Minhe Chicken Manure Biogas Plant: Circular economy management of chicken manure

Sep 2021
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In China, the rapid development of the poultry production sector has resulted in significant amounts of chicken manure. Chicken manure is quite ammonical, can be detrimental to the environment should it not be managed well and is not ideally suited to anaerobic digestion.

The Minhe Chicken Manure Biogas Plant is located in Yantai city, Shandong Province, China. It has two clusters of biogas digesters. The facility can treat about 300 tonnes/day of raw chicken manure and 240 tonnes/day of chicken house cleaning wastewater. The digesters operate in the mesophilic temperature range (at about 37°C) at an organic loading rate of 2.5 gVS/L·d and an hydraulic retention time (HRT) of 33 and 11 days for the first and second stage digesters, respectively.

This biogas plant generates multiple benefits in a circular economy system over and above energy (power and heat). It treats the chicken waste in an environmentally friendly manner reducing potential for water pollution, reducing smells, creating biofertilizer from digestates and as such minimising fossil fuel based fertilisers. Of definite interest is the savings in greenhouse production of 80,000 tonnes CO2e per annum; this is equivalent to 3.14 tCO2e/MWeh of electricity. Minhe was the first agricultural biogas plant in China to avail of the Cleaning Development Mechanism (CDM). The Certified Emission Reductions (CER) have been sold to the World Bank for 6 years.

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