Greenhouse Gas Mitigation and Renewable Energy Production through Farm-Scale Anaerobic Digestion - Potential for Flanders and the European Union

摘要

The development of farm-scale anaerobic digesters is recently gaining more interest due to its ecological and financial benefits. Such installations allow the conversion of proprietary biomass to biogas and digestate and thus contribute to the mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by avoiding uncontrolled emissions during long-term biomass storage (Marafion et al., 2011; Mesa-Dominguez et al., 2015; Miranda et al., 2015). The produced biogas, usually burnt in a combined heat and power (CHP) unit, will provide electricity and heat for farmers to become (partly) self-sufficient in their energy demand. However, most of the current farm-scale installations only use cattle slurry as input. Other agricultural sectors can still not benefit from the(partial) fulfillment of the energy requirements this technology can offer while rising energy prices become a more and more determining cost. Within the context of the Pocket Power project a sector scan for agricultural subsectors is ongoing for the region of Flanders, Belgium. This sector scan explores the possible transfer of the positive experiences with small-scale anaerobic digestion of cattle slurry to other agricultural streams (e.g. pig manure, crop residues). By means of data from the BIOSURFproject, funded by the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program of the European Union, the results obtained for Flanders will be extrapolated to an overall potential for Europe. The BIOSURF project itself aims to describe opportunities and potentialenvironmental burdens associated with biomethane production and consumption (Kirchmeyr, 2016).