A dash for Grass ?

Not sure how seriously we should take a report that includes the eye catching line
In many ways the process is just like a cow: the grass goes in one end, and gas and fertiliser come out the other. But in this case, rather than the gas escaping like it does from cows, it is collected and used to replace natural gas.

Cows are a bit more complex as I recall from trying to milk one.

still an interesting read Ecotricity report.

Seems they are putting money where their mouth is as it were

BBC report on experimental facility. Should be one worth keeping an eye on, certainly easier to do than closed cycle carbon capture.

Mike

I wonder how much land is actually available for harvesting.  Most farmland is being used for something at the moment.  If you take the grass away, it can't be fed to cows or sheep.  Set-aside land and nature reserves may be more viable.  It does them good to be mown from time to time, the quality of the hay is poor for livestock feed, and taking away the cuttings encourages more wild flowers.

It is interesting in two ways. Grass does extract Co2 from the air, and builds it into the grass itself

but quite slowly

In this PDF, while not the latest,  page 7 has some figures for CO2 absorbed per hectare for varying types of vegetation that I imagine are a good starting point.



Of course you do need quite a lot of forest and even more bush or grassland and if yo u make gas from it and burn it later you have not really won, but you are not making it worse either.

That proposed test generator making 'gas for 4000 homes' from 3000 Acres is presumably absorbing at the 'prairie' sort  of rate, perhaps 1 tonne CO2 per ha per month. Now to me 3000 Acres as an area is a touch under half that in ha - perhaps 1250ha or about 12sq. km (e.g. a 3km by 4km rectangle) so something over 1000 tonnes of CO2 per month. Now CH4(~16 grams per mol) is lighter than CO2 (44g/mol), so you are making perhaps 300 tonnes of methane per month.

that is a lot of joules even so.

Mike.

Great story, hope it pans out. So now all we need are solar panels round the edges of the fields and on all the wet/steep bits, charging up the robot mowers which will come out at night to do their work....