Banana biogas to power heavy-duty farming equipment and vehicles
Earlier we reported about three Malaysian students whose 'banana biogas' project won the country's National Competition in Innovative Science and Engineering. Now an Australian horticulture organisation, Growcom, has been awarded a grant of just under $200 000 by the Sustainable Industries Division of the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to build a pilot banana biogas plant in Tully. The plant will test the commercial viability of using waste bananas to produce methane. The biogas would be cleaned and compressed for use as fuel for forklift trucks, farm vehicles and other vehicles currently using diesel fuel. This project will also produce fertilizer as a by-product and reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
The plant will be constructed and operated in the next 12 months on the plantation of Bush Holdings at Tully. About 10 per cent of bananas are currently discarded in the Queensland banana industry every year due to imperfections which make them unsuitable for sale. “Bush Holdings, one of the industry’s larger growers, has agreed to partner with us to provide the constant supply to the plant required for the pilot project,” said Growcom CEO Jan Davis.
There are several advantages when using bananas for biogas:
Now it would be interesting to study how much biogas can be derived from tropical crops, like bananas and plantains:
biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: Africa :: biogas :: banana ::
In the developing world, biogas could be on its way to becoming a widely used fuel, both in transport and as a decentralised energy source for stationary applications (see here, here and here). (In a futuristic scenario, remote energy producing communities may even produce biogas that is airlifted to large cities - earlier post.) So instead of merely using waste bananas from existing industries, they should be studied as potential dedicated energy crops for large-scale methane production; instead of exporting uniform 'Euro-bananas' (a cumbersome process involving lots of middlemen, the profits of which never arrive at the small producers) they should be looked at as valuable sources of locally available energy. Bananas and plantains have high biomass yields: for bananas they can go up to 50 tonnes per hectare, for plantains up to 40 tonnes. Added are several tonnes of leaves and stems.
But for the time being, we should await the results from an initiative like that in Queensland. The project has clear targets and already some research that proves its viability: “We anticipate that the pilot plant will begin producing gas in about five months’ time and we hope it will prove that the gas can be produced in commercial quantities and compressed for use in combustion engines to power tractors and machinery. We expect the project will confirm the research findings made by the Division of Environmental Engineering at the University of Queensland last year. Researchers showed that natural gas could be produced from bananas using a ‘continuous digestion’ process involving natural microbial organisms. “We plan to transform their work from the laboratory benchtop into a full scale pilot plant on farm.”
“We hope that scaled up production could ultimately see a cheaper alternative fuel to petrol produced at the larger packing sheds on farm, saving growers a significant amount on their annual fuel bill. “The technology also has the potential to be transferred to other fruit and vegetable commodities such as apples in other regions.”
More information:
FreshPlaza: Banana biofuels project aims to reduce growers’ fuel bills - Oct. 20, 2006
The plant will be constructed and operated in the next 12 months on the plantation of Bush Holdings at Tully. About 10 per cent of bananas are currently discarded in the Queensland banana industry every year due to imperfections which make them unsuitable for sale. “Bush Holdings, one of the industry’s larger growers, has agreed to partner with us to provide the constant supply to the plant required for the pilot project,” said Growcom CEO Jan Davis.
There are several advantages when using bananas for biogas:
- they produce a very clean form of biogas, consisting of just methane and CO2, compared to biogas derived from other waste streams such as human sewage, piggery or feedlot waste which contains many different trace elements
- the methane production process releases less noxious odours compared to that based on other feedstocks
- the yields are very high due to the easy fermentability of bananas
Now it would be interesting to study how much biogas can be derived from tropical crops, like bananas and plantains:
biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: Africa :: biogas :: banana ::
In the developing world, biogas could be on its way to becoming a widely used fuel, both in transport and as a decentralised energy source for stationary applications (see here, here and here). (In a futuristic scenario, remote energy producing communities may even produce biogas that is airlifted to large cities - earlier post.) So instead of merely using waste bananas from existing industries, they should be studied as potential dedicated energy crops for large-scale methane production; instead of exporting uniform 'Euro-bananas' (a cumbersome process involving lots of middlemen, the profits of which never arrive at the small producers) they should be looked at as valuable sources of locally available energy. Bananas and plantains have high biomass yields: for bananas they can go up to 50 tonnes per hectare, for plantains up to 40 tonnes. Added are several tonnes of leaves and stems.
But for the time being, we should await the results from an initiative like that in Queensland. The project has clear targets and already some research that proves its viability: “We anticipate that the pilot plant will begin producing gas in about five months’ time and we hope it will prove that the gas can be produced in commercial quantities and compressed for use in combustion engines to power tractors and machinery. We expect the project will confirm the research findings made by the Division of Environmental Engineering at the University of Queensland last year. Researchers showed that natural gas could be produced from bananas using a ‘continuous digestion’ process involving natural microbial organisms. “We plan to transform their work from the laboratory benchtop into a full scale pilot plant on farm.”
“We hope that scaled up production could ultimately see a cheaper alternative fuel to petrol produced at the larger packing sheds on farm, saving growers a significant amount on their annual fuel bill. “The technology also has the potential to be transferred to other fruit and vegetable commodities such as apples in other regions.”
More information:
FreshPlaza: Banana biofuels project aims to reduce growers’ fuel bills - Oct. 20, 2006
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