My family had a hog farm when I was growing up, and this just reeks of geeks who have never had to actually deal with a whole lot of manure.
Making methane from manure is hardly a new idea, I remember reading farm magazine articles 40 years ago from farmers who did this as kind of an interesting sideline. At best they barely broke even.
There's all kinds of issues when you actually try to make it work. Collecting the stuff is harder than you think, and you have to worry about impurities such as soil and stones. There's also issues with rain introducing massive amounts of unwanted water to the system. In cold climates frozen manure is hard to collect and process (it has to be heated up first).
In CA anyway, dairies need a lot of open land per cow because of drainage issues (dairies use a lot of water). Thus they aren't the best target for manure collection. Cattle feedlots where cattle are fattened up for slaughter are better, but they tend to push all the poop into a 10 or 12 foot high pile in the center of the pen before collection where you've got all the impurity issues I mentioned before.
Instead of collecting it from open cow pastures, the better bet would be collecting it from confined swine and poultry operations, where outside weather doesn't affect it and it all gets collected in one place anyway. But then you also get ethical issues over the treatment of farm animals (confinement operations are considered concentration camps by PETA).
While the end product after the methane has been extracted makes good fertilizer, you still need a reliable market to sell the massive amounts generated. I remember that while my family at one time was able to sell our hog manure to local vineyards, at the end we couldn't give it away because the vineyards had gone out of business. The bulk fertilizer value is so low that transportation and handling costs eat up much of its value.
Also, running a livestock operation is notoriously risky. To stay in business, most operations will see the number of livestock fluctuate by 50% or more as the market goes up and down over cycles that last years. Selling the energy from manure won't make up the difference. A data center needs a constant energy stream, so it's basically incompatible with how livestock is produced. Does HP really want to worry about pork futures?
The research arm of computing giant Hewlett Packard demonstrated on Wednesday a design for a sustainable datacenter that can be fueled by cow manure.
In a research paper presented at the ASME International Conference on Energy Sustainability in Phoenix, Ariz., researchers from HP Labs explained how a farm of 10,000 dairy cows could fulfill the power requirements of a medium-sized, 1-megawatt datacenter, and still have power left over to support other farm needs.
The process works like so: heat generated by the datacenter is used to increase the efficiency of the anaerobic digestion of animal waste. This process creates methane, which can be used to generate power for the data center.
It may not smell very good, but it’s a viable economic and environmental answer to power-hungry computing.
Takeaways from the report:
- The average dairy cow produces about 120 lbs. of manure per day.
- That amount of manure can generate 3.0 kilowatt-hours of electrical energy.
- A medium-sized dairy farm with 10,000 cows produces about 200,000 metric tons of manure per year.
- Approximately 70 percent of the energy in the methane generated via anaerobic digestion can be used for datacenter power and cooling.
- Methane is 21 times more damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide — a problem for farms that choose to dispose of manure by “flaring” it.
- HP researchers estimated that dairy farmers would break even in costs within the first two years of using a system like this, then earn about $2 million per year in revenue from selling waste-derived power to datacenter customers.
Even better news: there are an awful lot of dairy farms in the U.S.
The concept, which is called “co-location,” is simple: marry a power hog with an energy producer on the same plot of land, and you’ve got a miniature ecosystem that more or less cancels out each side of the equation.
Here’s a video of Chandrakant Patel, director of the Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab at HP Labs, explaining the system:
It also proves beneficial for other means. Since farms — particularly those in the Midwest — are quite optimal for wind farms and other energy sources, it appears as though the U.S. may find renewed economic benefit from its wide open spaces.
