Bullshit + Chicken Shit

How many chickens do you need to cook your dinner?  

That question has totally different meaning when your into bio-digesters.  The better question is:  How much chicken shit does it take to keep a gas burner on for 1 hour?  Turns out to be around 3 chickens. 

Here's the math:   (note:  m3 is a cubic meter)
Each chicken produces 0.17 m3/day of manure,
which turns into 0.45m3 of biogas. 
A stove burner uses about 0.2 - 0.45 m3/hour. 
Crunch the numbers and you get 2.6 to 5.8 chickens. No bullshit! 

oh...speaking of which: it takes 1/100 of a cow to do the same thing, because one cow produced around 120lbs of bullshit each day.  Hey, now that's a lot of BS!
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We took a tour of bio  digester facilities yesterday:  Our first stop was a commercial company that employs 8 people,  and then we visited a simple family with 4 cows and a small scale digester producing clean gas for cooking and lights.  Their entire operation was SO simple and it rocked my renewable energy world.  And it hardly smelled!

Unfortunately these things are just inappropriate in California and other US cities.  If you think septic tanks are an issue, wait until biogesters hit the streets...errr small farms.  With careful western bureacracies, I can see the code book being a few hundred pages thick.  Never mind that 50% of India families have them, we're going to focus on the 1 in 1000000 chance that all that ammonia in a digester is gonna kill a baby.  Ahhh... western fear mongering, I miss it so.... NOT!

The really cool thing about these biodigesters is the rich HUMUS that's produced when the digester is emptied and readied for the next cycle.  I'm told in Indonesia the animal manure is used about 60% for soil fertilizer and 40% for biogas. I hope so... that seems sustainable.

India has over 50% of households using biogas for their cooking needs.  They are almost too successful at this, since their latest problem is they are depriving the soil of all that manure fertilizer.  So one of the big lessons I've already learned is to stick with the 'higher' order of things:

Learning #1:  Don't use cow/pig/chicken shit for making energy until you are certain that your growing needs have been met.  RE (renewable energy) must be sustainable at it's source, and not be a detriment to food supplies, etc.  If you don't have any food to cook, there's no sense in making biogas for a stove!

We did this same thing on a macro scale a few years ago when the Feds mandated 15% bio(corn)-ethanol.  This policy drove the price of global food up and started starving poor people are the world...and pissed off one poor kid in Tunisia.  But we didn't give a damn, because we never see the starving 3rd world.     ... it's all about how we can maintain cheap gasoline for our addictive car habits.

And if you think we're bad, after learning that electrical prices here are actually 4X higher due to subsidies... it makes us look like saints.

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On a personal note  I'm having a hard time getting used to all the bugs.  I don't mind the mosquitos and ants... well i do mind today's ants that came out of nowhere because I left a garbage bag sitting on the floor, and haven't been sweeping the floor every single day.  No... it's the flying weird bugs that i've never seen before.  They seem to be different and more prevalent here in the countryside.  I keep finding some big 'droppings' in the middle of the house and have no clue as to what animal (can't be small) would have 'dropped' them off.  stay tuned...