Performance optimization of the Växtkraft biogas production plant

All over the world there is a strong interest and also potential for biogas production from organic residues as well as from different crops. However, to be commercially competitive with other types of fuels, efficiency improvements of the biogas production process are needed. In this paper, results of improvements studies done on a full scale co-digestion plant are presented   In the plant organic wastes from households and restaurants are mixed and digested with crops from graze land. The areas for improvements of the plant addressed are treatment of the feed material to enhance the digestion rate, limitation of the ballast of organics in the water stream recirculated in the process, and use of the biogas plant residues at farms. Results from previous studies on pre-treatment and membrane filtration of recirculated process water are combined for estimation of the total improvement potential. Further, the possibility to use neural networks to predict biogas production using historical data from the full-scale biogas plant was investigated. Results from investigation of using the process residues as fertilizer are also presented.   The results indicates a potential to increase the biogas yield from the process with up to over  30 % with pre-treatment of the feed and including membrane filtration in the process. Neural networks have the potential to be used for prediction of biogas production. Further, it is shown that the residues from biogas production can be used as fertilizers but that the emission of N2O from the fertilised soil is dependent on the soil type and spreading technology.This is the author’s version of a work accepted for publication by Elsevier. Changes resulting from the publishing process,including peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting and other quality control mechanisms, may not be reflected in thisdocument. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. The definitive version has been published in Applied Energy, vol 97, DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2012.03.007.BioGasOp