Bernhard Waase, director of Renig, a subsidiary of the Salvadoran company El Granjero, where chicken manure from eight farms is converted into biogas. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Aug 5 2025 (IPS)

El Granjero, the second-largest egg producer in El Salvador, invested US$2.5 million in 2017 to build a biogas plant, proving that there is a solution to the thorny issue of environmental pollution caused by most poultry companies in the country.

It also showed that the investment can yield financial benefits, as the biogas generates electricity that is fed into the national power grid.

The biogas plant, located in Jayaque, a district in southwestern El Salvador, is managed by Renig, the subsidiary created by El Granjero to handle its biological waste.

In 2018, Renig began processing the 200,000 tons of chicken manure and other organic waste produced annually from the eight farms that El Granjero operates in the southwestern part of the country, housing around one million birds.

The plant’s biodigester, with a capacity of 5,300 cubic meters, is 92 meters long, 17 meters wide, and five meters deep.

“I thought biodigesters were the most suitable because they solved the environmental problem immediately, but there was also at least a possibility of being profitable,” Bernhard Waase, director of Renig, told IPS during his visit to the plant.

The environmental pollution caused by the poultry sector has been a source of tension for rural communities living near the farms established in their territories.

According to data from the Salvadoran Poultry Association, the country’s poultry sector produces approximately 1.2 billion eggs and 155 million kilograms of chicken meat annually.

The production of biogas is complex. Bacteria are living organisms that, depending on the conditions inside the biodigester, can behave differently and affect gas production, Melissa Ruiz, in charge of the digester and secondary processes, explained to IPS.

“The digester works like our stomach, and the bacteria are very sensitive to the elements we provide them, just like us. If we suddenly eat a lot of meat or an unbalanced diet, our stomach reacts, and we feel sluggish or get sick. The same happens with the digester,” Ruiz elaborated.

The biodigester at the Renig plant began producing biogas in 2018 but only started generating electricity in 2021. That year, after winning a government tender for biogas production, it began generating and injecting 0.85 megawatts into the national grid through the power distributor Del Sur.

Waase said that, in environmental terms, the plant has achieved its primary goal—preventing pollution—which is already a reason for celebration and pride, as few large companies in the poultry sector have taken this step. Specifically, in the egg industry, El Granjero is the only one that decided to make this investment.

However, financially, expectations have not been fully met.

“From an environmental standpoint, it has been a total success, but financially speaking, it’s much more complicated. We haven’t lost money in any year, but we’re nowhere near the return we had envisioned,” he stated.

The biodigester at the Renig plant in Jayaque, southwestern El Salvador, processes 200,000 tons of chicken manure annually from the farms of the company El Granjero. This serves as the raw material for producing biogas, which is used to generate electricity injected into the national grid. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
JAYAQUE, El Salvador, Jul 25 2025 (IPS)

Still in its early stages and with few players, the poultry sector in El Salvador is taking small steps toward environmentally sustainable production by using its biological waste to generate biogas and, in turn, electricity –an equation that benefits the natural environment, communities, and the farms themselves.

El Granjero is the second-largest egg-producing company in the country, with over one million chickens distributed across its eight farms. After an investment of US$2.5 million, it created the subsidiary Renig to build a biogas plant in 2017.“I thought biodigesters were the most suitable because you solved the environmental problem right away, and the possibility of being profitable” –Bernhard Waase.

A year later, it began processing 200 000 tons of chicken manure and other organic waste annually.

This waste serves as the raw material for producing biogas, the fuel used to generate electricity, which the company then injects into the national power grid.

“Back around 2010 or 2012, we discussed what to do with all the chicken manure because the way it was being handled—by poultry farmers in the country and, I’d say, around the world—was that it was dumped in the open air,” Bernhard Waase, director of Renig, told IPS. The facility is located in La Labor, within the district of Jayaque, in the southwestern department of La Libertad.

At least five of El Granjero’s eight farms, which are dedicated exclusively to egg production, are situated in this rural settlement.

Bernhard Waase, director of Renig, a subsidiary of the Salvadoran company El Granjero, where chicken manure from eight farms is converted into biogas. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

An Environmentally Friendly Solution 

The environmental pollution caused by the poultry sector has been a source of tension for rural communities living near the farms that were established in their territories or expanded around them over time, as was the case with El Granjero, founded in 1968.

“When the company was established, there wasn’t a single house nearby; it was completely uninhabited,” Waase noted before showing IPS around the plant facilities. But the issue of environmental pollution remained.

“I thought biodigesters were the most suitable because they solved the environmental problem immediately, but there was also at least a possibility of being profitable,” said Waase, referring to the potential for generating electricity.

The country’s poultry sector produces approximately 1.2 billion eggs and 342 million pounds of chicken meat annually, according to data from the Salvadoran Poultry Association.

However, despite being crucial in food production for the country, its contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP) is low, at just 0.79%, though within the agricultural GDP, it accounts for 16%.

Few companies in the poultry sector have chosen to invest in environmentally friendly solutions for biological waste.

One of them is Grupo Campestre, one of the largest chicken producers, which invested seven million dollars to set up its biogas plant and process the 40,000 tons of biological waste generated annually by its farms, processing plant, and fried chicken restaurants owned by the consortium nationwide.

Laying hens at the San Jorge farm, one of eight owned by the egg producer El Granjero. The manure from these farms in southwestern El Salvador is used for biogas production. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Biogas production in El Salvador is minimal compared to other renewable energy segments. In fact, its share is so small that it does not appear in the national energy matrix, which is dominated by hydropower (33.7%), geothermal (23%), and natural gas (16%).

Meanwhile, photovoltaics account for 8.5%, and wind power barely represents 2.1%.

In recent years, there has been notable interest in El Salvador, a country of six million people, in promoting clean, renewable energy production, which represents 70% of the country’s energy matrix, according to official figures.

The Renig executive stated that producing electricity from biogas is expensive and complex, as it not only requires investment in facilities and personnel but the process itself is extremely complicated.

“It’s costly because of the equipment and the operation of production. It’s not like solar—that’s child’s play: you have the land, you install the panels, you make the connections that any university student can do, and that’s it,” said Waase.

The complexity of biogas production also lies in dealing with bacteria, living organisms that can behave unpredictably and affect gas production, explained Melissa Ruiz, in charge of the digester and secondary processes.

Sometimes the bacteria get “sick,” she noted, and they must be carefully tended to.

“The digester works like our stomach, and the bacteria are very sensitive to the elements we provide them—just like us: if we suddenly eat too much meat or an unbalanced diet, our stomach reacts, and we feel sluggish or get sick. The same thing happens with the digester,” Ruiz told IPS.

The biogas produced by the Renig plant’s biodigester, using waste from a Salvadoran poultry company, powers two engines with a generation capacity of 425 kilowatts each. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

An Eco-Friendly Plant 

Once El Granjero decided to bet on biogas production through its subsidiary, it began working on the technical, operational, and financial details of what would become the Renig plant, where a biodigester measuring 92 meters long, 17 meters wide, and 5 meters deep—with a capacity of 5,300 cubic meters—would be built.

The biodigester is the centerpiece of any biogas plant. Inside, bacteria break down the biological waste from the farms—in El Granjero’s case, chicken manure.

This decomposition process generates gases, including methane, which become the fuel to power the plant’s two engines, each with a generation capacity of 425 kilowatts.

If not used for electricity production, these gases would rise into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), methane is a potent greenhouse gas with a warming potential 80 times greater than carbon dioxide.

This gas is also the main contributor to ground-level ozone formation, a dangerous air pollutant whose exposure causes 1 million premature deaths worldwide each year.

The Renig plant’s biodigester began producing biogas in 2018, but it only started generating electricity in 2021, as that was the year it participated in a government tender for renewable energy production.

During the period when no electricity was generated, the biogas had to be “flared” to prevent the gases from escaping into the atmosphere, using a combustion torch the company had to purchase for US$40,000.

“This torch basically burned all the biogas, and I thought: I’m literally burning money. Since February 2021, this torch hasn’t been lit because I’ve been generating energy,” said Waase.

As part of its production processes, the Renig biogas plant also produces high-quality fertilizer, which it markets to the agricultural sector. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

The Business Moves Slowly but Surely 

Two years earlier, in 2019, Renig won the contract to inject 0.85 megawatts into the national grid—a modest amount but significant as a starting point.

For reference, the Nejapa biogas plant, built in 2011 and operated by AES El Salvador at a cost of US$58 million, has an installed capacity of six megawatts.

Waase stated that, environmentally, the plant has achieved its primary goal of preventing pollution, which is already a cause for celebration and pride, as few large companies in the poultry sector have taken this step. Specifically, in the egg industry, El Granjero is the only one that made this investment.

However, financially, expectations have not been fully met.

“From an environmental standpoint, it’s been a total success, but financially speaking, it’s much more complicated. We haven’t lost money in any year, but we’re nowhere near the return we had projected,” he said.

Preschool teacher Iris Mejías and her husband Alexis García, a retired university professor, stand next to the geomembrane biodigester that since December 2023 provides about four cubic meters of biogas daily for their agricultural activities and the needs of their home in the semi-urban neighborhood of Sierra Maestra, in the municipality of Boyeros on the south side of Havana. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

By Luis Brizuela
HAVANA, Apr 26 2024 (IPS)

Just to obtain a good fertilizer it was worth building a biodigester, says Cuban farmer Alexis García, who proudly shows the vegetables in his family’s garden, as well as the wide variety of fruit trees that have benefited from biol, the end product of biogas technology.

García and his wife Iris Mejías organically grow all the agricultural products that make them self-sufficient, on the land around their home in the semi-urban neighborhood of Sierra Maestra, in the municipality of Boyeros on the south side of Havana.“We need a greater culture and awareness about renewable energies. There is resistance among some places and people. On the other hand, there are the high prices which do not foment the rapid expansion of technologies and equipment.” -- Alexis García

“I used to use a little urea, but because of the economic situation it has become very difficult to import this and other fertilizers. The bioproducts are an opportunity to make up for that shortage and, in some cases, function as pesticides,” García, a 62-year-old retired university professor who is now dedicated to his crops, told IPS.

Biol is the liquid effluent with a certain degree of stabilization that comes out of the biodigester, once the process of anaerobic digestion of organic matter, which includes animal manure, crop waste and/or liquid waste, has been completed. It is rich in nutrients for crops and for restoring soil through fertigation.

García pointed out that the challenges of obtaining energy and the need to process manure prompted the installation of the geomembrane biodigester, which as of December 2023 provides about four cubic meters of biogas per day.

This is one of the three types of biodigesters most used at a small and medium scale in Cuba, together with the mobile type, also known as the Indian model, and the fixed dome or Chinese biodigester.

“I had read a little about it and wanted to have a biodigester. With some savings we decided to start building one. In addition to the support of our sons Alexis and Alexei, we had the backing and advice of José Antonio Guardado,” coordinator of the Biogas Users Movement (MUB), said García.

Founded in 1983, the MUB brings together some 3,000 farmers who use this technology in this Caribbean island nation of 11 million people.

Preschool teacher Iris Mejías uses biogas to cook food, which gives her autonomy, saves money and improves the quality of life in her home in the south of the Cuban capital. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

Biogas opportunities

Mejías, 59, said that “with biogas you lose the fear of not having enough fuel for cooking. It provides security.”

Meiías, a teachers at a preschool for the young children of working mothers, says that when the economic crisis became more severe in the 1990s, she cooked with firewood, charcoal, kerosene and even coconut shells to prepare her family’s daily meals.

“If you cook with electrical equipment, you depend on the power supply, or if you have a gas cylinder (liquefied petroleum gas), you worry that it will run out and you won’t have a spare. In both cases the biodigester saves money,” she said.

Mejías said it is easier to cook food for domestic animals and heat water “without smut or smoke that makes it necessary to wash your hair every day or makes it difficult to take care of your hands.”

Studies show that methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with a warming power 80 times greater than that of carbon dioxide (CO2).

Proper management of the biological methane resulting from the decomposition of agricultural residues and manure can generate value and be a cost-effective solution to avoid water and soil contamination.

Therefore, its extraction and use as energy, especially in rural and semi-urban environments, can be a solution to reduce electricity consumption and help combat climate change.

According to García, the island could receive greater energy benefits if there were clear incentives for the installation of biodigesters.

Although the acute domestic economic crisis has had a very negative impact on the national swine and cattle herd, “many dairies and pig farms do not know what to do with the daily output of manure. In fact, our biodigester is fed from nearby facilities where it is piled up and they give it to us for free,” he said.

Alexis García dries coffee beans next to solar panels installed on the roof of his house in southern Havana. The possibility of storing energy with the back-up of recovered batteries provides the family with approximately three hours of autonomy during blackouts. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

Other incentives

Cuba has a biogas production potential of 615,595 cubic meters per year from agricultural and industrial production, according to the Bioenergy Atlas 2022.

That volume represents 189,227 tons of oil equivalent per year or 710,095 megawatt hours (MWh) per year. Of the total, 63 percent comes from agricultural production, he said.

In García’s opinion, Cuba’s rural environment “is in a better position to achieve the desired energy independence. But economic facilities would be necessary, such as loans for the construction of biodigesters, bonuses for people to produce that energy and access to buy lamps, pots and even refrigerators that use biogas.”

Of Cuba’s 11 million inhabitants, about 23 percent, some 2.3 million people, live in rural areas, according to official statistics.

On the other hand, it is estimated that there are some 5,000 biodigesters on the island, although conservative estimates by specialists consider it possible to expand the network to 20,000 family units.

Experts argue that the direct use of biogas is more efficient than transforming it into electricity.

A significant percentage of Cuba’s four million households use electricity as the main energy source for cooking and heating water for bathing, which represents about 40 percent of consumption.

Cuba is a country highly dependent on fuel imports.

During the last five years, in parallel to the deterioration of the domestic economic situation, the decline of the main sources of foreign currency and the strengthening of the U.S. embargo, the authorities have faced increasing difficulties in meeting the demand for fuel.

About 95 percent of Cuba’s electricity generation relies on fossil fuels. The government aims to increase clean sources from the current five percent to around 30 percent of electricity generation by 2030.

“Imagine what it would mean if not all, at least most of the houses in the Cuban countryside had a biodigester or solar panels. Any strategy that encourages independence from the national power grid, or that provides energy, would be very positive,” said García.

