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BIOGAS - WHAT IS IT AND WHAT ARE ITS BENEFITS ?

Biogas is a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide ,with traces of ammonia,hydrogen,nitrogen,hydrogen sulphide,carbon monoxide and water vapour.It is the only renewable source of energy suitable both for generating electricity and heat energy and for producing gas and liquid fuels.


Biogas is obtained with the help of methane-generating bacteria which assist in the process of breaking down the material without the presence of oxygen (anaerobic digestion). This process goes on in nature, in ponds and swamps, in the digestive tracts of ruminants and also under controlled conditions in the fermentation tanks of biogas plants.

Anaerobic digestion is a common method for processing the waste from the livestock industry ( liquid and solid manure), yielding electrical and heat energy and high-quality fertiliser.

By producing biogas through anerobic digestion, less of the methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) resulting from the disposal and use of manure are produced.

We have already mentioned that carbon dioxide is the main cause of global warming and the greenhouse effect.CO2 is also released during the evaporation of biogas,but the difference between this and fossil fuels is that the CO2 from biogas has been absorbed from the atmosphere through plant photosynthesis in the recent past. For this reason,biogas use is considered to be CO2 - neutral and does not give rise to an increase in the volume of greenhouse gases.

Using biogas also hleps mitigate global warming by reducing the consumption of fossil fuels in the production of energy amd automotive fuels and in doing so significantly reducing CO2,CH4 and N2O emissions.However, the greatest contribution made by biogas plants to the reduction of emissions of harmful gases is in the fact that in using biogas, methane (CH4), is burned rather than being released into the atmosphere,where it would otherwise cause some 22 times more damage to the ozone layer than carbon dioxide (CO2).

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