Biogasrötning av socker- och foderbetor : Jämförelse av färska, stuklagrade samt ensilerade betor i laboratorieskala

Sammanfattning: Fossil fuels are affecting our climate negatively and there is a limited amount of them in the world, which leads to the importance of finding alternative fuels. One alternative is biogas, which is produced though a digestion process of different organic materials in a biogasreactor. Organic substrate that comes from farms has the biggest potential to increase the production of biogas in Sweden. Primarily crops from farms, but also waste products like manure are of great importance. Today there is a calculated theoretical potential for biogasproduction of 14TWh per year, which is around ten times larger than Sweden’s production today. This potential depends on how much arable land that is used to produce crops for biogas though, and can be much larger. The biggest contributor to increase the biogasproduction is crops from farms and manure3. The reason for this is because sugar- and fodderbeets contain the highest amount of energy per hectare arable land for crops, and therefore it is interesting to study how to optimize the use of this energy. Usually the beets have to be stored after the harvest since the most of the beets cannot be used directly, and a consistent feed to the biogas reactors is favorable. The most common way to store the beets today is in covered storage or silage. The beets are usually in need of being co-digested together with another substrate since the amount of nitrogen that the beets contain are relatively low, and therefore the beets may be in need of co-digest with a substrate that contains a higher amount of nitrogen. For example are manure or slaughterwaste substrates containing high amounts of nitrogen, and therefore are co-digestion between beets and these kinds of substrates improving the ratio between carbon and nitrogen, which improves the digestion process. This is the reason why the beets were co-digested with manure from cattle during this study. The goal with this study were to compare newly harvested sugar- and fodderbeets potential for biogasproduction, with the production from beets that were placed in covered storage respectively silage. Another goal was to decide which type of beet, storage method and pre-treatment method that are the most optimal for co-digestion with manure from cattle. The tests showed that when newly harvested sugar- and fodderbeets were added the part size were a more important factor then when the beets had been stored or ensilaged. For newly harvested sugarbeets the biggest part size gave the highest production, while the newly harvested fodderbeets of the same size did not have time to digest properly, which resulted in that their production were the lowest. When the haulm from sugarbeets were added together with sugarbeets and co-digested with manure from cattle the results were more like the results from the fodderbeets. During the tests ensilaged beets had a higher production than the newly harvested and the beets that were stored covered. Even though the results from the ensilaged beets were modified since losses occurred from the ensilation process. Comparison between the groups showed no bigger differences in production for the sugarbeets, while for fodderbeets the second largest part size had a higher production than the others with fodderbeets. With ensilaged sugarbeets together with the haulm there was shown that the group with the second most amount of haulm gave a higher production than the rest of the groups that were co-digested with haulm. The tests can be concluded by that newly harvested and the sugarbeets that were stored covered are more suitable to be co-digested together with manure from cattle than fodderbeets when looking at these percentage admixtures and preconditions. When the beets have been ensilaged is it more favorably to use fodderbeets then sugarbeets together with manure from cattle. The part size was shown to have no bigger significance. To sum up ensilaged beets over all seem to be more favorably to co-digest with cattle manure than newly harvested or beets that were in covered storage. The production per gram VS were significantly higher although correction calculations.