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Revision as of 10:26, 17 September 2015
Human practices
Back to Human practicesCattle farm
The first industrial facility we surveyed was a cow barn, not just any cow barn of course; we visited the royal cow barn at the Norwegian Royal Farm in Bygdøy.
Picture 1: The Main Barn and the Surrounding Field
The main barn is 1000 m2 and houses 60 dairy cows 70 calves, in total 130 cows. These are mostly Norwegian Red cattle with a few Blacksided Trondheim and Norland Cattle added to the mix. They have plans for collecting manure in tanks to make biogas by anaerobic digestion, but there is no system yet that utilizes the methane released from cows.
Picture 2: The main cow barn, houses about 60-70 cows, part of the ventilation system that draws in surrounding outside air and mixes it with the indoor air can be seen hanging down from the roof
Picture 3: Calves in an enclosure. #Royal bovids
Facts About Methane Emissions From cattle The average cow can produce 250-500 L of methane per day:
Beef cows produce 2.29 Tg/year Tg (one million metric tons)
Dairy cows 1.2 Tg/year
Calves about 0.07-0.15 Tg/year depending on type of cow, dairy or beef.1
Enteric fermentation in cattle is responsible for 26% of US methane emissions
Figure 1: Figure from EPA’s US-GHG Inventory, 2015, Chapter 5: Agriculture.
The farm has a ventilation system in the roof that both releases air from the barn and gradually draws in air from the outside, mixing it with the air in the barn so as to not cause significant fluctuations in indoor temperature. From spring until fall the cows graze on the estate and the main doors and windows are often open, creating most of the ventilation during the summer.
Picture 4: Vents can be seen along the roof of the barn.
We think that the ventilation system in the roof of this barn could easily be converted to a filter system which degrades the methane released from the cows and converts it to biomass. The cow barn is an example of a facility where our methane-to-biomass (rather than methane-to-methanol) design might be preferable, as a safety precaution. This is because methanol is a volatile substance that is very flammable, so a farm could either opt to install a very safe filter system for collecting methanol and use the methanol produced for energy. Or they could opt to install a biomass filter primarily as a methane remediation strategy; many governments subsidize investments in green technologies and the utilization of best practices within industries. Alternatively if the facility is large enough and the amount of biomass created from methane capture is quite large the biomass could also be thermochemically converted to biofuels.
References
- Methane Emissions from Cattle, K.A Johnson and D.E Johnson, Journal of Animal Science, 1995.
iGEM UiOslo 2015 is sponsored by:
