A biogas plant operator from Upper Bavaria called me because he didn’t know what to do with his 130 kW biogas plant. Week by week, the “sludge” in the digester got thicker and thicker. By now he had to agitate “non-stop”.
He searched the internet and found me, because I am known for solving difficult biological problems in biogas plants. After two minutes on the phone and the first question, it was clear where the solution lay: raise the temperature!
But that wasn’t possible. The temperature in the digester had even dropped over the last few weeks, because something was wrong with the heating. The solution would be that simple. Would be. But he can’t get the heat into the digester. For whatever reason. *
This is another good example from practice showing that temperature is factor number 1 if you want high and maximum degradation rates in your biogas plant. Whatever the feedstock.
Temperature is the key to biogas biology!
And I can already hear the usual critics: What about trace elements? What about shredding? What about agitation?
It’s always a domino effect. If the first domino – the higher temperature – doesn’t fall, the others won’t fall either.
“I don’t promise any additional yield with my shredding!” – three manufacturers of mechanical shredding have now told me this. I asked them specifically. “Shredding makes it possible to use grass and straw at all.” I’ve been saying that for almost 20 years. And I was laughed at for a long time. Mechanics never get down to the molecular size needed for additional biogas production.
Today nobody laughs any more, because environmental verifiers confirm every year that biogas plants with higher temperatures are far above the KTBL average for gas yield. You can see it in black and white at my plant. 30% above KTBL must be the goal and the standard for every biogas plant, so that it runs economically in the long term.
The more fibrous and straw-like the feedstocks, the more important a higher temperature is!
I now recommend not just thermophilic but hyper-thermophilic operation. We run tanks at temperatures above 60 °C – and it works brilliantly. Whatever the “specialists and consultants” say about thermophilic operation being less stable. That is complete nonsense. Prof. Scherer scientifically proved the effect of hyper-thermophilic operation back in the 1990s. I don’t do it in the lab, but in a real biogas plant. It works.
And at the beginning – 5 years ago – I was afraid it might go wrong. It didn’t. Quite the opposite. Biogas yields went up again.
If
- your feedstocks are too expensive and you want to switch to cheaper, fibrous feedstocks,
- you keep having agitation problems because degradation rates are too low,
- you want to make your biogas plant biologically and economically fit for the next 10 years and more,
- you are interested in funding of up to 40% for investments,
then call my office on +49 8734 93 977 0 or my mobile on +49 151 7011 5170.
If you want to determine your biological performance against KTBL, you can request an Excel calculation sheet here: w.danner@snow-leopard-projects.com
*Since we couldn’t raise the temperature immediately, I recommended using special enzymes as an emergency measure, so that he didn’t have to have the whole tank separated. That was cheaper than external separation, which can easily cost €10,000.