In recent years, the international Biomas-Cuba project (2009-2022) focused on helping to understand the importance of renewable energy sources in rural environments, the role of on-farm biodigesters and waste treatment systems in swine facilities.

The initiative, financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (Cosude), was coordinated by the Indio Hatuey Experimental Station, a research center attached to the University of the western province of Matanzas, and involved related institutions in several of the country’s 15 provinces.

Ministerial Order 395 of the Ministry of Energy and Mines of 2021 stipulated that each of Cuba’s 168 municipalities must have a biogas development program and strategy, and coordinate its management and implementation with their respective provinces.

In addition, the non-governmental Cuban Society for the Promotion of Renewable Energy Sources and Respect for the Environment (Cubasolar), together with the MUB, encourages training workshops and the advice of specialists.

Banana clusters can be seen growing in the backyard of the García-Mejías home in southern Havana. Both the vegetables in the nursery and the fruit trees benefit from biol, the end product of biogas technology, which provides fertilizer. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

Moving towards energy independence

One of the aspirations of the García-Mejías family is to achieve energy sustainability for their home and agricultural production.

“We foresee the construction of a second biodigester, but this one will have a mobile dome, which should provide two cubic meters of biogas per day, but much more efficiently, and with a higher pressure. With a higher volume we can benefit some neighbors,” García said.

On the roof of their house, six 720-watt solar panels backed up by recovered batteries give them autonomy of approximately three hours of electricity in the event of a power failure.

“We plan to install a wind turbine, as well as a solar heater made of plastic pipes. We want to set up a demonstration area in the house to show the advantages of renewable energies and demonstrate how everything we do is done using these energy sources,” said the former professor.

“We need a greater culture and awareness about renewable energies. There is resistance among some places and people. On the other hand, there are the high prices which do not foment the rapid expansion of technologies and equipment,” García said when IPS asked him in his home about the obstacles to increasing the household use of renewables.

“People hear about the biodigester and think it’s difficult. It takes a little work, but then the benefits are many. There is a lack of information in the media. People come to us looking for help in building biodigesters. We also receive students, which opens up an opportunity for the new generations to grow up with the culture of using nature in a sustainable way,” he added.

Two huge biodigesters process around 40,000 tons of organic waste produced by Grupo Campestre's poultry farms and other companies in El Salvador each year. This material is used to generate biogas to produce electricity that is injected into the national grid. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN MIGUEL, El Salvador, Mar 1 2024 (IPS)

In a win-win relationship, a segment of El Salvador’s agribusiness industry is taking steps to ease the tension of the historic socio-environmental conflict caused by poultry and pig farms, whose waste has caused concern and anger in nearby communities.

Today, some companies in the sector are converting the waste into biogas to produce electricity for their own consumption and to inject the rest into the national grid.

“People no longer say that the chicken manure is contaminating our water or land. That is very important for the community, now we don’t have to deal with that pollution anymore,” small farmer Elizabeth Méndez, who welcomes the investments made by Grupo Campestre to process the waste and generate biogas, told IPS."Things used to be different, there was a bad stench. But now we are living in a more favorable environment." -- Elizabeth Méndez

Méndez, 44, lives in the San Carlos El Amate canton, in the municipality of San Miguel in eastern El Salvador. Near her community is located one of the four poultry farms of Grupo Campestre, which owns several companies in the agribusiness sector and fried chicken restaurant chains.

“Things used to be different, there was a bad stench. But now we are living in a more favorable environment,” stressed Méndez, after a hard day working as a farm laborer, during an IPS tour of rural localities in San Miguel near poultry farms.

El Salvador, the smallest country in Central America, with 6.7 million inhabitants and a territory of 21,000 square kilometers, is the scene of disputes between poultry and pig farms and the rural families that live near them, as the industry has generally failed to manage its biowaste properly.

Elizabeth Méndez (left), who lives in the San Carlos El Amate canton, in the municipality of San Miguel in eastern El Salvador, says the biogas plant that processes waste has significantly reduced the pollution produced by a poultry farm installed in her community. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Circular economy: biogas from manure

Grupo Campestre took a key step about four years ago when it decided to invest around seven million dollars to tackle the thorny issue of biowaste head-on, and acquired state-of-the-art technology to produce biogas, to generate electricity for consumption and injection into the national grid.

The company’s biogas plant is located in the El Brazo canton, also in San Miguel, near the area where the farms are located, which produce eight million chickens per year, whose manure is the main component to produce biogas.

All biowaste from the company’s various business activities, such as chicken manure from the farms and liquid and solid waste from the poultry processing plant, as well as biodegradable material from the fried chicken restaurants, are processed here.

“As part of the sustainability of operations, the need arises to move towards a circular economy model, to reincorporate waste into its life cycle, through reuse, recycling, or producing energy,” Jimmy Gómez, environmental compliance manager for Grupo Campestre, told IPS at the facility.

The biogas plant, in operation since 2021, processes some 40,000 tons per year of biological waste with energy potential, which is fed into two huge biodigesters where bacteria decompose the waste to generate gases such as methane, the main fuel that drives a generator with 850 kilowatts of installed power.

The biodigesters generate around 10,000 cubic meters of biogas per day, producing 17 megawatt hours a day of electricity.

A photo of one of Grupo Campestre’s four poultry farms, which raise 200,000 chickens each. It is located on the outskirts of El Brazo, in the eastern Salvadoran municipality of San Miguel. Thanks to its biogas plant, the surrounding villages no longer have to put up with the foul odors emanating from the farms. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

“Today chicken manure is the main waste product that is given new value at the biogas plant, generating about 80 percent of all the energy we produce and sell,” said Gómez, a chemical engineer.

Grupo Campestre has entered into an energy sales contract with Empresa de Electricidad de Oriente, one of the four electric power distribution companies in El Salvador, owned by AES El Salvador, a subsidiary of the U.S. transnational AES Corporation.

“We resolved a socio-environmental issue, which brought complaints from nearby communities about bad odors and flies, and we turned it into an opportunity, which has also helped us to provide support to the other companies in the group,” said Gómez.

When the plant began to operate, it was also necessary to address the noise pollution caused by the generator that produces the biogas. The solution was to enclose it in a metal container so that the sound now does not exceed 50 decibels and cannot be heard from 20 meters away.

Part of the energy generated, around 50 kilowatts, is used for the plant’s own consumption, production manager Rubén Membreño told IPS. In addition, hundreds of solar panels, placed on the roof of a large shed containing thousands of chickens, generate 5.5 megawatts per hour per day.

This energy efficiency provides the company with the capacity to even provide waste processing services to other companies in the agroindustrial sector that have not yet made the necessary investments to carry out the transition.

“We are taking advantage of all the waste from our own companies, and also from other companies. For them it is waste but for us it is our raw material” to generate electricity, Membreño pointed out.

The technology used in the plant was provided by European companies, mainly from Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, he said.

Jimmy Gómez (left), environmental compliance manager, and Rubén Membreño, production manager of Grupo Campestre, inspect the 850 kilowatt generator that produces electricity from biogas generated by the company’s activities. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Relief for the climate

Methane, the main gas produced in the bacterial decomposition process in the biodigester, is one of the major pollutants and causes of the greenhouse effect. But using it in the production of electricity prevents it from being released into the atmosphere, thus alleviating the effects of climate change.

