Feasibility analysis of utilizing swine manure as an energy source in Southwest Taiwan

Swine manure is one of the main sources for generating biogas. A well designed biomass-to-energy system is meaningful in low carbon power generation, pollution prevention, and greenhouse gas reduction. In this study, a semi-centralized biomass-to-energy system for transforming swine manure to electricity was proposed and the potential of being cost-effective was examined. Geographic Information Systems with agglomerative hierarchical clustering as the algorithm were employed to identify the cooperative areas and the cover years in a conservative and an optimistic scenario were calculated. In southwest Taiwan, where over 70% of the swine heads were raised, it was found that collecting high dry matter swine manure within 40km returned better performance than that for collecting low dry matter swine manure within 10km.