Biogas: the underestimated tool to achieve our climatic goals.

You can see one of the best images (thanks to the US Environmental Protection Agency) that I found summarizing all that we can do with biogas.

To me, the beauty is how nicely complement the other renewable energy technologies. Let’s try to reflect about 3 advantages and 3 challenges all related to the main advantage of renewable technologies: distributed manner of producing energy and high efficiency.

Advantages:

1.   Biogas is a renewable technology as it is obtained from our wastes (manures, food, waste water treatment plants, agriculture, etc…). Wastes traditionally very painful for our societies and responsible of great share of greenhouse emissions, both CO2 and CH4 (methane).

2.   It is NOT intermittent, as the production of biogas is done in a continuous process. If we struggle now to extend the use of renewable technologies is because our main and cheaper sources, sun and wind, are intermittent. This is the reason that we still talk a lot about nuclear and batteries are coming more to the picture.

3.   Feed-stocks are everywhere and readily available. Investments to produce biogas are not very high and technologies to further use it are well-proven and ready to be used.

Challenges:

1.   Depending on the other renewable technologies around biogas would need to be used for an application or another. For instance, the use of biogas to produce electricity and heat needs to be carefully complemented with solar, wind and batteries technologies. Biogas needs to cover seasonal periods where those other technologies cannot reach to finally complement the mix of renewables.

2.   Despite the large potential and large way to go now with so much wastes around, feedstocks are limited. We should never forget that this is a distributed manner to produce energy and very little comparable with fossil gas. Economies of scale can be achieved by putting many plants in many places instead of thinking of making the plants bigger and bigger.

3.   Fossil gas stakeholders sees this technology as a threat to their “status quo”. However, the sooner will embrace it, much faster could take advantage of it as they are probably starting in a much better position than others. If the insist to put breaks on it, they will just continue their agony as renewable technologies are inevitable and expanding much more rapidly that they think.

What do you think? Are these advantages and challenges the ones that you would pick for the amazing biogas world? Use the comments below!