According to company estimates, methane makes up 60 percent of the plant’s biogas production process, thereby “capturing” around 24,000 tons of CO2 or carbon dioxide per year, which damages the atmosphere and impacts life on the planet through climate change that produces extreme rainfall and droughts.

If that methane were not “burned” at the plant, “it would remain on the ground, in the open and would go into the atmosphere,” said Gómez.

Another agroindustrial company that has included new technologies to process its waste and generate biogas is Avícola El Granjero, which produces eggs from farms with more than one million hens.

Its 5,000 cubic meter biodigester produces the biogas that drives two 360 kilowatt generators, and the resulting electricity is fed into the national grid.

Granja San José, in the poultry and swine industry, also has a biodigester that processes the manure from 13,000 hogs and 75,000 hens.

One of the first phases of biogas production at the Grupo Campestre plant in central El Salvador consists of depositing biological material in huge underground tanks to begin the decomposition process. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Pending disputes

But despite these strides, the poultry and swine farming sector has not completely reconverted and socio-environmental conflicts are still simmering in several parts of the country.

In May 2023, IPS reported on the struggle of rural villages near the municipality of Suchitoto, in the central Salvadoran department of Cuscatlán, to defend their community water system, built in 2002, which will be affected by Avícola Salvadoreña, a company that is building an agribusiness farm nearby.

“The work has continued, trucks with construction materials are passing by all the time,” Blanca Portillo, a resident of Nueva Consolación, one of the seven rural settlements affected by the project, told IPS in a conversation on Feb. 28.

Portillo said local residents have learned that a court, which is handling the conflict, has requested that the poultry company carry out a new environmental impact study and citizen input consultation, due to apparent violations committed previously.

Many of the nearby villages are not supplied by the national grid, and have worked hard to set up their own community water projects, which are now at risk of being contaminated with waste from the farm.

“The authorities have told us that they will not give water exploitation permits to the company if there is a risk of contamination. But we don’t know if they are just saying that to keep us quiet,” said Portillo, a member of the Haciendita Rural Water and Sanitation Association, which serves some 1,000 families in seven communities, including Nueva Consolación.

Marisol and Misael Menjívar pose next to the biodigester installed in March in the backyard of their home in El Corozal, a rural settlement located near Suchitoto in central El Salvador. With a biotoilet and stove, the couple produces biogas for cooking from feces, which saves them money. The biotoilet can be seen in the background. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SUCHITOTO, El Salvador , Jul 25 2023 (IPS)

A new technology that has arrived in rural villages in El Salvador makes it possible for small farming families to generate biogas with their feces and use it for cooking – something that at first sounded to them like science fiction and also a bit smelly.

In the countryside, composting latrines, which separate urine from feces to produce organic fertilizer, are very popular. But can they really produce gas for cooking?

“It seemed incredible to me,” Marisol Menjívar told IPS as she explained how her biodigester, which is part of a system that includes a toilet and a stove, was installed in the backyard of her house in the village of El Corozal, near Suchitoto, a municipality in the central Salvadoran department of Cuscatlán."When the first ones were installed here, I was excited to see that they had stoves hooked up, and I asked if I could have one too." -- Marisol Menjívar

“When the first ones were installed here, I was excited to see that they had stoves hooked up, and I asked if I could have one too,” added Marisol, 48. Hers was installed in March.

El Corozal, population 200, is one of eight rural settlements that make up the Laura López Rural Water and Sanitation Association (Arall), a community organization responsible for providing water to 465 local families.

The families in the small villages, who are dedicated to the cultivation of corn and beans, had to flee the region during the country’s 1980-1992 civil war, due to the fighting.

After the armed conflict, they returned to rebuild their lives and work collectively to provide basic services, especially drinking water, as have many other community organizations, in the absence of government coverage.

In this Central American country of 6.7 million inhabitants, 78.4 percent of rural households have access to piped water, while 10.8 percent are supplied by wells and 10.7 percent by other means.

With small stoves like this one, a score of families in El Corozal in central El Salvador cook their food with biogas they produce themselves, thanks to a government program that has brought clean energy technology to these remote rural villages. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Simple green technology

The biodigester program in rural areas is being promoted by the Salvadoran Water Authority (Asa).

Since November 2022, the government agency has installed around 500 of these systems free of charge in several villages around the country.

The aim is to enable small farmers to produce sustainable energy, biogas at no cost, which boosts their income and living standards, while at the same time improving the environment.

The program provides each family with a kit that includes a biodigester, a biotoilet, and a small one-burner stove.

In El Corozal, five of these kits were installed by Asa in November 2022, to see if people would accept them or not. To date, 21 have been delivered, and there is a waiting list for more.

In El Corozal, a rural settlement in the municipality of Suchitoto in central El Salvador, the technology of family biodigesters arrived at the end of last year, and some families are now producing biogas to light up their stoves and cook their food at no cost. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

“With the first ones were set up, the idea was for people to see how they worked, because there was a lot of ignorance and even fear,” Arall’s president, Enrique Menjívar, told IPS.

In El Corozal there are many families with the surname Menjívar, because of the tradition of close relatives putting down roots in the same place.

“Here we’re almost all related,” Enrique added.

The biodigester is a hermetically sealed polyethylene bag, 2.10 meters long, 1.15 meters wide and 1.30 meters high, inside which bacteria decompose feces or other organic materials.

This process generates biogas, clean energy that is used to fuel the stoves.

The toilets are mounted on a one-meter-high cement slab in latrines in the backyard. They are made of porcelain and have a handle on one side that opens and closes the stool inlet hole.

One of the main advantages that family biodigesters have brought to the inhabitants of El Corozal, a small village in the Salvadoran department of Cuscatlán, is that the whole process begins with clean, hygienic toilets, like this one set up in Marleni Menjívar’s backyard, as opposed to the older dry composting latrines, which drew flies and cockroaches. To the left of the toilet is the small handle used to pump water to flush the feces into the biodigester. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

They also have a small hand pump, similar to the ones used to inflate bicycle tires, and when the handle is pushed, water is pumped from a bucket to flush the waste down the pipe.

The underground pipe carries the biomass by gravity to the biodigester, located about five meters away.

The system can also be fed with organic waste, by means of a tube with a hole at one end, which must be opened and closed.

Once it has been produced, the biogas is piped through a metal tube to the small stove mounted inside the house.

“I don’t even use matches, I just turn the knob and it lights up,” said Marisol, a homemaker and caregiver. Her husband Manuel Menjívar is a subsistence farmer, and they have a young daughter.

In El Corozal, biodigesters have been installed for families of four or five members, and the equipment generates 300 liters of biogas during the night, enough to use for two hours a day, according to the technical specifications of Coenergy, the company that imports and markets the devices.

But there are also kits that are used by two related families who live next to each other and share the equipment, which includes, in addition to the toilet, a larger biodigester and a two-burner stove.

With more sophisticated equipment, electricity could be generated from biogas produced from landfill waste or farm manure, although this is not yet being done in El Salvador.

