A study on biogas production from food waste and POME

Abstract

The energy crisis and current environmental degradation are the two key issues for global sustainable development. Biogas such as methane (CH4) is seen as the energy of the future, looking at the uncontrolled discharge of food waste and generation of palm oil mill effluent alongside the production of crude palm oil, on top of the increasing global awareness of increasing carbon dioxide level. This carbon dioxide level is associated to global warming, acid rain and other environmental issues. Methane gas can be a renewable resource and environmental friendly. The objective of this study was to produce biogas from food waste and POME using anaerobic digestion (AD) process. AD technology was considered to have many advantages among all the approaches, which could not only decrease the quantity of food wastes but also produce clean biogas which can use as sources for electricity. The selected parameters for biogas production (e.g. temperature, pH, alkalinity and C/N ratio) were analysed using standard methods. This study was run in two ratio which are 2:1 and 2:2 ratio. As a result, ratio 2:2 produced higher percentages of biogas (49.4 % of CH4) and (25.5 % of CO2) with pH (6.841), alkalinity (16800 mg/L) and C/N ratio (8.4 %).