how2meth.txt
how2meth.txt - - - - harold bate notes
"It all started with the Suez Crisis in 1953," Harold said. "When Egypt closed the canal, it blocked England's supply route with the Middle and Far East. This meant that petrol (gasoline) imports were crippled and fuel here in Great Britain was rationed. I got fed up with that and started looking round for an alternative form of power. I knew that gas engines were used before petrol and I also knew that gas was more efficient than petrol... so I began to experiment.
Harold Bate holds pressure tank of home- made methane.
"During the war I had done quite a bit of pig farming,
and I knew that manure contained gases and that pig manure was very potent. A number of experimenters and sanitation facilities have been extracting gas from sewage for years now, but it's diluted so much that the process is slow. I therefore decided to concentrate on animal manure and find the best blend from which to extract methane... and then develop a method of feeding this gas into a car's engine.
"After experiments with just about every type of animal manure, I found I got the best results from mixing that of chickens and pigs. Chicken manure contains more nitrogen than others and pig droppings are useful because they generate heat so well."
Bate has also found a certain amount of straw and/or vegetable waste to be a valuable addition to his methane raw materials. The manure contributes mainly nitrogen and the straw provides carbon, it seems. The ideal mixture is about 75% droppings (half pig and half chicken) and 25% straw. Methane brewed up from this formula has a caloric value per liquid pound of 22,000 B.T.U. as compared to gasoline's 19,000, propane's 19,944 and butane's l9,680.
The excreta-straw formula is first stacked up into a compost pile, doused with water and left exposed to the air for about a week of aerobic pre-fermentation. When this pre-fermentation is complete, about three hundred pounds of the mixture is shoveled into a heavy steel container (Bate recommends a trash-mongered domestic water heater) and sealed shut. A wait of four, five or even seven days -- depending on conditions -- is then necessary before fermentation of the first batch starts. If a little of the original mix is left behind as a starter, however, gas production will usually begin within 24 hours for all following batches.
Nothing fancy here! Harold has simply "hay wired" the methane gas cylinder valve to the steering wheel of his Hillman.
The real secret of a rapid, strong and complete
transformation of waste into the maximum amount of methane is the maintenance of the 85 to 90 deg. F (29-32 deg. C) temperature at which the necessary bacteriological digestion is most active. If the temperature of the digester rises above 104 deg. F (40 deg C), no gas will be produced at all -- in extremely hot regions a methane production unit should be shaded or otherwise protected from the heat. A digester set up in a temperate or cooler zone, on the other hand, may need some supplemental heating from an electric element inside the tank or a small kerosene (or methane!) flame under the unit.
By the way, for those who speculate that the methane used to heat the digester might total more than the gas produced by the unit... 'tain't so! An extremely low flame (a car sump heater is ideal) under a Bate digester can cause the tank to yield a right vigorous flow of gas.
Bate has fitted his digester tank with a safety valve set for 60 p.s.i. "just in case". Pressures in the extractor seldom reach a third that level, however, because Harold considers a digester internal pressure of 20 p.s.i. to be the signal to start up a high-pressure compressor (of the type used for filling aqualung diving bottles) and pump the collected gas from the extractor into an ordinary high-pressure bottle.
A filter between the digester and pressure bottle extracts the small quantities of phosphoric acid and ammonia that are present and the remaining almost-pure methane liquefies at a pressure of 1110 p.s.i.
The Bate Auto Gas Converter (demand regulator) as mounted in Harold's 1953 Hillman. The white cover here is purely decoration. Note, again, the rather casual manner in which Bate has installed his accessories in his own car.
Bate finds that it takes about one-half hour of steady
pumping to fill a 32-pound (4.5 Imperial gallon) bottle to its capacity of liquid methane. This figures out to approximately 200 cubic feet of dry gas... or a fuel equivalent of seven gallons of good petrol (about eight and three-quarters gallon of high-test gasoline, to readers in the US).
