Harnessing Agro-Waste for Electricity Generation: A Pathway to Environmental Sustainability and Energy Poverty Reduction in The Niger Delta

The rural communities of the Niger Delta over the years have been faced with problem of energy poverty due to the fact that electricity has consistently been a scarce resources in the rural area. Agricultural waste in the Niger Delta has been growing exponentially as a result of several agricultural interventions in the region by government agencies, private and cooperate bodies.There is an increasing search for alternative cost-effective and environment friendly sustainable electricity source that will effectively reduce energy poverty in the Niger Delta region. This research is aimed at addressing the problem of environmental sustainability and energy poverty in the Niger Delta using agrowastes as bidigester feedstocks. The experimental method involved design of a small scale biodigester and using pig dungs, poultry droppings, cow dungs and cassava peels from LIFE-ND incubation centers as feedstocks.Four experiments were carried out using each agrowaste as feed stock.The collected agrowastes were each mixed with water in the ratio of 1:1 ( 40kg of agrowaste mixed with 40kg of water) to form a slurry and carefully poured in a biodigester and allowed to undergo anaerobic digestion for 25 days while daily biogas production was observed and recorded.The result from experiment shows that generally, all the feed- stocks used indicated a linear relationship between the volume build up against retention time. The retention time (days) that produces the maximum yield of biogas in volume are as follows: Cow dungs with 1,750 liters at 19 days, Pig dungs with 2,484.9 liters at 21 days, poultry droppings with 2,544.6 liters at 18days and cassava peels with 1,240.98 liters at 16 days, a total daily electricity contribution of 165.36Kwh , for every 1kg of agrowaste when effectively managed can generate about 0.09kwh of electricity, every 1kg of agrowaste when converted to biogas energy and used as substitute to conventional fuel sources can effectively reduce CO2 emission into the atmosphere by (0.04-0.27)kg.