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Inventor harvests methane gas from ditches and ponds to power his moped

notechmagazine.com

161–170 of 181 posts

Re: Inventor harvests methane gas from ditches and ponds to power his moped

#161
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The awful thing is that the greenhouse gas emissions involved in manufacturing the generator and maintaining it might have been significantly greater than the emissions due to the grid electricity. Not all these decisions are simple.

Better might be to capture the methane and use it to supplement residential natural gas. Here in BC you have the option to convert any percentage of your residential NG usage to 'biogas' AKA methane. (You just need to pay the higher cost for the gas.) Technically it doesn't change what comes out of your pipes, but they purchase and inject into the system an aggregate amount of biogas equal to what's purchased by cust…

It's hardly clear that building, installing, and maintaining all the equipment necessary to do that would require less energy than the methane they are wasting.

To a rough approximation, the fact that no one found it financially worthwhile already tells you that you need a ton of resources to make it happen.

Re: Inventor harvests methane gas from ditches and ponds to power his moped

#162
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're collecting something that would be produced anyway, it's going to be a net bonus.

Ideally your kitchen waste would go into a facility that properly handles it and will use it for energy production, but in a properly controlled environment (and if that energy production is biogas by avoiding methane leakage as good as possible). Of course whether that happens depends a lot on where you're living.

That ideal is far from happening.

Household waste either goes to commercial composting plants (where the methane produced most likely escapes) or to sanitary landfills, where the reduced biological activity means that the scraps degrade at a much slower rate, but do eventually reduce to methane and other lipids, though possibly at the scale of millennia or longer.

Re: Inventor harvests methane gas from ditches and ponds to power his moped

#163
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was still at school, I had occasion to tour the local sewage treatment facility as a field trip. They had equipment to power all the buildings on site with captured methane, but did not use it, because it was cheaper to just buy electricity from the grid supplier than it was to operate and maintain the generator with free methane fuel. (The methane was still burned.)

The awful thing is that the greenhouse gas emissions involved in manufacturing the generator and maintaining it might have been significantly greater than the emissions due to the grid electricity. Not all these decisions are simple.

Remember to factor in that capturing the methane and burning it is in itself a substantial good in the greenhouse gas equation. Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas if allowed to release in its raw form, far more so than CO2 and water vapor - the products of its combustion.

https://www.factcheck.org/2018/09/how-potent-is-methane/

Re: Inventor harvests methane gas from ditches and ponds to power his moped

#164
post #3

If you want to do this seriously, you could probably do quite well by creating biogas from kitchen scraps: https://www.motherearthnews.com/renewable-energy/other-renew...

Biogas is by definition a product of excess biomass production. The net potential can be estimate by the net agricultural (and perhaps forestry) primary production within a country.

To a rough first approximation based on food intake, biomass is the residual of undigested food caloric energy in the waste stream, which I believe runs at about 25% of the input calories.

You can estimate this for a population by taking roughly 2,000 kilocalories/day * population * 0.25. Ignoring any collection or processing losses, for the US this translates to about 700,000 GJ, 110,000 barreloil, or 200 GWh electricity (assuming no generation or transmission losses, in actuality about 1/3 this amount).

Actual US energy consumption is closer to 45 million barreloil day (equivalent, only 18.3 million barrels of actual oil), or roughly 400 times the maximum amount of energy available in food waste.

There may be other biomass wastestreams available (say: the input feedstock for livestock, pork, dairy, and poultry), though this won't add up to the 400-fold increase necessary as typically the trophic loss is about 10x in a given foodchain level. Even were all US food consumption in the form of animal products, the wastestream would be 40x short of present energy consumption levels.

It's not clear if the artist here is aware of what they're demonstrating, but the process of methane harvesting employed is not dissimilar to how fossil fuels formed in the first place, with biomass settling to the bottoms of shallow seas and, over the course of hundreds of millions of years, being transformed to petroleum and natural gas.

We're presently consuming that bounty at roughly 5 million times its rate of formation. The fact that it takes 8 hours to produce fuel sufficient for 20km of travel is actually millions of times more efficient than the net energy cost of fossil fuels.

Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003) details this with exquisite clarity.

https://www-legacy.dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_C...

Re: Inventor harvests methane gas from ditches and ponds to power his moped

#165
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Methane is estimated to be an order of magnitude or two more powerful than CO2. https://unece.org/challenge

That's if you release the methane, not if you burn it; assuming you burn all of it, the resulting CO2 is the bigger concern.

That's false, you should have read the link or just looked it up. And on a sidenote CH4 is converted into CO2 in the atmosphere sooner or later anyway.

Re: Inventor harvests methane gas from ditches and ponds to power his moped

#167
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better might be to capture the methane and use it to supplement residential natural gas. Here in BC you have the option to convert any percentage of your residential NG usage to 'biogas' AKA methane. (You just need to pay the higher cost for the gas.) Technically it doesn't change what comes out of your pipes, but they purchase and inject into the system an aggregate amount of biogas equal to what's purchased by cust…

It's hardly clear that building, installing, and maintaining all the equipment necessary to do that would require less energy than the methane they are wasting. To a rough approximation, the fact that no one found it financially worthwhile already tells you that you need a ton of resources to make it happen.

Seems like in the US there are 500+ landfill gas projects operational with about another 500 possible sites - so not exactly no one.

https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-ga...

Re: Inventor harvests methane gas from ditches and ponds to power his moped

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really any account with less than 100k karma is practically a throwaway account.

whoa, even dang has only 25k. I'm not longer going to listen to him when he threatens bans.

Maybe HN stores karma as a 32-bit integer and dang had a buffer overflow and is simply wrapping back around to 25k now.

Re: Inventor harvests methane gas from ditches and ponds to power his moped

#169
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could easily walk 20km in 8 hours.

5km per hour is easily doable, I believe. A group of us in high school once did that and covered about 105kms in 3 days. We walked just about 7 hours every day for those 3 days.

My great-great-grandfather in the late 1800s got a land grant. I'm trying to work out how he got the farm started, because apparently he used to catch the train from his labourer job in the bit city, then walk 70km to his land.

Re: Inventor harvests methane gas from ditches and ponds to power his moped

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the obesity epidemic it is probably better to tell people they can just compost their food if there is too much and they can't eat it. And then cook a little less next time. I keep 100% of foodstuff out of my trash, and an added benefit is that you never get stinky trash that needs to be taken out. I take my trash out every 2 weeks and it never smells at all.

My uneaten food went into the fridge for my next meal as a kid.

Sorry you had abusive parents
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