Marleni Menjivar gets ready to heat water on her ecological stove, watched closely by her four-year-old daughter, in El Corozal in central El Salvador, where an innovative government program to produce biogas has arrived. With this technology, people save money by buying less liquefied gas while benefiting the environment. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Saving money while caring for the environment

The families of El Corozal who have the new latrines and stoves are happy with the results.

What they value the most is saving money by cooking with gas produced by themselves, at no cost.

They used to cook on wood-burning stoves, in the case of food that took longer to make, or on liquefied gas stoves, at a cost of 13 dollars per gas cylinder.

Marleni Menjívar, for example, used two cylinders a month, mainly because of the high level of consumption demanded by the family business of making artisanal cheeses, including a very popular local kind of cottage cheese.

Every day she has to cook 23 liters of whey, the liquid left after milk has been curdled. This consumes the biogas produced overnight.

For meals during the day Marleni still uses the liquefied gas stove, but now she only buys one cylinder a month instead of two, a savings of about 13 dollars per month.

“These savings are important for families here in the countryside,” said Marleni, 28, the mother of a four-year-old girl. The rest of her family is made up of her brother and grandfather.

“We also save water,” she added.

The biotoilet requires only 1.2 liters of water per flush, less than conventional toilets.

In addition, the soils are protected from contamination by septic tank latrines, which are widely used in rural areas, but are leaky and unhygienic.

The new technology avoids these problems.

The liquids resulting from the decomposition process flow through an underground pipe into a pit that functions as a filter, with several layers of gravel and sand. This prevents pollution of the soil and aquifers.

Also, as a by-product of the decomposition process, organic liquid fertilizer is produced for use on crops.

Most families in the rural community of El Corozal have benefited from one-burner stoves that run on biogas produced in family biodigesters. Larger two-burner stoves are also shared by two related families, where they cook on a griddle one of the favorite dishes of Salvadorans: pupusas, corn flour tortillas filled with beans, cheese and pork, among other ingredients. CREDIT: Coenergy El Salvador

Checking on site: zero stench

Due to a lack of information, people were initially concerned that if the biogas used in the stoves came from the decomposition of the family’s feces, it would probably stink.

And, worst of all, perhaps the food would also smell.

But little by little these doubts and fears faded away as families saw how the first devices worked.

“That was the first thing they asked, if the gas smelled bad, or if what we were cooking smelled bad,” said Marleni, remembering how the neighbors came to her house to check for themselves when she got the latrine and stove installed in December 2022.

“That was because of the little information that was available, but then we found that this was not the case, our doubts were cleared up and we saw there were no odors,” she added.

She said that, like almost everyone in the village, her family used to have a dry composting toilet, but it stank and generated cockroaches and flies.

“All that has been eliminated, the bathrooms are completely hygienic and clean, and we even had them tiled to make them look nicer,” Marleni said.

She remarked that hygiene is important to her, as her little girl can now go to the bathroom by herself, without worrying about cockroaches and flies.

A pickup truck is fueled with biomethane at a pump in the Franca Wastewater Treatment Plant, in the southeastern Brazilian state of São Paulo. Some 40 vehicles are run on biofuel produced from wastewater treatment. The resulting sludge goes through a biodigestion process, which extracts biogas, which is then refined as biomethane. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
FRANCA, Brazil, Jul 21 2023 (IPS)

The city of Franca is an example of basic sanitation in Brazil. In addition to providing universal treated water and sewage to its 352,500 inhabitants, it extracts biogas from wastewater and refines it to fuel its own vehicles.

Biomethane, the final product also called renewable natural gas, replaces fossil fuels and is used in 40 vehicles of the state-owned company Saneamiento Básico do Estado de São Paulo (SABESP) in Franca, in the northeast of the state of São Paulo."We are a laboratory, a pilot project, which SABESP will replicate in other facilities when the economic and technical feasibility has been proven and the qualification and regulation of biomethane is in place." -- Alex Veronez

SABESP Franca has been producing biogas at its main wastewater treatment plant (ETE) since its inauguration in 1998, but for 20 years it flared the gas in order to avoid pollution. In 2018 it switched to purifying it to initially supply 19 vehicles.

The city became a symbol of good sanitation practices when it reached first place in the ranking of the 100 largest Brazilian municipalities by the non-governmental Instituto Trata Brasil, which monitors the sector and promotes awareness of it.

From 2015 to 2020 Franca remained in the lead, but fell to ninth place in 2023, in the report released in March. Reduced investment, relative to income, was one of the factors leading to the decline. But the city continued to score top marks in nine of the 12 categories evaluated.

The main reason for the decline, according to the institute’s executive president, Luana Pretto, was the rate of water loss in distribution: 28.89 percent. The target is 25 percent. This item is also measured by the losses in each connection, in which the city is doing well, but the evaluation takes into account both indicators.

“The competition is fierce among the top positions,” Pretto told IPS from nearby São Paulo. “The top-ranked improve even more, while those at the bottom get worse. The best ones, with sound systems in place, have more capacity to invest in expansions and improvements. At the bottom, many new investments are required.”

Alex Veronez, district manager of the São Paulo State Basic Sanitation company, is interviewed in his office in the city of Franca in southeastern Brazil. The production of biomethane from sewage here is a “laboratory” to be replicated after proving its economic and technical feasibility, in addition to producing improvements such as drying the sludge to convert it into biofertilizer. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Biogas complements sanitation

Extracting biogas from wastewater and using biomethane, in which SABESP Franca is a pioneer in Brazil and Latin America, would improve the ranking, since it complements sanitation, she acknowledged. But it is not included in the assessment.

Franca is the only one of Brazil’s 5,575 municipalities that produces biomethane from wastewater, even in the SABESP system, which is responsible for the basic sanitation of 375 municipalities in the southeastern state of São Paulo, with a total of 28 million inhabitants.

“We are a laboratory, a pilot project, which SABESP will replicate in other facilities when the economic and technical feasibility has been proven and the qualification and regulation of biomethane is in place,” explained Alex Veronez, district manager of SABESP in Franca, which is responsible for operations in 16 municipalities.

The biomethane plant was inaugurated in 2018, thanks to a partnership with the German Fraunhofer institute, which provided the refining and storage equipment, while SABESP carried out the necessary works and the adaptation of its vehicles to biofuel.

Investments totaled seven million reais (1.5 million dollars at the current exchange rate) and a return on the investment is expected in seven years.

A decanting pond is the first step in the treatment of wastewater that then goes through other processes until it is sufficiently clean to be returned to the river, at the Wastewater Treatment Plant in Franca, a city in southeastern Brazil. This leaves sludge that goes to the biodigesters where biogas is produced. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

The benefit is primarily environmental. The International Center for Renewable Energy-Biogas (CIBiogás) estimates that biomethane reduces gasoline pollution by 90 percent.

Its production is only the final part of the 550 liters per second wastewater treatment plant, about 85 percent of Franca’s total. It comprises several processes and numerous ponds, for decanting and oxygenation that increase the reproduction of the microorganisms necessary for biogas production in three large biodigesters

Regulations needed for biofertilizer

The sludge that goes through the biodigestion process that extracts gases from it can be converted into fertilizer. As such it was distributed to farmers during the 13 initial years of the ETE, until new regulations on fertilizers by the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock prevented it from being used.

