Sichuan, Day 2

I have a few days to catch up on here, and a few hours to do it in, so here goes.  In my last post I was still in Sichuan Province, staying in the city if Chengdu.

Thursday, Nov. 1st featured more talks on Biogas production and research.  Thankfully it was a late morning start, and by 10:30 we had made our way to the Biogas Institute of Ministry of Agriculture (BIOMA).  This is the national key laboratory for biogas research in China.  Biogas in China is focused mainly on just a few feedstocks - straw, manure (human and animal) and to a much lesser extent, some food processing waste.

one of the labs for testing alternative feedstocks

We started with a short tour of the facility.  It was certainly impressive with some very high tech equipment - DNA sequencers,  high capacity spectrometers, some pretty incredible microscopes and more.  BIOMA has a staff of 108 with 13 of them Doctors (mostly in chemistry with biogas as the concentration) and 26 researchers with masters degrees.  In addition to the staff there, several years ago the institute became a training ground for Doctors and now has more than 50 doctoral candidates working on research as well.  The work is broken up into many areas, but most of it seemed to be focused on the chemical processes involved in biogas production.  We spent a considerable amount of time with one researcher who has made great strides in identifying the methanegenic achea microbes (those little microbes that actually turn "stuff" into methane.)

One of the smaller projects they were working on, which I found really intriguing was identifying good plants for treating polluted water, that were also good for ethanol production.  China's policies, which put such a heavy focus on food production (as I have mentioned, this is a national security issue for this country of 1.3 billion people) that it is a virtual impossibility to grow plants on land for energy production.  At this point, only byproducts are to be used for producing energy.  However, since there is also a major focus now on waste water treatment, and cleaning up already polluted water bodies.  The use of plants to do this, if the right plants can be selected that have high oil contents, would produce a regular supply of byproducts (those plants) that can be used for ethanol production.  Gas here is around $US 4.50/gallon, so there is a push to find domestic sources of energy of all kinds, ethanol included (but without reducing the food production capacity as has happened in the US.)

The facility is eager to have international cooperation and exchanges professors with foreign organizations on a regular basis, as well as hosting (and paying the way of) doctoral students from developing countries, mostly in Africa.

Their work right now has brought the potential production in most medium and large biomas facilities up to around .4 cubic meters of biogas per kg of straw.  Most areas of China grow either corn or rice, so there is a significant supply of straw to utilize.  While, like in the US, there are some areas that have higher amounts of farmland than others, they do not have the vast open spaces without people.  Additionally with the restructuring of the countryside, moving farmers into village centers with the farmland nearby, this makes the distributed generation model of medium scale biomas facilities feasible.