Energy and nutrient recovery from dairy manure : Process design and economic performance of a farm based system

This thesis assessed the technical and economic premises for installing systems that process manure in order to recover nutrients and inherent energy. The main purpose of recovering nutrients was to extract phosphorus from the manure, so as to be able to distribute more of the manure on the farm without exceeding the phosphorus regulation. Three other scenarios were included as reference; conventional manure handling, solid-liquid separation only and solid-liquid separation including energy recovery. Since most important parameters for modeling scenarios in agriculture are site-specific (e.g. soil type, crop rotation and manure composition), the thesis results were based on a case farm. The case farm is a 675 ha dairy farm with approx. 1400 milking cows, located in Östergötland, Sweden. As for the results, it was first concluded that the central characteristics of manure were the content of dry matter (DM), nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K). The higher the DM content, the more fuel for energy recovery, and the higher the N:P-ratio, the more on-farm N can be utilized before having to consider the P regulation. The technical premises for farm-scale nutrient recovery were limited to commercial techniques from companies operating in Sweden, and included various possible processing methods, such as; pH modification, anaerobic digestion, coagulation-flocculation, precipitation, filtration and reverse osmosis. However, most methods were either too costly or simply not realistic to install on stand-alone farms, resulting in only two feasible options; struvite precipitation and secondary solid-liquid separation with a decanter centrifuge. The comparison in economic performance for all scenarios resulted as follows: nutrient recovery by struvite precipitation was the most profitable scenario of all, if struvite was allowed to replace mineral P fertilizer (i.e. end-product on-farm utilization). If not, it was more profitable to invest in only energy recovery, as nutrient recovery by secondary solid-liquid separation or struvite precipitation with end-product sales were not as profitable. However, the absolutely largest increase in profitability lies within investing in a primary solid-liquid separation. As for the case farm, this investment reduced costs by more than 2 MSEK, while any of the latter scenarios reduce costs by 0,1-0,2 MSEK. Furthermore, the possible utilization of the waste heat from energy recovery increased profitability by a factor of ten