Since then, the sludge has been discarded in the city’s sanitary landfill, a waste that also has costs for transporting a material that is heavy due to its 80 percent moisture. Composting treatment to eliminate impurities such as fecal coliforms could enable it to be used as biofertilizer, but it became unfeasible due to the cost.

“We spend a lot to carry water to the landfill,” lamented Veronez in a conversation with IPS in his office at SABESP in this southern city.

In order to save money and create better conditions for converting sludge into fertilizer, SABESP Franca is implementing a new drying system, which has been purchased and is being installed, as well as renovating a greenhouse to dry the sludge using solar thermal energy.

The Franca Wastewater Treatment Plant in southeastern Brazil has three large biodigesters that extract biogas from sludge, where the microorganisms that perform biodigestion reproduce, in a process that eventually gives rise to biomethane. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

“This will allow us to dry 90 tons of sludge per day,” the manager said. It will save on transportation costs and represents a step forward towards the regulation and development of compost, an additional product that would be added to biomethane in the use of organic waste.

For now, only light SABESP vehicles use biomethane. Successful tests were carried out on a bus from the Swedish company Scania. Sweden is a country that uses biofuel extensively in its heavy vehicles.

But the sanitation company does not plan to sell biomethane, which it produces for its own use. SABESP has many vehicles and a level of energy consumption that will demand all the biogas and biomethane it produces in the long term, said Veronez, a construction engineer.

There are many challenges standing in the way of fully taking advantage of urban sewage gases, including the organization of the market and regulation of the activity, which is a recent development in Brazil, unlike in Europe.

The biggest progress in producing biogas is in landfills, especially for electricity generation. In a few cases it is converted into biomethane.

The energy potential of sanitation

In Brazil, only about two percent of the potential for biogas is being tapped, the Brazilian Biogas Association (Abiogás) estimates. The main sources are agricultural waste, led by sugar cane residue and animal excrement, landfills and urban wastewater.

Part of the equipment at Franca’s Wastewater Treatment Plant, for processing the biogas that generates biomethane, described as renewable natural gas, which is already replacing fossil fuels in 40 of the company’s vehicles on an experimental basis. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

But the potential of basic sanitation, limited in relation to agriculture and landfills, would increase if the goal of universalizing its services by 2033, set by the regulatory framework for the sector passed by Congress in 2020, is met.

In Brazil, 44.2 percent of the population of 203 million people still has no sewerage service. The goal set by the Sanitation Framework approved by Congress in 2020 is for at least 90 percent of the population to have access to wastewater treatment by 2033.

The goal of universalization of treated wastewater is more feasible because it already stands at more than 85 percent of the total. The problem is droughts, which have become more frequent as a result of climate change.

“Franca was caught off guard by the 2014 drought, a novel experience because we did not know the limits of our water sources, the measurements were insufficient,” Veronez acknowledged.

Water security improved with the June 2022 inauguration of a new water treatment plant that takes water from the Sapucaí-Mirim River, the largest in the region. Until now, the local water supply depended basically on the smaller Canoas River, which cuts across the municipality.

The new catchment will serve 30 percent of the population, but it will be connected to the old system so that it can compensate for eventual reductions in flow from other sources, explained the manager of SABESP Franca.

Lucineide Cordeiro loads manure from her two oxen and two calves into the "sertanejo" biodigester that produces biogas for cooking and biofertilizer for her varied crops on the one-hectare agroecological farm she manages on her own in the rural municipality of Afogados da Ingazeira, in the semiarid ecoregion of northeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
AFOGADOS DA INGAZEIRA, Brazil , Jun 24 2023 (IPS)

“The biodigester really gives a huge boost to those who have the courage to do things,” said Maria das Dores Alves da Silva, based on her own experience as a 63-year-old small farmer.

She did not hesitate to accept the offer of Diaconia, a social organization of Protestant churches in Brazil, to acquire the equipment to produce biogas on her farm in the rural area of Afogados da Ingazeira, a municipality of 38,000 people in the state of Pernambuco in the Northeast region of Brazil."We seek to promote energy, food and water autonomy to maintain more resilient agroecosystems, to coexist with climate change, strengthening community self-management with a special focus on the lives of women." -- Ita Porto

At first she did not have the cattle whose manure she needed to produce biogas, that enables her to save on liquefied petroleum gas, which costs 95 reais (20 dollars) for a 13-kg cylinder – a significant cost for poor families.

She brought manure from a neighboring farm that gave it to her for free, in an hour-long trip with her wheelbarrow, until she was able to buy her first cow and then another with loans from the state-owned Banco del Nordeste.

“Now I have more than enough manure,” she said happily as she welcomed IPS to her four-hectare farm where she and her husband have lived alone since their two children became independent.

Das Dores, as she is known, is an example among the 163 families who have benefited from the “sertanejos biodigesters” distributed by Diaconia in the sertão of Pajeú, a semiarid micro-region of 17 municipalities and 13,350 square kilometers in the center-north of Pernambuco.

Farmer Maria das Dores Alves da Silva stands between the manure pit and the “sertanejo” biodigester designed by Diaconia, a social organization of Protestant churches in Brazil, which has already installed 713 biogas production plants in eight of Brazil’s 26 states. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Biofertilizer

In addition to using the biogas, she sells the manure after it has been subjected to anaerobic biodigestion that extracts the gases – the so-called digestate, a biofertilizer that she packages in one-kilo plastic bags, after drying and shredding it.

Every Saturday, she sells 30 bags at the agroecological market in the town of Afogados da Ingazeira, the municipal seat. At two reais (40 cents) a bag, she earns an extra income of 60 reais (12.50 dollars), on top of her sales of the various sweet cakes she bakes at home, at a cost reduced by the biogas, and of the seedlings she also produces.

The seedlings provided her with a new business opportunity. “The customers asked me if I didn’t also have fertilizer,” she said. The biodigester produces enough fertilizer to sell at the market and to fertilize the farm’s crops of beans, corn, fruit trees, flowers and different vegetables.

This diversity is common in family farming in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, but even more so in the agroecological techniques that have expanded in this territory of one million square kilometers in the northeastern interior of the country, which has an arid biome highly vulnerable to climate change, subject to frequent droughts, and where there are areas in the process of desertification.

The Pajeú river basin is the micro-region chosen by Diaconia as a priority for its social and environmental actions.

On Lucineide Cordeiro’s small farm, cotton, corn, sesame, sunflower, cassava and fruit trees are alternated in the fields, as recommended by agroecology, which is on the rise on family farms in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, which is threatened by longer and more severe droughts due to the climate crisis. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Energy and food security

“We seek to promote energy, food and water autonomy to maintain more resilient agroecosystems, to coexist with climate change, strengthening community self-management with a special focus on the lives of women,” Ita Porto, Diaconia’s coordinator in the Pajeu ecoregion, told IPS.

“The production of biogas on a rural family scale fulfills the needs of energy for cooking, sanitary disposal and treatment of animal waste and reduction of deforestation, in addition to increasing food productivity, with organic fertilizer, while bolstering human health,” said the 48-year-old agronomist.

More than 713 units of the “sertanejo biodigester”, a model developed by Diaconia 15 years ago, have been installed in Brazil. In addition to the 163 in the sertão do Pajeú, there are 150 in the neighboring state of Rio Grande do Norte and another 400 distributed in six other Brazilian states, financed by the Caixa Econômica Federal, a government bank focused on social questions.

