Environmental Impact Assessment of Centralized and Decentralized Biogas Power Plants in Palestine

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Date
2017-01-31
Authors
Alia, Ruba Ahmad Hasan
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An-Najah National University
Abstract
Biogas production by biodigestion is considered as an important method for the production of renewable energy. One of the most important methods in utilization biogas is the production of electrical energy by means of special generators. In West Bank, there are a lot of animals such as cattle, goats, sheep and poultry. These animals produce a huge amount of dung which can be anaerobically digested and produces what is called biogas. In order to estimate the amount of electrical energy that can be generated from biogas produced by the biodigestion of animal dung, many statistical data were collected according to the type and number of animals and the mass of daily manure production. This was done for most villages in ten governorates in West Bank. This research is aimed at studying the economic feasibility and environmental impact assessment for electrical energy production from biogas plants. After the calculation of annual waste production in each village, the biodigester volume, the capacity of electrical generator and the potential of production electrical energy were calculated. Consequently, Annual Worth (AW) was calculated. Moreover, the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCoE) was calculated. For profitable and environmentally friendly production, the selling price for one kWh of electricity is considered to be 0.3 NIS in order to compete with Israel electrical company which sells electricity for local electricity distribution companies by 0.4 NIS /kWh. To guarantee short payback period, it was found that biodigesters of volume less than 100m3 were infeasible. Since the levelized cost of energy depends directly on the volume of the biodigeter, the design of centralized biogas stations were investigated. The proposed methods depends on collecting the manure from all nearby villages and construct a single centralized biodigester for each clusters at one of the villages taking in consideration the environmental impacts and the feasibility. It was obvious that all of proposed centralized biogas power plant is feasible from economical aspects with shorter payback period than decentralized biogas power plant. It was also found that from environmental impact assessment that centralized biogas power plant is better from social and environmental aspects. Based on the results of this study, it was found that the proposed Hebron governorate biogas power plant has the largest amount of biogas production from all governorates, which has 45,670 m3 daily biogas production that is equivalent to annual electrical energy of 28.8GWh. The least biogas production was found to be in Salfeet governorate, with a daily biogas production of 2,860 m3 which is equivalent to annual electrical energy of 2GWh. Potential electrical energy production is estimated to be 2% of total energy consumption in west bank. In the case of proper utilization of these bioenergy sources, it is expected to minimize the amount of greenhouse emissions equivalent to 100,000 ton CO2 which may produced from the same amount from the production of electrical energy from coal.
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