Let's see you plan on connecting a pipeline to all the gas vent pipes of septic tanks to collect the methane gas???

Then running a elecrtic generator off that gas?

First of all you would have to have everyhouse hold run grey water lines into french drains to keep soap and greases out of you collection sysytem or you would incur other problems such as system break down from lack of acidity or neturalized bacteria from the oils.

How well will the gas flow thew pipe over a long distance? Could it back up in houses or blow up the houses. Vent pipes clog sometimes espically in home where no one has lived for a while and the gas will come back thru the plumbing, you would be some sort of venting system to prevent that. Like a burn off this do at natural gas pumping plants.

http://cr4.globalspec.com/blog/97/APIX-Pilot-Plant-Design-Project-Recycling-Wastes

Here is a link for a company that recently inked a contract with PG&E for a plant near Fresno. There are selling methane produced from cow manure.

http://www.allbioenergy.com/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

Digesters have two waste streams, one liquid and one solid. The solid waste can be gasified, which is a good solution because of the utility of syngas and because the process sterilizes the gas and ash. Lots of municipal waste treatment plans are starting to use systems like this. The liquid stream can be treated with conventional secondary treament.

A more intersting treatment would be to use the liquid waste to grow algae in a bioreactor. The algae then becomes biomass for gasification.

Yup, it's a start

There should be 3 waste streams, just like the 3 states of matter solid, liquid & gasous.

Cows produce most of their methane as gas!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle#Environmental_impact the figure of 95% methane as a gas is an exageration, I've seen more conservative figures around 75%

Dairies are moving to Feedlots to the valley from the LA basin, the coast & grazing lands in the sierras. This process is is continuing to degrade the already bad air quality.

Define "small" please

Tim Collins

Hi mviljoen

There is a Cape Town social housing project looking at biogas systems within a pilot scheme to build 50 solar houses (the idea is that the houses generate income for their occupants by selling excess electricity to the grid ). As it happens I will be there next week to meet the creators of the project. If you are into sustainability engineering suggest you make contact :www.landmarkfoundation.co.za

If you google The Ashden Awards and scroll through 2006 and 2007 winners you will find a number of small scale AD systems used to treat human and animal wastes (and generate biogas for cooking) in Nepal, India, Rwanda, Tanzania. The rule of thumb seems to be that generating biogas for cooking is relatively easy - power generation is a step up .

Fresh Human Wastes are more desirable than stale old septic tank stuff. The Plastic Blue Room Wastes of Construction Sites are suggested as gas producers to run supercharger, (turboturbineturningelecticgenerators.) Halfgasburners of splits for Electricity production and then heating are recommended for closed block units.

Cheap wires are also recommended for the units.

Aluminum in the walls is cheaper than Copper.

Nickel coatings may be more durable to make up for losses of perfect molecular structures.

Grounding of systems is important if any ac power is involved.

Solar PV of Outhouse combined with gas run turbine generators is suggested along with a battery cell fluid holding tank with 12volt output plugs.

hi,

i am also interested in this project and in the process of collecting info on this...pls let me know if u come across any

my id is indjk@hotmail.com

jk