-no end-
"It all started with the Suez Crisis in 1953," Harold said. "When Egypt closed the canal, it blocked England's supply route with the Middle and Far East. This meant that petrol (gasoline) imports were crippled and fuel here in Great Britain was rationed. I got fed up with that and started looking round for an alternative form of power. I knew that gas engines were used before petrol and I also knew that gas was more efficient than petrol... so I began to experiment.
Harold Bate holds pressure tank of home- made methane.
"During the war I had done quite a bit of pig farming,
and I knew that manure contained gases and that pig manure was very potent. A number of experimenters and sanitation facilities have been extracting gas from sewage for years now, but it's diluted so much that the process is slow. I therefore decided to concentrate on animal manure and find the best blend from which to extract methane... and then develop a method of feeding this gas into a car's engine.
"After experiments with just about every type of animal manure, I found I got the best results from mixing that of chickens and pigs. Chicken manure contains more nitrogen than others and pig droppings are useful because they generate heat so well."
Bate has also found a certain amount of straw and/or vegetable waste to be a valuable addition to his methane raw materials. The manure contributes mainly nitrogen and the straw provides carbon, it seems. The ideal mixture is about 75% droppings (half pig and half chicken) and 25% straw. Methane brewed up from this formula has a caloric value per liquid pound of 22,000 B.T.U. as compared to gasoline's 19,000, propane's 19,944 and butane's l9,680.
The excreta-straw formula is first stacked up into a compost pile, doused with water and left exposed to the air for about a week of aerobic pre-fermentation. When this pre-fermentation is complete, about three hundred pounds of the mixture is shoveled into a heavy steel container (Bate recommends a trash-mongered domestic water heater) and sealed shut. A wait of four, five or even seven days -- depending on conditions -- is then necessary before fermentation of the first batch starts. If a little of the original mix is left behind as a starter, however, gas production will usually begin within 24 hours for all following batches.
Nothing fancy here! Harold has simply "hay wired" the methane gas cylinder valve to the steering wheel of his Hillman.
The real secret of a rapid, strong and complete
transformation of waste into the maximum amount of methane is the maintenance of the 85 to 90 deg. F (29-32 deg. C) temperature at which the necessary bacteriological digestion is most active. If the temperature of the digester rises above 104 deg. F (40 deg C), no gas will be produced at all -- in extremely hot regions a methane production unit should be shaded or otherwise protected from the heat. A digester set up in a temperate or cooler zone, on the other hand, may need some supplemental heating from an electric element inside the tank or a small kerosene (or methane!) flame under the unit.
By the way, for those who speculate that the methane used to heat the digester might total more than the gas produced by the unit... 'tain't so! An extremely low flame (a car sump heater is ideal) under a Bate digester can cause the tank to yield a right vigorous flow of gas.
Bate has fitted his digester tank with a safety valve set for 60 p.s.i. "just in case". Pressures in the extractor seldom reach a third that level, however, because Harold considers a digester internal pressure of 20 p.s.i. to be the signal to start up a high-pressure compressor (of the type used for filling aqualung diving bottles) and pump the collected gas from the extractor into an ordinary high-pressure bottle.
A filter between the digester and pressure bottle extracts the small quantities of phosphoric acid and ammonia that are present and the remaining almost-pure methane liquefies at a pressure of 1110 p.s.i.
The Bate Auto Gas Converter (demand regulator) as mounted in Harold's 1953 Hillman. The white cover here is purely decoration. Note, again, the rather casual manner in which Bate has installed his accessories in his own car.
Bate finds that it takes about one-half hour of steady
pumping to fill a 32-pound (4.5 Imperial gallon) bottle to its capacity of liquid methane. This figures out to approximately 200 cubic feet of dry gas... or a fuel equivalent of seven gallons of good petrol (about eight and three-quarters gallon of high-test gasoline, to readers in the US).
-no end-
posted by Arise! at 5:12 PM
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