Enhanced Membranes For Sweetening Of Manure Based Biogas

Each year over 1 billion tons of animal manure is produced in US and it can be a pollution source if not handled properly. "Anaerobic digestion" is an energy efficient way to dispose manure. Through this process manure is converted to biogas and digestate. The manure digestate can be used as fertilizer. Biogas is a mixture of ~60% CH4, ~40% CO2 and trace amounts of contaminant gasses such as H2S. If the non-methane components can be removed from biogas, biogas will be chemically identical to natural gas, greatly increasing the value of the anaerobic digestion. A solution to upgrade raw biogas (remove CO2, H2S and H2O) is much needed to improve the economics of this conversion from manure to biofuels and valuable bioproducts.Compact Membrane Systems is proposing a membrane separation technology which can efficiently upgrade biogas to biomethane. The Phase I program has been very successful. We have developed membranes with very high CO2 flux and very high selectivity. These membranes have shown excellent resistance to high concentration H2S biogas. Economic analysis shows at least 37% savings compared with conventional natural gas membrane separation. In Phase II we will optimize/scale up the biogas membranes/modules, and design/build pilot membrane systems. Field tests will be conducted on farms.We expect this technology will promote the use of anaerobic digestion to treat manure for biogas production. This will result in less pollution from manure, less greenhouse gas emission from manure degradation, more renewable energy from biogas production, and more jobs in rural areas. .