Abstract

This research work seeks to mitigate the act of deforestation and save the natural vegetation by designing a biomass plant whose feedstock is cow dung for use by the Charia community of the Upper West Region of Ghana. Firewood has been the primary fuel for domestic purposes at Charia over the years. There has been a shift from the practice where dead (naturally dried) firewood was harvested as fuel. Increase demand for firewood has led to cutting down live trees, drying them and using them as firewood. Others burn these trees for charcoal. In this research, cow dung was collected from four kraals and its mass measured to establish the amount of cow dung expected daily. An average of 1428 kg of cow dung was realized per day. This amounts to a total volume of 57.12 m3 of biogas. This volume of biogas can serve a total of 952 families which is assumed to be made up of four individuals. It was further realized that, 100% of the community’s population can rely on the 57.12 m³ of biogas as per the daily mass of 1428 kg of cow dung with a reserve of 14.73%. A total of 319.59 kg of firewood is also going to be saved.

Keywords:

Acetogenesis, acidogenesis, biogas, charia community, cow dung, hydrolysis, methanogenesis,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.