" Energy " Solutions !

Most country towns welcome both an abattoir and a meat processing plant for the jobs they create but are less enthusiastic about the bad smells and disposal methods from the inevitable waste they generate, and a lot of this ends up in the local landfill.

The New South Wales city of Goulburn has such plants and they will soon be self sufficient in electricity and able to contribute energy to the state power grid.   The abattoir and the meat processing factory have partnered with a power generating company to create a biogas facility to use waste generated in the meat trade.

They are spending $5.75 million to build a biogas facility that will use as fuel the waste generated by the food source.   Liquid run-off, fats and other waste from the abattoir and trim discarded by the meat factory will be biologically broken down and putrefied in a covered dam using bacteria.  There is a high degree of flexibility as the liquid containing the biogas can expand when energy demand is low, saving this fuel to supplement the system when demand is high.

Basically, this simply replicates the human digestive process.   When we have a meal the meat and vegetable matter is digested by the bacteria in our stomach as the nutriments are extracted and the waste passed on to the bowel and it is here that methane is produced, and that is a burnable gas.

In this commercial duplication of the human stomach it will pass that methane to two 800 kilowatt generators  that supply the meat plants need and feed the excess into the state power grid.   These generators can also use natural gas for fuel so they can keep producing electricity when the meat plant is shut down for annual maintenance.

That is a substantial saving.  The Goulburn facility consumes about 20,000 kilowatt hours of electricity every working day as it processes sheep and lambs for meat and skins.   This biogas generation replaces the method used by most abattoirs and meat processors in which waste is stored and  treated in a series of ponds, often producing offensive smells until it can be used to irrigate pasture or transferred to a sewer.

We have an ever expanding need for more electricity and global warming is causing us to turn away from coal as the means of generating our electricity needs.   The impetus is on " renewable " sources such as wind and solar, but turning an inevitable waste product into an electricity source is a creative way of harnessing what otherwise goes free to contribute to global warming.

We have a lot of abattoirs and meat plants scattered across Australia.  Methane if an inevitable by-product of the waste they generate.   It makes a lot more sense to turn it into electricity than allow it to putrefy in landfills or in evaporative ponds where in contributes to global warming.