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Porridge power is the latest innovation to burnish South...

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    Porridge power is the latest innovation to burnish South Australia’s reputation for being at the cutting edge of the global energy transition.

    Electricity is now being fed into the SA power grid by a biogas plant fed with the waste oat husks cast aside by Australia’s largest rolled oat mill in Bordertown, and the creator of the plant says it should be viewed as a carbon-neutral form of “renewable” power.Converting organic material into flammable gases like methane for energy generation is not a new concept, but it is far less common in Australia than abroad and had never previously been done with oat husk and dust as the feedstock.

    The innovative power station adds to SA’s growing list of cutting-edge achievements in power generation; the state was home to the world’s biggest grid scale battery when Tesla installed the Hornsdale battery in 2017 while in October the Australian Energy Market Operator said SA was the first major jurisdiction globally to run entirely on solar power for an hour. Biogas upstart Delorean Corporation created the anaerobic digestion plant that converts the Bordertown mill’s oat husk and dust into methane and carbon dioxide for combustion, and managing director Joe Oliver said the system was effectively a giant, mechanical cow’s stomach. Mr Oliver said the biggest uncertainty during creation was whether the oat waste feedstock would be consistent enough to digest well and make a viable energy project.“ There’s always a fear I think whenever you’re doing something new, it’s the first of its kind in the world at this commercial scale,” he told the Tech Zero podcast.

    Delorean managing director Joe Oliver has overseen construction of a biogas plant that runs on waste from an oat mill. Trevor Collens“ As a monoculture, it’s all about what the trace elements are in that material to enable the different nutritional value to break down and to keep a healthy gut.“ That was always the concern; that the material could change, that it might not supply us with the right trace elements that enable that healthy gut.“ Today we’ve seen a relatively healthy gut surviving on that monoculture because in the dust there’s a lot of sugars, there’s a lot of carbohydrates, there’s different proteins. It’s got a full suite of trace elements that enables that breakdown of products for renewable energy. “It was an R&D [research and development] exercise, but at the same time, we’ve done a lot of testing before we understood that the property could be broken down.” The waste oat husk and dust was previously sent by the mill to landfill or sold to farmers as cattle feed during times of drought. Delorean has built the biogas plant for the agriculture giant that ultimately owns the Bordertown mill, CBH Group, and the project was commissioned in a bid to improve energy reliability and security in a fragile part of the electricity network.

    The mill’s project manager Jeremy Neale said the biogas plant was adopted because there was little scope to take more electricity out of the existing power networks that supplied Bordertown, limiting the mill’s ability to grow.“We’re part of the SA electricity network. But we’re at the end of the line,” he said. The biogas plant and gas-fired power station can now generate 1200 kilowatts; about one-and-a-half times the oat mill’s power consumption needs. As a result, the mill now has much greater energy security and can sell excess power back into the energy grid.

    Methane is a greenhouse gas with 28 times the atmospheric warming potential of carbon dioxide over a 100-year period.Is biogas renewable?Imperial College of London research associate Dr Semra Bakkaloglu published a paper earlier this month which said methane emissions along the full stretch of biogas supply chains were often under-estimated. Dr Bakkaloglu studied European biogas projects and said the extent to which methane was emitted along the supply chain was unclear in many cases, and she particularly focused on the “digestate” material that remains at the end of the process. “Methane emissions could be more than two times greater than previously estimated with the digestate handling stage responsible for the majority of methane released,” the paper said. The report had to deal with “highly variable” emissions data because of the wide range of biogas feedstocks and project types; biogas can be produced from animal or human manure, urban food scraps or even dedicated “energy crops” like corn.

    Bioenergy Australia, an industry association for biogas producers, argues that in the Australian context biogas is made from wastes, not crops deliberately grown for energy production. That means biogas producers are typically harvesting a product that would emit greenhouse gases even if not converted for energy. ‘It’s really a circular economy’And Mr Oliver said the project should still be considered a carbon-neutral source of gas-fired power generation because the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere were equivalent to the greenhouse gas sucked out of the atmosphere when the oat plant was growing in the soil. “It is classed as renewable because what we’re doing is we’re utilising a product which is an organic product that we’re able to break down which has consumed greenhouse gas emissions,” he said. “As opposed to, I guess, solar and wind, we produce energy 24/7. As opposed to when the sun shines, or the wind blows. “It’s really a circular economy as opposed to contributing to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel.”Mr Oliver said biogas could even be considered carbon negative if it displaced fossil fuels from the energy grid.

    The Australian biogas industry is keen to catch up on European rivals where biogas plants are far more common.Efforts to blacklist Russian gas have prompted a renewed focus on biogas in Europe.Mr Oliver said at a time of astronomical gas prices and an energy crisis in eastern Australia, the nation should make a bigger effort to generate energy from the 50 million tonnes of waste organic material it produced each year.“We’re seeing fertiliser and energy prices really hit us hard, there’s a lot of talk about food shortages, there’s a lot of talk about gas shortages. When you look at this system, this is part of the answer,” he said.“It’s just really important that we capture organics for energy production and nutrient recovery.
 
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