Biogas

the following is from a note I wrote, submitted to the Peterborough Examiner.

I had the great fortune of attending one of those special and almost secret conferences hosted by a working group of academics at Trent University. The Saturday Sept. 16 conference – “Farming for the Future” was attended by academics, scientists, farmers and business people from all parts of Canada, Europe and South America. I had a tremendous jump in my knowledge and awareness about Biogas, from knowing next-to-nothing to seeing the vast untapped potential of using organic waste products and green biomass to create electricity. One fact take-away for me was if all the animal manure in Ontario was fed into anaerobic digesters to create biogas to power mini-turbines to generate electricity, we would create the equivalent power capacity of one-third of a nuclear plant. This doesn’t include the far greater resources of organic waste that currently goes directly to landfills, or gets processed in sewage treatment plants. Farmers can also produce and harvest green crops that are grown specifically to feed Biogas digesters or fermentation units. Our farmers especially the ones with livestock, have the potential to earn much needed second incomes as electrical power producers, using biogas to produce electricity in peak hour time periods. What lacks is education, training, start-up infrastructure, and financing for same. Rather than pumping billions into building new deadly toxic waste generating nuclear power plants, we have the potential to invest this money into our municipal and rural communities to create alternative energy sources. It is not surprising that Canada is lagging far behind what is being done in most of Europe in this area. It was, however, surprising to see conference attendees coming from Europe to learn more about emerging technologies some of which were presented by a small group of experts, residents of the Peterborough region, who are researchers at Trent University. Our local University has some amazing academics, researchers and research activities. The world knows about it more than our local residents.