Your banana and papaya peel, remains of rotten vegetables and other kitchen scraps are valuable source of fuel. With the simple biogas technology, you can cook using fuel from your kitchen.
This article explains how kitchen waste can generate fuel. The original article had pictures. We reproduce the article here using only one photo of the biogas.
Released from the Energy Grid
Trisha Sertori
The Jakarta Post Thursday, December 19 2013
Wood fires in village kitchens could soon be a thing of the past with biogas offering an alternative to firewood.
“We need energy self sufficiency at the house hold level,’”says Hira Ghindwani when talking about her husband Deepak’s household biogas system that creates methane gas from kitchen and garden waste. “This biogas system can make people independent from other energy sources,” Hira said.
While the technology of harvesting methane from animal waste has been harnessed by several villages across Bali, Deepak said that many people could simply not make methane, lacking livestock and enough land to raise the animals. Hence, his impetus to develop an alternative.
Biogas, says Deepak, was developed in India and China a long time ago, and was in wide use before the start of the 20th century. “In India using cow dung for fires is written about in the Mahabharata, so it’s ancient,” according to Deepak. “But demographics changed as people moved to the cities. Biogas created from cattle dung was dying out.”
Deepak began to search for a way to help people get off the energy grid and become self sufficient.
“I started looking at biogas as a hobby related to technology and energy. I read about biogas and started experimenting here at home with the technology and discovered kitchen waste could replace cow dung. That was a breakthrough that we could use that waste to make biogas so we could transport methane technology to middle-class people in cities.”
Home designs can be adjusted to allow for the creation of biogas systems within existing homes, he says. The technology developed by Deepak working with villagers from Sibutan in Karangasem is simple.
In Deepak’s garden in Batu Bulan stands a large, domed black plastic tank. The lower portion is a ‘digester’ that is fed food scraps, such as papaya and avocado skins, grass clippings and even meat waste. The upper domed section stores methane.
A gas line runs from the biogas system to especially designed kitchen gas ring, where a kettle is merrily whistling as it boils on the biogas burner.
“It has taken time to understand the correct feeding volumes,”says Hira. “It’s a bit like a human stomach, if you overfeed it stops digesting, and underfeeding means reduced gas production.”
Deepak says that finding enough raw materials for the digester is no problem, as the average household’s waste is comprised of up to 70 percent organic waste. “This can be harvested as biogas, in turn reducing the need for landfills and the trucks needed to dump it. Household biogas addresses all the links in the waste chain.”
How this essentially free energy source plays out on the ground, and how it changes lives is seen best in the village of Teluktuk in Sibetan, Karang Asem, Bali, where a pilot project has been underway for the last two years, with funding from the Consumer’s Union in Jakarta to buy digesters for six households.
“The Consumer’s Union agreed to fund the installation of six biogas units in Teluktuk under specific criteria, including family size being above five members and women in the home,”says Deepak. It was also better if the families were running small businesses, like warung and if they were using firewood as their energy source, and of course their willingness to try the biogas.
While there have been hiccups, such as developing designs for the stoves designs and reining the regimen for ‘cultivating’ the kitchen waste needed to produce biogas, people in Sibetan say that biogas has been life changing.
“We have had the biogas system for the past two years,”says one resident, Made Rempah. “I have a sister-in-law down the road who has a warung. She is not in the program, but she gives me her food scraps for the biogas”.
‘It is really good for our family,’ the 32-year-old says. ‘If I want to cook food quickly, like noodles for my children before school, biogas is much faster than lighting a fire. Wood fires are the norm here [….] I can heat water easily and I can cook a hot breakfast for the kids.”
This family’s biogas digester has also eased the life of its elderly members, such as a grandmother who used to spend many hours daily collecting firewood, despite her age.
“In the past, I had to gather firewood every day. That was very difficult when it was raining. Now I only gather firewood occasionally,” says the elderly woman believed to be in her late 70s.
“Pak Deepak’s biogas has changed our lives, changed the lives of women. We no longer search for firewood and wait hours to cook and heat water. We would like all the villagers here to have biogas to make their lives easier,” says Made.
At the nearby home of Kasna, life has also improved. “This is much easier than using firewood and it saves us money, as we were paying for the wood and biogas is free,” Kasna says. “Deepak is constantly improving the system. He is working on our stoves at the moment. I hope in the near future every family in Teluktuk has biogas.”
Hira calls biogas a ‘liberating energy technology’, freely available to all. “The kitchen is the basic source of family health and you need energy to run this. Biogas makes people independent from other energy sources.”
