Terry Feldmann, PE, Principal and Agricultural Group Manager, had the opportunity to sit down with Sarah Michaels of Food, Farms & Biofuels segment at WEEK Channel 25 to discuss an ongoing project with a client in southern Illinois that has installed a biogas digester. This feature brought a spotlight to Agricultural Engineering and the broadness of the profession. This special focused on livestock system and manure handling and utilization design in the agricultural engineering field.
“Our expertise here at Maurer-Stutz are a big part of our agricultural services is designing housing facilities for all the different species of livestock and poultry. We spend a lot of time dealing with manure systems but there’s also quite a bit involved with the indoor environments to create the proper environment for the animals but the bonus is to collect and utilize that manure to produce natural gas and treat that gas with technology such as anaerobic digestion.”
So the way a digester works is by growing and maintaining bacteria that utilizes the organic matter in the manure. We utilize heating that up to around a little over a 100 degrees Fahrenheit to encourage the growth and of methanogenic bacteria that those are the ones that produce process the organic matter in the manure, or a large majority of the OM, and converts it into methane.
One of the nice pluses when you produce the biogas can be converted to power. The other benefit that the effluent, or the leftover manure, still has pretty much all the nutrients that farmers and crops can utilize, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. The farmer can still use the digester effluent for fertilizing his crops and add value to a byproduct from the livestock by applying it to the crops.
Maurer-Stutz, Inc. has provided planning which included engineering survey, soils and geotechnical investigation. Design services included permitting with relevant state and federal agencies as well as developing site and structural design plans. MSI also provided limited construction observation for the project. MSI looks forward to sharing more about this project in a future feature once the project is completed.