“Hopefully the government will make it a public policy, as it has already done with the rainwater harvesting tanks in the semarid Northeast,” said Porto.

More than 1.3 million rainwater harvesting tanks for drinking water have already been built, but some 350,000 are still needed to make them universal in rural areas, according to the Articulation of the Semi-Arid (Asa), a network of 3,000 social organizations that spearheaded the transformative program.

Maria Das Dores examines the biofertilizer that comes out of the biodigester, without the gases from the animal manure. She sells this by-product at the agroecological market in the town of Afogados da Ingazeira, the seat of the municipality where her four-hectare farm is located, which earns her an average extra income of 12.5 dollars a week. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

The value of manure

“One cow is enough to produce the biogas consumed in our stove,” said Lucineide Cordeiro, on her one-hectare farm where she grows cotton, corn, sesame seeds and fruit, in an interconnected agroecological system, along with chickens, pigs and fish in a pond.

She also has two oxen and two calves, which she proudly showed to IPS during the visit to her farm.

“Pig manure produces biogas more quickly, but I don’t like the stench,” the 37-year-old farmer who is the director of Women’s Policies at the Afogados da Ingazeira Rural Workers Union told IPS.

The difference in the crops before and after fertilization by the biodigester by-product is remarkable, according to her and other farmers in the municipality.

She tends to her many crops on her own, although she is sometimes helped by friends, and has several pieces of equipment such as a brushcutter and a micro-tractor.

“It’s the best invention,” says Lucineide Cordeiro, as she shows IPS the seeder created by the Japanese for small-scale farming, which allows her to sow in half a day the land that used to take her two days to plant, on her one-hectare farm in Afogados da Ingazeira, in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

“But the seeder is the best invention that changed my life, it was invented by the Japanese. Planting the seeds, which used to take me two days of work, I can now do in half a day,” Cordeiro said.

The seeder is a small machine pushed by the farmer, with a wheel filled with seeds that has 12 nozzles that can be opened or closed, according to the distance needed to sow each seed.

The emergence of appropriate equipment for family farming is recent, in a sector that has favored large farmers in Brazil.

Female protagonism clashes with male chauvinist violence

For the success of local family farming, the support of the Pajeú Agroecological Association (Asap), of which Cordeiro is a member and a “multiplier”, as the women farmers who are an example to others of good practices are called, is important.

In family farming the empowerment of women stands out, which in many cases was a response to sexist violence or oppression.

Blue flames emerge from the burners of Maria Das Dores’ biogas stove at her home in Afogados da Ingazeira, in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast region. A single ox or cow produces enough manure to generate more biogas than a family requires for its domestic needs. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

“The first violence I suffered was from my father who did not let me study. I only studied up to fourth grade of primary school, in the rural school. To continue, I would have had to go to the city, which my father did not allow. I got married to escape my father’s oppression,” said Cordeiro, who also separated from her first husband because he was violent.

After living in a big city with the father of her two daughters, she separated and returned to the countryside in 2019. “I was reborn” by becoming a farmer, she said, faced with the challenge of taking on that activity against the idea, even from her family, that a woman on her own could not possibly manage the demands of agricultural production.

Organic cotton, promoted and acquired in the region by Vert, a French-Brazilian company that produces footwear and clothing with organic inputs, has once again expanded in the Brazilian Northeast, after the crop was almost extinct due to the boll weevil plague in the 1990s.

In the case of Das Dores, a small, energetic, active woman, she has a good relationship with her husband, but she runs her own business initiatives. Thanks to what she earns she was able to buy a small pickup truck, but it is driven by her husband, who has a job but helps her on the farm in his free time.

“He drives because he refuses to teach me how, so I can’t go out alone with the vehicle and drive around everywhere,” she joked.

José Luis Márquez, Yaisema Fabelo and their son Yadir stand around a table holding fruits harvested from their Los Tres Hermanos agroecological farm, in Martí, a municipality in northwestern Cuba. The family of farmers values ​​the final products of biogas technology, rich in nutrients suitable for fertilizing and restoring the soil. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Luis Brizuela
MARTÍ, Cuba , Apr 20 2023 (IPS)

The first five biomethane-fuelled buses in the Cuban municipality of Martí will not only be a milestone in the country but will also represent a solution to the serious problem of transportation, while reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and bolstering local development.

Yaisema Fabelo, a librarian at the local prep school, told IPS that “the buses will boost the quality of life of the residents” of the municipality located in the north of the western province of Matanzas, about 200 kilometers east of Havana.

Fabelo, who is also a farmer from the Los Tres Hermanos agroecological farm, stressed that using biogas on an industrial scale and on individual farms “to produce electricity, cook food and obtain biofertilizers for organic crops” will benefit the 22,000 inhabitants of the municipality and surrounding areas.

The Martí I and nearby Martí II covered lagoon biodigesters will produce around 1,800 and 3,600 cubic meters of biogas per day, respectively, when they come into operation. They will connect through two separate gas pipelines with a biomethane plant where the fuel will be obtained for a group of buses. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

The project

Turning pig manure and crop waste into biomethane and biogas is the focus of the project “Global Action for Climate Change in Cuba: Municipality of Martí, towards a carbon-neutral sustainable development model.”

The project, carried out by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Ministry of Economy and Planning with 5.5 million dollars in financing disbursed by the European Union, began to be implemented in 2020 and is to be completed in 2024.“[We want] to demonstrate that the biodigesters are economically feasible for Cuba, that connected with large pig farms they can be used to generate electricity and contribute to the economy." -- Anober Aguilar

“The main problem that Martí has ​​in the case of greenhouse gases is waste, responsible for 57 percent of our emissions,” explained Sobeida Reyes, director of territorial development for the town.

In an interview with IPS, the official pointed out that with the project and as part of the local development strategy, the aim is to gradually contribute to decarbonization with the use of renewable energy sources and incorporate biogas to biomethane conversion technology.

Biogas is composed mainly of methane and carbon dioxide, obtained in biodigesters from the decomposition of organic residues such as agricultural or livestock waste by bacteria, through anaerobic digestion, without oxygen.

Biomethane, also known as a renewable gas, is derived from a treatment process that removes carbon dioxide, moisture, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, among other impurities from biogas, which brings its composition closer to that of fossil natural gas and favors its use to generate electricity and heat and to fuel vehicles.

The plan is to strengthen the public transport system through “16 buses powered by biomethane, the first five of which are to be tested in February 2024, after a bidding process outlined in the project that will facilitate their importation,” Reyes said.

“There is a commitment that these buses will be driven by women,” she added.

The future biomethane plant, which has already been awarded in tender, will provide, according to the plan, about 150 cubic meters per hour of gas suitable for bottling.

It will depend on the Martí I and Martí II covered lagoon biodigesters, which will be the largest in the country and will produce around 1,800 and 3,600 cubic meters of biogas per day, respectively, when they come into operation.

These, in turn, will each be fed by a pig breeding center belonging to the Matanzas Pork Company.

A third of the 14 kilometers of gas pipelines that will connect both biodigesters to the biomethane plant have already been put in place.

