost-reducing continuous advances in the technology that make biomethane competitive to fossil natural gas, the emerging concerns over global warming and the need for developing renewable energy resources, and the looming peak oil consequences on the international political-economic stability and in particular the national security of the United States and several major energy importing nations. All types of organic wastes generated by our advanced society, as well as dedicated energy cash crops, can be and are employed separately or combined to produce this renewable fuel. Unlike other biofuels derived from limited food crops, biomethane is a universal natural fuel that is produced in a sustainable fashion because organic fertilizer as a coproduct of the conversion process is used to grow optimally the employed energy crops. Biomethane can be most effectively utilized as a replacement of gasoline and diesel in the transportation sector and is the only practical solution to do so in the foreseeable future. A biomethane-based road transportation system in the United States can generate over 1 trillion dollars in economic output and support 10 million direct and indirect green jobs in manufacturing, engineering, construction, farming, and services. Vision and political will are sufficient to mobilize the vast American natural resources, know-how and economy in order to effect full transition from oil dependency to an indigenous biomethane economy within twenty years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9781469121918

Dr. John G. Ingersoll

Dr. John G. Ingersoll is a scientist and businessman who has worked since the early 1980s in the implementation of energy efficiency and renewable energy both in the built environment and in transportation. He has held senior technical and management positions in a national laboratory, aerospace and automotive industries, in academia and the federal government. He has authored and co-authored hundreds of technical papers and reports, three books and holds several patents. He is the co-recipient of numerous awards on the design of innovative energy efficiency and renewable energy projects. He has been educated at Syracuse University, University of California at Berkeley (Ph.D. in Physics) and UCLA. He is the founder and president of ECOCORP, a leading US firm dedicated to the large scale commercialization of biomethane as a biofuel.

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Copyright © 2010 by Dr. John G. Ingersoll.

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Contents

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Abbreviations, Acronyms And Units

Bibliography

About The Author

Endnotes

PREFACE

The time for application of the large-scale conversion of organic matter via a biological process into biomethane, a gaseous biofuel and the renewable form of the familiar to all natural gas, has finally arrived. The conversion process, also known as anaerobic digestion, is not new as it has been applied since the late nineteenth century, primarily as an effective method of treating wastes in municipal wastewater facilities. Anaerobic digestion has also been applied to control animal wastes in farms and is also responsible for the decay of organic materials discarded in landfills. The same conversion process, of course, has been occurring on earth, since life appeared on our planet, as a natural process to recycle organic matter and to stabilize the composition of the atmosphere. ¹ What is new and different today is the commercialization of the technology in an optimized and cost-effective fashion to convert organic wastes and energy crops, including cellulose, into a premium fuel, namely, biomethane. Methane is the key ingredient in natural gas, comprising typically 93-96% of it.

The late 1980s witnessed the commercialization of the first modern biogas facilities in Europe optimized for fuel production rather than waste control. Since that time, more than one hundred large industrial such facilities and several thousand smaller ones have become operational. These facilities treat millions of tons of separated municipal wastes, green and yard wastes, animal wastes, crop residues and industrial wastes, and even energy crops as a means to augment the value of unprocessed organic wastes into valuable products such as a biogas fuel and liquid or stabilized organic fertilizers for further environmental quality gains. As we enter the twenty-first century, more and more people in the United States take notice of the biogas technology, which is moving slowly but steadily in the forefront of the biological conversion process of organic matter, including wastes and dedicated energy crops². The progress, albeit slow, is taking place at a steady pace without fanfare and without any particular government subsidies. This is unlike other biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel. Biogas flourishes in the midst of existing, but technology-neutral, environmental regulation because it offers a cost-effective mechanism on a life cycle cost basis to convert wastes into marketable products and at the same time improve land, water, and air environmental quality at no additional cost. Moreover, the biogas technology is capable today, as it has been all along, of converting cellulose, starch, sugars, and other carbohydrates, as well as fats, oil, and proteins, and just about any organic substance into methane. Thus, a very broad spectrum of organic matter may be used to produce biomethane unlike other biofuels that are limited to a few highly selective feedstocks. This is critical for the emergence of a sustainable biofuel that can rely exclusively on energy crops rather than food crops to be produced in the large quantities necessary to be able to replace imported oil overtime.

