Creating power from poultry poop

DW (English)

Chickens create a lot of waste, which is hard to dispose of. A Coimbatore start-up is generating enough biogas from the muck to cover one farm’s power needs.

Transcript

00:01Chickens may provide us with eggs and meat, but poultry farming also generates a lot of excrement that harms the environment.

00:09Bablan, a farmer in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, used to sell it as fertilizer.

00:15But it releases methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

00:18And handling all that chicken manure was a messy, unpleasant job.

00:21Before, we needed a lot of manpower to handle the waste.

00:31But now, with the conveyor belt, we just need two people to handle the whole process.

00:38The waste reaches the tank via the belt.

00:44That tank is a part of biogas facility, purchased with a neighbor from a local company.

00:51Environmental Technology Company.

00:53It converts the waste into electricity, powering two farms.

00:58This plant costs around 7 million rupees.

01:02And we can recover that amount in just five years.

01:05Since this system requires very little maintenance, it is highly beneficial and profitable for farmers.

01:12Green solutions like this are urgently needed.

01:16In Tamil Nadu alone, there are around 5,500 poultry farms.

01:20Their waste releases methane, which is more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide.

01:27In terms of trapping heat in the atmosphere and driving up temperatures.

01:31So, we get eight tons of poultry litter per day.

01:41And the biogas plant is constructed accordingly.

01:44It is possible to generate 800 to 1,000 kilowatts of electricity per day from eight tons of waste.

01:50As you can see, this is the storage balloon where we have stored the gas that contains 80% methane.

02:01And with that gas, we can run the generator.

02:03In the biogas facility, the chicken waste is converted into electricity.

02:11It works like this.

02:13The excrement is mixed with water and fermented in a tank with bacteria to create methane.

02:19It is then further purified.

02:21Then we have two separators that remove moisture and carbon dioxide.

02:27We get filtered gas that has 80% of methane and it is stored in this storage balloon.

02:34The gas is burned and produces electricity via a turbine.

02:38The stored gas from the balloon reaches the generator through the pipeline.

02:46Now, as you see, I'll start the generator without any supporting fuel.

02:54Bablan's 20,000 chickens produce a huge amount of waste each day.

03:00Enough to generate around 500 kilowatt hours of electricity.

03:03Rather than sending it to the wider grid, Bablan and his fellow farmer used nearly all of it for fans.

03:10And conveyor belts.

03:12Our electricity bill used to be around 400,000 rupees.

03:18At a price of roughly 10 euro cents per kilowatt, this was a major challenge for us.

03:25Now, with biogas, we can generate 1,000 kilowatts of power from eight tons of waste.

03:30It has reduced our bill by about 2,500 euros, which is roughly three quarters of the entire amount.

03:38Chicken manure has been used for biogas for around 20 years.

03:44But only recently has it been possible to install compact plants right at the fuel source on farms like this one.

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