One farm in Hokkaido transforms the source into something valuable, as it is turning cattle manure into hydrogen. When it is burned, hydrogen does not emit carbon, making it an attractive alternative to fossil fuels. There are widespread hopes it could be used as a sustainable fuel to heat homes and power cars, trains, aircraft and ships in the future.
The most common way of producing hydrogen today involves using methane – a fossil fuel piped up from deep underground, meaning it is still associated with significant carbon emissions. Hydrogen can also be produced by splitting water using electricity, but this can be expensive and is only low carbon if renewable sources of electricity are used.
The Shikaoi Hydrogen Farm, however, is using a different source – a waste product that there is no shortage of on Hokkaido. Around 20 million tons of cow manure is generated in Hokkaido annually. If not treated correctly, it can be an environmental burden, producing significant methane emissions as well as affecting water quality if allowed to leak into streams and rivers.
Hydrogen Fuel from Cow Manure
Rising to the occasion, the Japanese Farm is now turning ‘Cow Manure’ into Hydrogen Fuel. So, it is being used as a source of sustainable energy.
“This project to produce hydrogen from livestock manure originated in Japan and is unique to this place,” says Maiko Abe from Air Water, one of several companies involved in the hydrogen farm project. Such facility in Shikaoi, a town in central Hokkaido, accounts for 30% of Hokkaido’s cow waste and urine. Thus, it has great potential for renewable energy.
Launched in 2015 by Japan’s Ministry of the Environment, the project aims to convert agricultural by-products into hydrogen to supply the local, rural community in a circular economy. The cow excrement and urine collected from local dairy farms before being fed into a anaerobic digester at a central facility. Here bacteria break down the organic waste to produce biogas and a liquid fertilizer. The biogas is then purified into methane that is used to manufacture hydrogen.
The plant now has a hydrogen production capacity of 70 cubic meters (18,500 gallons), with an onsite fueling station that can fill around 28 vehicles fitted with hydrogen fuel cells per day. Although the fuel can be used by cars with fuel cells, the plant’s fueling station has been specially designed to accommodate agricultural vehicles such as tractors and forklift trucks. These farm vehicles are difficult to electrify with batteries due to their size and the type of work they do. The hydrogen-powered vehicles are used around the farms’ sites, reducing the emissions that would otherwise be created by using other fuel sources.
Cattle-made-hydrogen is also stored in canisters that are transported to provide power and heat to other facilities in the area, including a local sturgeon fish farm and the nearby Zoo.
But, hydrogen needs to be stored in high-pressure tanks as a gas, and can be prone to leakage due to its low molecular weight. It can also degrade metal storage containers, leaving them embrittled, and is easily ignited and so requires additional safety precautions when handling it.
Hydrogen can also be stored as a liquid by chilling it to cryogenic temperatures of below –253C (-423F), but this can be energy intensive and requires large amounts of additional infrastructure.
Hydrogen has nearly three times the energy content of petrol (gasoline) when taken by mass alone. But its low molecular weight also means that by volume, the energy packed into a liter of liquid hydrogen is a quarter that of petrol.
Put simply, as the lightest gas in the Universe, hydrogen takes up more space than petrol. This means a lot more storage space is needed for hydrogen compared to fossil fuels like petrol, diesel and natural gas. It also means producing and storing it at scale can require large amounts of energy and infrastructure.
But as well as these hurdles, the hydrogen farm project in Hokkaido also faces other challenges specific to northern Japan’s climate.
Hokkaido’s subzero winters means new technologies are needed to produce the hydrogen stably without the small amounts of water vapor in the methane freezing.
Using agricultural waste as a methane source to produce hydrogen is relatively uncommon, but it ultimately uses the same process as is used to produce hydrogen from natural gas: steam reforming. Here, steam heated to 800C (1,472F) reacts with the methane to produce hydrogen, along with the byproducts carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide (CO2).
The manure must first be anaerobically digested to produce biogas, which is purified into methane before being turned into hydrogen.
Leftover slurry from the manure after the biogas has been extracted is sprayed as fertilizer onto nearby fields, while formic acid – which is both used in and created by the processes – could be offered as a preservative for cattle feed.
Currently, the electricity needed to produce and store the hydrogen comes from the national grid. But there’s potential to shift to green energy, given Hokkaido’s promising sea, wind and geothermal potential, thus reducing the carbon emissions of this electricity.
Still, other challenges remain. The high cost of the hydrogen compared to fossil fuels and low demand mean expanding the operation is difficult.
The construction costs of hydrogen stations are very high. Since hydrogen vehicles are not yet widespread, keeping of filling capacity low is there to manage initial investment. As adoption increases, supply will be expanded.
The Hydrogen Farm on Hokkaido demonstrates how waste from one industry can be turned into useful fuel for others. To encourage hydrogen vehicle adoption in the area, hydrogen prices are subsidized by the plant, matching the cost of petrol. Hydrogen refueling stations are also being developed in major Hokkaido cities like Sapporo and Muroran.
The process to make clean hydrogen fuel from cow manure in Shikaoi Hydrogen Farm is worth paying attention to, especially as it also reduces methane which would otherwise be released from the manure.
With other countries exploring how to use other types of waste, from pig dung to coconut husks, to produce hydrogen using similar processes, it appears this could be a model adaptable to other local contexts.
With the scale still small, however, and costs of production high, it remains to be seen how widespread this industry can be. There are also other ways of producing fuel from cow waste, such as simply using the biogas produced from manure as a fuel itself without needing to convert it to hydrogen.
Japan is the world leader in hydrogen vehicles and has invested considerably in developing the technology. But, for now battery-powered electric vehicles remain cheaper than hydrogen powered ones.
Though it’s unlikely that cow manure alone will ever meet Japan’s hydrogen demand, it could contribute significantly, and Shikaoi is creating a model for a circular economy that it hopes will show how costs can fall with the economies of scale.
Educationist/Administrator/Editor/Author/Speaker
Commencing teaching in his early twenties, Prof Aggarwal has diverse experience of great tenure in the top institutions not only as an educationist, administrator, editor, author but also promoting youth and its achievements through the nicest possible content framing. A revolutionary to the core, he is also keen to address the society around him for its betterment and growth on positive notes while imbibing the true team spirit the work force along with.
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