This book is written for those wishing to learn more about this fascinating technology that is surely going to play a crucial role in the sustainable development of our planet in the twenty-first century not only in the United States but also all around the globe. The level of the book is more information orientated and less technical in nature in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. It provides sufficient detail to be of value to (a) policy makers in the government—federal, state, or local—as they make hard choices from among a myriad of conflicting requirements, lack of information, and occasional misinformation, and (b) the business community to identify new opportunities for development. Above all, this book is intended as an educational tool for any member of the public with concerns about environmental, financial, or national security issues emanating from the ever-increasing dependency of the United States on imported fuels. The longer these issues are left unaddressed, the more pronounced and severe would their impact be on the well-being of future generations. An informed citizenry is necessary for an orderly change. And change, a paradigm shift, would be required in order to redirect the course of the nation away from a business as usual approach, presented to the rest of us as the only choice by those with vested interests in maintaining the status quo. The proponents of the business as usual approach realize that oil dependency threatens the national security of the country, but their solution is to maintain the supply of oil from overseas at any cost.³ Fortunately, more people and policy makers now seem to understand that the energy system is in serious and growing trouble, and that without a fundamentally new approach, we are almost assured of a catastrophic failure. Others have observed that the most cost-effective and fastest way to end successfully the War on Terrorism is for the United States to stop sending petrodollars overseas. Only the creation of a viable domestic alternative and renewable fuels industry for the transportation sector will address and solve the problem at hand. Indeed, the message of this book is that there is another choice, but its implementation requires a bold vision for the future more than anything else.

I find it gratifying—more than thirty years since I first became exposed to and fascinated with the potential of biomethane while a university student in the aftermath of the 1973 energy crisis and in the midst of natural gas shortages in the United States—that the technology is finally taking off. The idea for this book was conceived some years ago, but the circumstances were not right yet for its development until very recently. As with most endeavors of this type, a confluence of factors had to provide the necessary impetus to make it happen. These factors have included, among others, the ever-increasing military incursions of the United States in the oil-rich Middle East to secure dwindling supplies of oil from among an ever-increasing number of competing nations; the highly unstable oil prices due to the fact that world oil production is approaching peak capacity, if it is not already there⁴; and the no-longer-sustainable oil-based economy at home and abroad for environmental, economic, and several other reasons. Indeed, the era of oil is rapidly reaching its end, and methane is emerging to replace it. The dawn of a perpetual domestic and global Biomethane Economy is upon us⁵.

CHAPTER 1

OIL—THE FUEL OF THE

TWENTIETH CENTURY

Crude oil, known since antiquity, was rediscovered in modern times in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. The vast expansion of the US industry and economy after the Civil War, having already made a transition from fuel wood to coal as a primary energy source, found in crude oil an even better source of energy. Crude oil and its derivative liquid fuels became ideal sources of energy in the transportation sector, the expansion of which became an integral part of ongoing industrial and economic growth across the vast American continent. The large-scale introduction of the horseless carriage—i.e., the automobile—in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century was a product of this need, but it could not have happened to the degree it did without the availability of abundant domestic resources of crude oil. Indeed, the US crude oil production accounted year after year for more than 60% of the world output in the first half of the twentieth century. The United States remained the largest producer of crude oil until the early 1970s. Domestic crude oil production reached its peak at 10.2 million bbl (barrels) per day in 1970, as shown in figure 1.1a, and began its gradual, but predicted some twenty years earlier, decline ever since. ⁶ The coming on line in the mid-1970s of Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, the largest US oil field ever discovered, and represented in figure 1.1a by the lower peak, was unable to affect materially the decline of crude oil production. This observation is important in light of offshore oil production claimed by some nowadays as a solution to US oil dependency. Clearly, expansion of offshore oil production will have no substantive impact in stopping the decline in domestic oil production. It is also important to note the fast impact of vehicle fuel efficiency on oil consumption compared to expanding offshore oil drilling that takes a decade or so to begin making an impact. This is reflected in the dip in US consumption shown in figure 1.1b in the ten years between 1975 and 1985, when the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards for automobiles were implemented and took full effect.

image%201.jpg image%202.png

A                                                          B

FIGURE 1.1 Historical US crude oil production and supply:

A. Production from 1860 to 2007. Peak oil occurred in 1970. The second lower peak reflects the contribution from Alaska.

B. Domestic and imported supply from 1945 to 2007. The dip in imported oil by 3 million bbl per day in 1986 reflects the implementation of the automobile CAFE standards starting in 1976

Source: Energy Information Administration, US DOE.

The worldwide expansion of the oil industry after World War II was able to fuel an unprecedented growth of the global economy throughout most of the rest of the twentieth century. Plentiful resources of oil beyond those already known were found and developed in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, UAR), Siberia and several of the former Soviet republics, in Europe (UK, Norway), as well as in the Americas (United States, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela), and even in parts of Africa (Nigeria) and in East and Southeast Asia (China, Indonesia). As of 2006, the cumulative world production of oil since the beginning of the oil era in the nineteenth century amounted to about 1 trillion bbl. An additional 1 trillion bbl is believed to constitute the remaining conventional oil reserves. The inclusion of the Canadian tar sands raises the reserves of crude oil to about 1.3 trillion bbl, as shown in figure 1.2.⁷

Daily world crude oil production including natural gas liquids and refinery gains has reached a plateau of