why waste perfectly good manure?, page-2

Bluegen is not suitable for powering an electric vehicle - however, you could use the power to run your general farm equipment - for example dairy farmers could use it to run the milking shed.

Another flaw in you idea is the collection of methane producing material. How does a farmer collect the manure? Unlike some countries, we let our animals roam in paddocks. The energy wasted to collect the manure would be greater than the energy produced from it. Also the manure returns to the soil to keep the paddocks fertilised. If you take the manure away you have to fertilise the paddocks some other way.

The best application I could envisage use of fuel cells generating electricity from methane is human waste - ie. sewerage - A lot of methane can be produced from anaerobic digestion of sewerage - many plants collect the methane and burn it in a gas fired plant, but banks of fuel cells could do this same application with greater efficiency. You have a constant flow of waste to rely on, which is brought back to single points via an existing network. There are a lot of products in sewerage that can be collected and reused - for example Phosphorus (a finite resource) could be collected and pelletised for use back on farms as fertiliser.

The trick with all these ideas is the collection and distribution of the waste and the reusable products - if you can use infrastructure that is already in place then great - but if you have to expend additional energy to collect the waste material the equation soon turns in the balance of doing nothing, or looking to other techniques to reduce emissions.