Presenting a frugal, efficient, and an environmentally friendly answer to all our energy problems: generation of energy from crap 
. Sounds funny, but this interesting approach to efficient energy production and waste management has been put to practical use in many countries.
Heard about biogas before? If you haven’t, this will serve as a primer for you. According to Wikipedia, the term biogas refers to:
a (biofuel) gas produced by the anaerobic digestion or fermentation of organic matter including manure, sewage sludge, municipal solid waste, biodegradable waste or any other biodegradable feedstock..
If you take out the scientific jargon from that definition, it simply means that biogas is a fuel produced by treating animal or human waste under certain conditions. A schematic of this process is shown in the image below.
Here is a brief explanation about the process. Degradable animal (cow dung is hugely popular) and human waste is fed to the biogas generator through some kind of an inlet pipe. The generator is usually a large sized, dome shaped container that holds the waste in an oxygen-free environment. The waste is held there till it ferments (usually in a couple of weeks) and produces the desired gas (mainly a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide). The gas is then refined if necessary and directed towards where ever it’s required (usually for cooking or heating purposes). The residual waste from the generator is mostly used as an organic fertilizer. So basically, you start with crap and end with free heating/cooking and free soil fertilizer…how frugal is that! You can read the details here, here, here, and here.
After the initial capital costs of installing the generator, the system essentially produces free gas for use….you just have to keep producing organic waste. If large communities come together and plan on installing and maintaining ‘bulk’ systems, even the capital costs per person (per family) could be reduced. Apart from the cost advantages, there are numerous environmental advantages like these (source):
Biogas production by anaerobic digestion is popular for treating biodegradable waste because valuable fuel can be produced while destroying disease-causing pathogens and reducing the volume of disposed waste products. The methane in biogas combusts more cleanly than coal, and produces more energy with less emissions of carbon dioxide. The harvesting of biogas is an important role of waste management because methane is a greenhouse gas with a greater global warming potential than carbon dioxide. The carbon in biogas was generally recently extracted from the atmosphere by photosynthetic plants, so releasing it back into the atmosphere adds less total atmospheric carbon than the burning of fossil fuels.
Is this new stuff?
Nopes, according to one website:
Biogas has been known since Ancient times. The Assyrians used it to heat their bath water. From 1895, the city of Exeter in England had street lighting fuelled by biogas produced from a methanisation unit installed at the town’s water purifying plant.
India, China, and some European Union countries are getting heavily into technologies related to this concept.
I haven’t heard about any such stuff in US except rare use of terms like “Biomass Program” and rare news like this; is there a good reason why this is not popular here? Is it just lack of publicity ? Or are we just too rich and sophisticated (and careless) to explore the potential of crap? With 300 million people, that’s a lot of crap wasted.
May be this will give some encouragement to the idea :
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nice image at the bottom.
Los Angeles’ waste treatment facility does this. The gas that is produced goes to a power plant down the road and some of the electricity created is used by the treatment plant. They then take the fertilizer/waste and use it on the city owned farms (in a county north of LA County).
MoneyFwd: Thanks for the info. It does seem like this stuff lacks publicity, may be more people are doing it but I just haven’t heard about them.
Hasn’t everyone seen “Mad Max Beyond
Thunderdome”?
(With the gas from pigs plant?)
Harm: I looked up that movie and saw this as the plot outline:
No wonder then..they may have had no other choice
. Kidding apart, I will try and watch that movie someday.
I went to China in the late 70’s and saw acres of greenhouse heated by the methane, now called biogas, produced from the pig sty — cooking stoves, lights…the whole village ran on biogas. They were eager for me to visit the outhouse, the hole of which was positioned directly over the pig sty (I guess there was a second step in the recycling process, human deposit through pig and into methane generator). I could feel the eager piggies breath on me as they waited below and thus, was unable to contribute then or for another two weeks after. I was traumatized. I also couldn’t partake of their fine pork banquet. Nevertheless, I was really impressed at how the entire village had power, energy and light. Lots of Vermont dairy farmers have installed gas producers that take care of mountains of cow-produced stuff and heat the barn…it is pretty cool.
At some point in a past life, my parents had a farm and we had a bio-gas generator (based on animal waste)! We were pre-teens and hated the idea because of the ick-factor. But thankfully, after all the processing you just couldnt tell the difference between the bio-gas and the regular gas that we had to pay for! I do remember my mom complaining though that the flame from the bio-gas was weaker and took a long time to heat the water - so I doubt if you can convert it into fuel that can be used in automobiles!
3 Things About Money: Wow…your China experience was one of a kind. I hope things have improved since then.
ISPF: Yeah, I didn’t go into those details, but the crude biogas that we get out of animal/human waste has a lower calorific value than gasoline, the ratio being about 3:5. Roughly if it takes a certain quantity of water 6 minutes to heat using gasoline, it would take about 10 minutes to heat it using biogas.
However, people are coming up with some home-made refining solutions for such problems now a days and increasing the ratio to about 4:5. There are some methanization plants in Sweden that are working on refining it to be used in automobiles..so hopefully we will see that in the time to come.
Golbguru: looks like you really research your topics well, before you write about them huh? Another good reason for me to keep coming back to your blog
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Hello guys,
Need help?
I leave in country that has garbage collection challenges. I need a turnkey operation solution on collecting garbage and turn it into cooking gas. Any ideas.
abdul
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