Abstract:

Rapidly growing population, ever-evolving industrialization, increasing energy and fertilizer prices with the decreasing natural resources caused the interest in biogas technology. At this point, waste produced from livestock farming is a good source for biogas production either on farm scale or as cooperatives involving several farms of a whole region. In this study, it was aimed to determine the potential of biogas from accessible animal manure such as bovine, ovine and poultry in Mersin province and its equivalence to other types of fuels by the information obtained from the literature. When the animal existence is examined based on districts of Mersin province, it is seen that there are 20,200,937 farm animals in total. In the direction of this numerical data, the total amount of calculated annual manure is 1,752,474 ton/year, while the amount of usable/collectible animal manure is 1,009,452 ton/year. It has been determined that biogas of about 60 million m3 per year can be theoretically obtained from the sum of the animal manures and this value can produce electric energy of 280 GWh per year. It has been determined that a total of 128,609,656 TL (21,217,378 $) in electricity consumption can be achieved in the district by using animal manure in biogas production. It is also estimated that the biogas produced could meet the need for 1 year cooking energy for approximately 106,606 households. It has been determined that the utilization of animal manures will make an important contribution to Mersin in terms of socio-economic development.

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