If you’ve driven past a large livestock operation, you’ll recall the ammonia stink from the manure slurry ponds. Even when composted, that waste releases a lot of greenhouse gases. But a Korean team has developed an energy efficient process of turning the waste into biochar which can help soils absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The core of the Manure To Biochar (MTB) process developed by the research team is a dehydration and drying technology that reduces the moisture content in livestock manure, which is over 80%, to less than 20%.
The research team successfully designed and built an integrated system that combines the drying process owned by the KIER, the dehydration process from the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM), the pretreatment process from DULI TECH Co., Ltd., and the pyrolysis technology from YOUGI IND Co., Ltd. to achieve optimal performance. Using this, the overall energy consumption can be significantly reduced to less than one-tenth compared to the conventional rotary kiln method.
The process begins with a screw-type solid-liquid separator developed by the KIMM. This separator reduces the moisture content in livestock manure, which is over 80%, to less than 60%. The energy used in this step is minimized to 1% of that used in conventional heat-based processes like the rotary kiln method (horizontal, cylindrical). The separated manure chunks are then finely crushed to less than 1 cm in size by a three-stage blade crusher developed by DULI TECH Co., Ltd.
https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/convert-livestock-manure-into-biochar-korea/
Right now, they can convert up to 10 tons of manure per day but they plan to scale up to 100 tons.
Darcy Hitchcock 