Can methane from a digestor/reactor be compressed to become a fuel suitable for the same uses as LNG?
There is a number of fleets around the world that have run or are running – on biogas. One of the earliest was in Christchurch, New Zealand – and this used methane from the city sewage processing plant. There is now a significant number of fleets operating on biogas, with examples in France, Sweden, USA etc. It is certainly a very ‘green’ approach to part of our energy and pollution problems. It was estimated in 1993 by the company Solagro in France that the potential in that country for annual biogas production was between 2.5 and 5 million tonnes of petrol equivalent. The main problem that must be faced is that raw biogas contains about 50% CO2 and quite a few other gaseous contaminants that may foul up mechanical plant or be corrosive. A light water scrubbing process can remove most of these nasties except the CO2, but while it is possible to run stationary engines on gas than contains 50% CO2 this is obviously going to lower the volumetric efficiency of the engine and cause other p
