22-10-2014, 02:28 PM
Abstracts: The demand for petroleum products in India has been increasing at faster rate than the increase in domestic availability, resulting in increased imports. The transport sector is the single largest consumer of petroleum products, secondly about 65% of total air pollution caused by the emissions of pollutants from the vehicles run on the petroleum product in the wake of this, there is urgent need to introduce alternate fuel as substitute for diesel and petrol in the transport sector. Biogas is a clean environment friendly fuel. Raw biogas contains about 55-65% methane (CH4), 30-45% carbon dioxide (CO2), traces of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and fractions of water vapors. Presently, it can be used only at the place where it is produced. There is a great need to make biogas transportable. This can be done by compressing the gas in cylinders which is possible only after removing its CO2, H2S and water vapor components. Pilot level trials to compress the biogas have been carried out by a number of earlier investigators working on the subject. This paper reviews the efforts made to improve the quality of biogas by scrubbing CO2 and the results obtained. There is a lot of potential if biogas could be made viable as a transport vehicle fuel like CNG by compressing it and filling into cylinders after scrubbing and drying. Compression of biogas was carried out under near isothermal and adiabatic condition up to 11 bar absolute pressure. Thus the need emerges for a unified approach for scrubbing, compressing and subsequent storage of biogas for wider applications.