From the Living Lab: Small Biodigester to Fuel Research, Extension

By Caitlin Hayes

As biodigesters go, Cornell’s new unit will be small: two 10,000-gallon tanks on a concrete pad that might not be much to look at. But this little system, which will transform food scraps and cow manure into energy, will have an impact far beyond its footprint.

“This is such a great opportunity for research, education and extension,” said Lauren Ray, senior extension associate and agricultural sustainability and energy engineer for PRO-DAIRY, in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS). “It has this element of practicality, because it really will supply energy to the university, but at the same time it’s a platform for learning and even playing, as well as providing hands-on demonstrations for farmers and students.”

The digester is one of the newest additions to Cornell’s Living Lab: a long-standing approach that uses campus operations to research and advance sustainability. It will be installed this summer at the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine’s (CVM) Teaching Dairy, where it will take in a portion of manure from the 180-cow herd, as well as food service scraps and byproducts from campus. Microbes in the sealed tanks will anaerobically convert the organic waste into biogas, a combination of methane and carbon dioxide, and nutrient-rich, liquid digestate. The biogas will provide energy to the dairy – offsetting fossil fuel use – and both the gas and digestate will provide raw materials for Cornell researchers who study cutting-edge processes for carbon capture or the conversion of waste streams to biofuels.

“Whatever we do on a laboratory- or bench-scale, to translate it to real-life, you want to validate it in the field,” said Jefferson Tester ’66, M.S. ‘67, the Croll Sesquicentennial Fellow and Professor in Cornell Duffield College of Engineering, who studies the conversion of waste to useful products. “It’s very hard to do that on a big farm with a huge digester. The best way to get that data is to have an operating experiment like we’re going to have on campus.”