Presentation on Biogas Basics - a Youtube series

Almost exactly 25 years ago, in August 2000, I operated my first lab-based biogas reactor, digesting food waste from a market in Tunis. After finishing my process-engineering degree, I added a Doctor in the field of biogas process engineering, specialising on how to grow bugs. Most of my colleagues went to Big Pharma, I went to a biogas start-up.

After working 9 years for a technology provider and 9 years for a project developer and plant operator I have come across many AD-plants. Not all of them good. Some of them really bad.

Biogas is a cottage-industry, but it requires a broad knowledge basis to design a plant correctly, covering process, mechanical and chemical engineering, agriculture, fluid dynamics, chemistry, biology, thermodynamics, and many other disciplines.

I decided to make my knowledge public, hoping to create a free and easily accessible biogas canon in the form of a Youtube Playlist (@BiogasBasics). After all, nobody reads books these days and they are behind paywalls.

So far, I have generated over 6 hours of presentations. These are not superficial overviews but go into the detail of the process. I try to avoid purely academic knowledge (the know-what) but focus on the application side (the know-how) instead. But attention-spans larger than 90 seconds are a prerequisite for consumption, I'm afraid.  

If you are a designer of biogas plants, use this channel as an opportunity to compare notes. If you are an investor, and about to spend several millions on funding or acquiring a biogas plant, use this presentation-series to build your own models, ask the right questions and spot the snake-oil salesmen. I promise a great ROIC on your time. If you are an operator of an AD-plant, this series should give some insights on feedstock selection, plant operation, equipment choice and potential plant upgrades.

Until today I made the following presentations which will go live over the coming days:
01 Biogas Myths
02 The stoichiometry of the biogas process, Buswell and more
03 Feedstock selection and their interchangeability
04 Mass balance of a biogas plant (3 parts)
05 Heat balance of a biogas plant
06 Microbial growth in a biogas plant (5 parts)
07 the ADM1 model
08 the case against plug flow reactors, the impact of recirculation and dispersion

As warm-up, I start with Biogas Myths: some common ideas about the biogas process are simply wrong and repeating them over and over in textbooks or mindlessly copying them in publications to fill the literature section does not make them more true. Examples are the CN-ratio, the “total residence time”, the organic loading rate, confusing batch run times with steady state residence times of a CSTR, the “concrete cow” and others.

I hope you will find this presentation-series useful an am grateful for feedback, so I can improve this series.

Video 01: Biogas Myths

Video 02: the stoichiometry of the biogas process

#Biogas #FutureBiogas #BiogasBasics
My Youtube Channel - Biogas Basics