Ecological evaluation of large-scale biogas engineering with biogas slurry recycle mode based on emergy analysis method

Biogas project is a kind of powerful tool for dealing with and utilizing the waste of livestock, and it is crucial to the development of China where the livestock production has been up to 85.378 million tons, while A large amount of biogas slurry will be produced in the process of biogas project operation. If excessive quantities of biogas slurry directly apply to the land, it will be harmful to the environment. How to properly dispose the biogas slurry is the problem which must be solved in the biogas project development process and the technical operation mode should be studied in order to improve its efficiency. At present, recirculation is a common way to reduce the influence of biogas slurry to environment, and appropriate biogas slurry recirculation can improve the stability of fermentation system, reduce the use of groundwater and avoid secondary pollution, but the biogas slurry perennial recirculation will cause lower gas production and choke the pipeline. Emergy analysis was selected in this research in order to compare these two technology modes which were biogas slurry recirculation and no slurry recirculation, however, the application of emergy analysis in biogas project was not mature, there was no difference of transformity between livestock manures and no appropriate emergy distribution method for multi-products output system. In view of this, 'relative emergy transformity' had been introduced to differentiate the emergy transformity of chicken and cow manures, ecological input emergy had been introduced to measure the influence of biogas slurry excessive application on the environment, and a method to distribute the output emergy of biogas, slurry and digestate also had been given in this paper. Moreover, two representative biogas plants were selected as cases for study, researchers had observed those two plants for one year, and had done some relative experiments to get data and monitor its status. Each plant, in particular, was designed in two kinds of modes, slurry recirculation or not, to use for contrast and the two plants were analyzed and compared in details by emergy evaluation index system. The results showed that the values of evaluation indexes of biogas plant D were better than L and the mode of no slurry recirculation was better than recirculation, but the recirculation mode can reduce the pollution to the surrounding environment where the biogas slurry had no way to be used. Through the comparative analysis of the two kinds of modes, the value of ELR(environment load rate) could be decreased dramatically from 2.15 to 1.05 by using the recirculation mode in plant L, and the value of ESI(emergy sustainability index) could be increased significantly from 0.41 to 0.93, so the technical mode should be chosen according to conditions and environment of the biogas plant. It is suggested that the dispose of one ton of chicken manure VS by biogas plant should be equipped with 0.5 hm2/t land, and the dispose of one ton of cow manure VS is 0.2 hm2/t, thus the biogas plant should properly use the recirculation mode of the slurry when the surrounding land is less than its need.