Biogas handling

Three major system components which need to be examined when assessing the technical feasibility of using anaerobic digestion to produce methane gas from animal manure include i) manure handling ii) biological process stability and iii) biogas handling. 

Biogas Handling. Quantitative biogas production potential... 

Anaerobic systems range from large systems that can handle 400,000 cubic feet of material and produce 1.5 million cubic feet of biogas per day to small systems that handle 400 cubic feet of material and produce 6,000 cubic feet of biogas a day. 

An alternative to the use of H2 as fuel is methanol, which is a liquid fuel and easy to handle. This can be directly transformed to electrical current in a DMFC (direct methanol fuel cell). The DMFC allows a simple system design. However, presently achieved performance data of DMFC is not satisfactory and material costs are too high. As another alternative, methanol or hydrocarbons (e.g. natural gas, biogas) can be transformed to hydrogen on board the electric vehicle by a reformation reaction. This allows use of the H2-PEFC cell, which has a higher level of development. The reformate feed gas may contain up to 2.5% carbon monoxide (CO) by volume, which can be reduced to about 50ppm CO using a selective oxidizer (Wilkinson et al. [1997]). 

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