In Utah, for years, farming facilities across the country have utilized anaerobic digesters to convert cow manure into renewable energy. However, these digesters have been limited to a modest 30–40% efficiency. Now, groundbreaking research led by a team of BYU professors is revolutionizing the process, making it faster and more efficient than ever before by pretreating the waste with a special bacteria.
BYU professors created waste pretreatment to enhance chemical extraction that usually escapes anaerobic digesters. Their innovative design converts waste into a sludgy soup of small, chained molecules, which is then pumped into existing digesters to produce usable natural gas. The process significantly boosts methane gas capture efficiency to 80–85%, accomplishing the transformation in less than half the time. Instead of the conventional 30–45 days, the pretreated waste, including challenging plant waste, requires only one to two days of pretreatment and five to seven days in a regular digester for complete breakdown.
