Effect of organic compounds on dry anaerobic digestion of food and paper industry wastes.

Effects of antimicrobial compounds on dry anaerobic digestion (dry-AD) processes were investigated. Four compounds with known inhibition effects on traditional wet digestion, i.e. car-3-ene, hexanal, 1-octanol and phenol were selected and investigated at concentrations of 0.005%, 0.05% and 0.5%. Food waste (FW) and Paper waste (PW) were used as model substrates, all assays were running with the substrate to inoculum ratio of 1:1 (VS basis) corresponding to 15% TS in reactors. Generally, increasing concentrations of inhibitors resulted in decreasing methane yields with a few exceptions; in all these specific cases, long, lag phase periods (60 days) were observed. These adaptation periods made possible for the microbial systems to acclimatize to otherwise not preferred conditions leading to higher methane yields. Comparing the effects of the four different groups, phenols had the highest inhibitory effects, with no methane production at the highest amount added, while the lowest effects were obtained in cases of car-3-ene. Furthermore, the results showed that adding inhibitors up to a certain concentrations can repair the balance in AD process, slowing down the degradation steps, hence making it possible for the methanogens to produce a higher amount of methane. This phenomenon was not observed in case of PW, which is already a slow degradable substrate in its nature.

Energy performance and greenhouse gas emissions of kelp cultivation for biogas and fertilizer recovery in Sweden.

The cultivation of seaweed as a feedstock for third generation biofuels is gathering interest in Europe, however, many questions remain unanswered in practise, notably regarding scales of operation, energy returns on investment (EROI) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, all of which are crucial to determine commercial viability. This study performed an energy and GHG emissions analysis, using EROI and GHG savings potential respectively, as indicators of commercial viability for two systems: the Swedish Seafarm project's seaweed cultivation (0.5ha), biogas and fertilizer biorefinery, and an estimation of the same system scaled up and adjusted to a cultivation of 10ha. Based on a conservative estimate of biogas yield, neither the 0.5ha case nor the up-scaled 10ha estimates met the (commercial viability) target EROI of 3, nor the European Union Renewable Energy Directive GHG savings target of 60% for biofuels, however the potential for commercial viability was substantially improved by scaling up operations: GHG emissions and energy demand, per unit of biogas, was almost halved by scaling operations up by a factor of twenty, thereby approaching the EROI and GHG savings targets set, under beneficial biogas production conditions. Further analysis identified processes whose optimisations would have a large impact on energy use and emissions (such as anaerobic digestion) as well as others embodying potential for further economies of scale (such as harvesting), both of which would be of interest for future developments of kelp to biogas and fertilizer biorefineries.