Chicken Manure Pretreatment for Enhancing Biogas and Methane Production

Abstract

The objective of this work was to determine the potential of chicken manure as a substrate for biogas production after pretreatment. The effects of removing excess nitrogen from chicken manure by water extraction in a temperature range from 20 °C to 60 °C to increase methane production were investigated. The dynamics of the process and efficiency of biogas production were also analyzed. As a result of manure fermentation after pretreatment, 16 to 45% more biogas and 18 to 39% more methane were obtained compared to manure without pretreatment. The effect of extraction was to increase the ratio of carbon to nitrogen by 2–2.7 times, which contributed to increasing biogas efficiency. The proposed method seems to be a promising enhancing of biogas and methane production in comparison with raw chicken manure. Biomass in the form of chicken manure is a promising substrate for biogas production, due to the constantly growing poultry meat production as well as environmental aspects such as reducing gas emissions from manure into the atmosphere.