Fuel companies

Biogas doesn’t have to be used only for the production of heat and electricity.  It can be used as a replacement for fuel, such as gasoline.  This means that you could technically run your car off of cow manure! First off let’s look at why this would be beneficial.

 

The most common way for fuel companies to obtain oil today is through drilling.  Drilling oil has many negative consequences like the destruction of wildlife and biodiversity, loss of fertile soil, pollution of air and drinking water, degradation of farmland and damage to aquatic ecosystems.  It is also one of the primary causes of global warming because of all the CO2 that is released into the atmosphere when the oil is used (the burning of fossil fuels).  Using biogas as an alternative for oil would completely eliminate all of these harsh environmental consequences. 

 

The Alberta oil sands have completely destroyed the ecosystems that used to be found in the areas where the drilling happens.   

 

 Oil is also going to RUN OUT.  The human race has such a huge dependence on it presently that we will not be able to survive once it is gone.  This is why it is necessary to find a sustainable, eco-friendly alternative and why this dependence on fossil fuels should further encourage the energy markets and politicians to invest in renewable energy alternatives and incentives for biogas. 

 

How could fuel companies obtain the methane?  

There are two types of fuel industries that concern biogas- electrical and gasoline.  The main problem convincing fuel companies to invest in, or switch to, biogas is that it would be a waste to have centralized plants for the methane to be extracted.  To do this, the fuel companies would have to buy the manure from the farmers and transport it to the plant, using fossil fuels during the transportation, therefore defeating the whole purpose.  What the fuel companies would have to do is install the digesters on each farm to capture the methane directly from the fresh manure.  The electrical companies could either generate electricity on the farm and transport it to commercial areas through wires, or transport the gas through pipelines back to one central plant to generate the electricity and heat.

 

Then there are the fuel companies that concern gasoline.  There are two ways that a car could run off of biogas.  The first way would be to convert cars to be able to run off of upgrade biogas (bio methane).  The complicated part in this is that this gas contains 60% methane and 40% carbon dioxide.  Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the resulting waste of a combustion engine, so it would have to be extracted from the methane before it could be used for a car. 

The most practical way for Canadians to use biogas as fuel would be to convert the car to be able to start on gasoline and switch over to biogas once the engine is heated up.  The gas tank would need to be able to pressurize the gas to 3,500psi (pounds per square inch) and would have to be made out of a plastic composite core wrapped in carbon fibre.  Other than the price of the conversion, it wouldn’t be too difficult accomplish except for one thing.  Due to the large quantity of time needed by the filling station (22 hours), we Canadians would have trouble adapting to cars running on biogas. This is hugely impractical for today’s society because it would take almost a full day to fill up the car when most families and people need to use their cars multiple times a day.  Nascar is currently developing a system that can fill a car in only 8 hours which will help for the future.  Some states in the U.S. have developed and installed high-speed fueling at gas stations.  These take only 4-5 minutes (the time of normally filling up a car with gasoline), but these stations cost 750, 000 dollars each and low demand means that it would be difficult to receive the funding to install them. 

 

 

 

This is a dodge caravan that has been converted to start off of gasoline and then switch over to natural gas. 

 

The other alternative would be for Canadians to convert to electrical cars, using green electricity (generated from biogas) to run them.  Electric cars produce no tailpipe emissions and are cheaper to operate than cars running on gasoline.  Again, like the car running on biogas, the charge up time for the car takes hours which isn’t practical for Canadians. 

 

This diagram shows the differences of electric and gasoline cars. The electric cars are much cheaper and run more efficiently than electric cars without producing any pollution.