Analyzing the environmental and economic aspects of using human and cow organic solid waste in biogas power plants
This paper is based on a previous research project, which was a modest contribution to overcome the global decline of non-renewable fuel (oil and natural gas) and substitute their usage by renewable biogas fuel. The aim of the previous project was to increase the rate of production of environment-friendly biogas fuel from anaerobic digestion of human and animal solid waste, however the recent project aims in improving the previous research with the support of economic analysis as previous results could improve the financial aspect of biogas power plants. This is in line with the IPCC (International Panel of Climate Change) regarding the reduction of the risk of global warming by methods of mitigation and adaptation combined. Previous experiments were conducted at the Faculty of Science, Alexandria University in Egypt (between 2010-2011) using simple equipments to find the most efficient combination ratio of human/cow wastes that produces the maximum biogas fuel using replicates to ensure accuracy. Results showed that human sample was the least specimen in producing bio gas fuel, therefore placing a larger amount of human wastes than animal wastes will decrease the amount of biogas fuel production. Based on previous result in connection with the good combination of both human and animal waste, in this paper the economic aspects of the implementation and maintenance of a biogas power plant in general is discussed as feedstock now is a combination of human and cow waste with the ratio of 1:1 based on the previous research results. For such change in feedstock to increase the efficiency of biogas power plants, this change will affect the environmental, economic and social aspects. The strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for each aspect were classified in an SWOT analysis. Finally, it is concluded that feeding a biogas power plant with an equal amount of human and animal waste together will reveal a new potential in biogas production surely accompanied with different threats that should be well studied and analysed to be clearly handled.
szerző
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Ghorab Omar
gépészeti modellezés
nappali (angol nyelvű)
konzulens
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Harazin Piroska
Egyetemi tanársegéd, Környezetgazdaságtan és Fenntartható Fejlődés Tanszék
