/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11328200
>>11328288
>>11328302
You can make methane from all organic waste, especially from manures, and also get high-nitrogen fertilizer out of the deal. The latter of which is highly valued in a place where growing your own food would be paramount. The neat thing is that the microbes are doing the major amount of work. Once you have built the system and have proper amounts of input, you can get more energy out of the system than work-energy you are putting into it. Meaning, since humans are not actively working to convert organic waste to methane and fertilizer you get quite a large net benefit of energy. It happens in such large quantities that it will more than likely outpace other Mars methane generation methods for quite some time.

There are a few calculators floating around online that allows you to calculate how many people or animals can produce x amount of methane. Start up costs can range from next to nothing up to government funded power plants. India (no surprise!) is the forerunner of biomethane digesters, using masonry-lined holes in the ground and only using it as cooking gas and fertilizer. Germany is all tech tech tech with it making gas for home heating, electric, and fertilizer. There are now many turn-key companies in the USA selling small scale and mid-farm scale biomethane digesters; mostly for gas and fertilizer production.

Scrubbing the gas to move H20, CO2, and HS2 is thankfully pretty simple. All the energy needs of one of these biomethane digester plants is produced by itself, with an abundance of methane to spare.

>>11109224
>>11109231
I prepose we use the biomethane route to get the most out of the waste.

>>10915928
Based biogas poster. We need to get as much out of something before the cycle loops back.

>>8119557
>>8119547
It is actually pretty logical. You never get more energy out of anything you make than what you put into it.

The only times you can hope to stop this is something where you hijack existing bio processes that lower energy costs in production. One major thing is biomethane which uses microbes to produce the methane fuel. We get more out of that than what we put in only because of the microbes doing the major workload.

We still need to feed the microbes so that still requires biomass. Instead of growing things specifically for the biomass like in ethanol production, we use waste products. Things like human feces, animal manure, industrial food waste, farming biomass waste, etc.

You get back methane and fertilizer. So you can grow more crops with the fertilizer to start the cycle over again. That's something can can't be done with ethanol production unless you couple ethanol production biomass waste with the methanol/fertilizer production.