Slurres Pilot
Livestock slurries are one of the most widely available and underutilised resources in Ireland
Project Insights
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€427,884
Total Project Costs -
2 yr
Project Duration -
2018
Year Funded
Project Description
Livestock slurries are one of the most widely available and underutilised resources in Ireland. Current farming practice disposes of raw slurries via land spread, which precludes energy recovery and incurs a significant transport energy penalty. It results in sub-optimal nutrient recycling, giving rise to nutrient losses from fugitive atmospheric emissions and runoff to surface and groundwater. Farming sector fragmentation is a barrier to optimal deployment of energy-related capital infrastructure, which can be overcome via a low-cost system to aggregate slurry solids for transport to centralised energy/nutrient recovery facilities. SLURRES PILOT will demonstrate a pyrolysis-based slurry-to-bioenergy system. It will advance current technology by (a) engineering a novel mechanical filtration process to de-water slurry solids, deploying technology that decouples filtration pressure from material movement and introducing a biomass filtration aid shown to separate slurry solids from liquors at efficiencies that justify transport for energy recovery. It will (b) demonstrate energy recovery via pyrolysis including investigation into optimal syngas storage conditions to improve dispatchability, enabling alignment of energy supply with demand. It will (c) investigate processes to improve nutrient recycling including N recovery from slurry liquor filtrates and water vapour sourced from solids drying, as well as P recovered from biochar and/or ash. Results will inform designs of pilot-scale units that can be engineered to improve the integrated manure-to-energy system. Techno-economic validation will support development of a business model that sources feedstock either from permanent separation-unit deployments in large installations such as piggeries or from mobile applications that service small-scale cattle farms.
Project Details
Total Project Cost: €427,884
Funding Agency: SEAI
Year Funded: 2018
Lead Organisation: University of Limerick
Partner Organisation(s): Irish Research Centre for Resource Efficiency (Tcbb RESOURCE); Premier Green