At Bingham farm in Northern Ireland a N2 test installation is located. Wednesday June 20th 2018 we organized a demonstration event at Bingham. We demonstrated our plasma reactor and explained the working principles to an interested group of invited stakeholders – local farmers, policy makers, academia and representatives from the biogas industry.
Media was also there, and here you can read what dairyglobal wrote about our technology.
Bingham farm is owned by Robin and George Bingham. They have a 650-acre dairy farm where they milk 750 cows under a zero grazing system. This means that the cows are kept indoors throughout the year and the grass is brought to the cows. The farm has a biogas plant that uses manure to produce methane gas, which is used to produce electricity using a generator. The produced electricity is fed into the power grid. Part of the surplus of electricity is used to run N2’s plasma reactor. Dairy farmer George Bingham is interested to test the N2 system as it meets his desire to farm in a more environmentally friendly way. Here is a movie about the Bingham test installation, and how George describes N2’s technology.
The plasma reactor is mounted in a container and placed close to the biogas plant on the farm. The reactor processes the digestate from the biogas plant and produces liquid nitrogen fertilizer. In collaboration with the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI) we execute agronomic field trials with the fertilizer on the grass land of the farm during the summer and fall of 2018. Here we compare the grass yield of the processed digestate with unprocessed digestate and with chemical fertilizers in various doses. We will analyze the results of the three following fertilizer applications and harvest of the grass.
N2’s CTO Rune Ingels explains the working principles to an interested group of stakeholders
During the presentations by N2 Chief Technology Officer Rune Ingels our guests got the opportunity to ask questions and this resulted in interesting discussions about the challenges, as well as opportunities of our solution for the Northern Ireland situation. Reducing ammonia emissions is currently a major challenge for the Northern Ireland livestock farmers and is also one of the important positive effects of the N2 solution. It potentially supports farmers in complying to environmental regulations and at the same time it produces a high value fertilizer.
From the left: CTO in N2 Rune Ingels, George Bingham and N2’s Business Development Director, Henk Aarts
As George Bingham summarizes it: ‘’Using this plasma reactor system will help us achieve our goals of farming more environmentally friendly while at the same time, sorting out my ammonia quotas. I see this as a potential game changer across the world helping farmers get more from their farmyard slurry and saving them money.’’
And meanwhile the cows eat grass and keep themselves busy producing more milk as well as manure, which is the input for the biogas reactor and the source of the digestate that makes the grass grow. The circle of nutrients keeps on turning.
Henk Aarts,
Business Development Director Europe.
henk.aarts@n2agri.no