The generator is also being installed, while the lagoon is being filled with water to check its operation. The last thing needed is to put in place the membrane that will cover it.

This part is expected to be operational in February of next year, as well as the biomethane plant, so that the first five buses can then be tested, according to the established timeframe.

With the help of an electricity generator, the Martí I biodigester is to provide 100 kilowatts per hour, equivalent to the approximate consumption of 80 to 100 homes. The Martí II will provide even more.

A poster shows what the Martí I covered lagoon biodigester will look like. For Anober Aguilar, a specialist at the Indio Hatuey Pastures and Forages Experimental Station, responsible for the technological assembly, the construction of this type of biodigesters is economically feasible in Cuba. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Greater commitment to biogas

A potent greenhouse gas, methane has 80 times the climate-warming power of carbon dioxide, studies show.

Scientists argue that proper management of methane resulting from the decomposition of agricultural waste and livestock manure helps to mitigate water and soil pollution and to combat climate change.

Its extraction and energy use, especially in rural and semi-urban settings, can be a cost-effective solution to reduce the consumption of electricity based on fossil sources. In Cuba there are an estimated 5,000 small-scale (up to 24 cubic meters per day) biodigesters.

In this country of 11.1 million inhabitants, a significant percentage of the 3.9 million households use electricity as the main source of energy for cooking and heating water for bathing.

Renewable energy sources account for only five percent of the national energy mix.

In the case of biogas, “the main obstacle to its expansion is the availability of manure, as there is a low number of pigs and cattle, due to problems with feed and animal nutrition,” Anober Aguilar, an expert with the Indio Hatuey Pasture and Forage Experimental Station, located in Perico, another municipality of Matanzas, told IPS.

This scientific research center for technological management and innovation in the field of livestock production is in charge of the technological assembly of the biodigesters of the covered lagoon in Martí.

In the context of an economic crisis that has lasted for three decades, exacerbated by the tightening of the U.S, embargo, the COVID pandemic, and failed or delayed economic reforms, Cuba has limited imports of animal feed due to the shortage of foreign currency.

Furthermore, insufficient harvests do not guarantee abundant raw material to produce feed, while the scarcity of construction materials and their high cost make it impossible for many farmers to undertake the construction of a biodigester.

Conservative estimates by experts suggest that there is potential to expand the network of biodigesters on the island to up to 20,000 units, at least small-scale ones.

“If we look at the cost of the investment in the short term, it is more feasible to focus on wind or solar energy, because setting up a biodigester requires more financing, more time and specialized personnel,” explained Aguilar.

But seen at a distance of 10 to 15 years, “the investment evens out, because the potential of photovoltaic cells declines, repairs are made difficult by the rapid changes in technology, or the blades of the windmills deteriorate, in addition to the fact that both are more vulnerable to tropical cyclones,” the expert said.

“As long as they have raw material, biodigesters produce 24 hours a day,” he added.

He specified that one of the objectives of the project is “to demonstrate that the biodigesters are economically feasible for Cuba, that connected with large pig farms they can be used to generate electricity and contribute to the economy.”

Ministerial Order 395 of April 2021, of the Ministry of Energy and Mines, stipulated that each of the 168 Cuban municipalities must have a development program and strategy regarding biogas, and coordinate their management and implementation with those of their respective province.

Electrical technician Reinaldo Álvarez shows the electric generator located in the Martí I covered lagoon biodigester, in northwestern Cuba, which will provide about 100 kilowatt hours, equivalent to the electricity consumption of 80 to 100 homes. The nearby Martí II biodigester will produce even more. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Promoting agroecology

Martí’s development strategy includes projects to prepare preserves, spices and dehydrated foods with the help of the sun, a biomass gasifier for drying rice and generating electricity, the production of cooking oil, thermal baths, exploiting natural asphalt deposits, and social works, among others.

Reyes reported that 28 farms in the municipality have biodigesters, and that in 12 of them, as part of the project, “a module was delivered that includes a refrigerator, a stove, a rice cooker and a lamp, which use biogas.”

Another urgent objective is to foment agroecology and move towards local self-sufficiency in food, including animal feed.

“In the current harvest we had a yield per hectare of 19 tons of organic potatoes. As with the other crops, we only used biological products, of which more than 80 percent were produced by us,” farmer José Luis Márquez explained to IPS.

The 13-hectare Los Tres Hermanos agroecological teaching farm, dedicated to growing a variety of crops and small livestock using sustainable techniques, was granted in usufruct by the government, forms part of the Ciro Redondo credit and services cooperative, and has been managed by Márquez since 2018, together with his wife Yaisema Fabelo and their son Yadir.

A nationally manufactured PVC (polyvinyl chloride) tubular biodigester is also installed on the farm, with a volume of forty cubic meters.

“Due to the pandemic and the shortage of manure, it is not producing. We want to once again encourage pig and rabbit farming, recycle solid waste and convert it into organic fertilizer for crops and household chores,” said Márquez.

Biogas technology provides biol and biosol, liquid effluent and sludge, respectively, rich in nutrients to fertilize and restore the soil.

The farm is visited by students from different levels of education, up to prep school, who through workshops given by Márquez and Fabelo, learn about good agroecological practices “and the positive impact on the economy, people’s health and the environment,” Fabelo said.

Farmer Mayra Rojas says that the Chinese-type fixed-dome biodigester built in back of her home in Carambola, in the municipality of Candelaria in western Cuba, has become part of her daily life and a key factor in improving her family's quality of life. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Luis Brizuela
HAVANA, Aug 2 2022 (IPS)

Standing in front of a blue flame on her stove, getting ready to brew coffee, Mayra Rojas says the biodigester built in the backyard of her home in western Cuba has become a key part of her daily life and a pillar of her family’s well-being.

“Biogas is a blessing,” says Rojas, a farmer who lives in the rural community of Carambola, in the municipality of Candelaria, located about 80 kilometers from Havana in the western province of Artemisa.

A pioneer in the use of this form of renewable energy in her town, she explains that with biogas “I spend less time cooking and pay less for electricity,” while the savings have enabled the gradual upgrade of her old wooden house to a more solid cinderblock structure.

In addition, “it doesn’t blacken the pots, like when I used firewood. And now I get my nails done and they last, as does my hair after I wash it,” says the environmental activist who raises awareness about caring for nature among elementary school children, in an interview with IPS at her farm.

She also specifies that greater support from her husband and two children in household chores, cleaning the yard and taking care of the animals on the family farm, “and greater awareness of environmental care,” are other benefits brought about by the use of this alternative energy.

In fact, it was her husband, Edegni Puche, who built the biodigester, for which the family put up part of the cost, while receiving contributions from the municipal government and the local pig farm company.

At the back of the house are the pigsties where they raise pigs, as well as fruit and ornamental trees, while on an adjoining lot Rojas is setting up an organoponic garden, where she will grow different vegetables.

As she pours the freshly brewed coffee, she says that “before, when the pens were cleaned, the manure, urine and waste from the pigs’ food accumulated in the open air, in a corner of the yard. It stank and there were a lot of flies.”

But in 2011 she learned about the potential of biodigesters, where organic matter is decomposed anaerobically by bacteria, but in a closed, non-polluting environment that provides gas as an energy resource.

Training workshops and advice from specialists from the Cuban Society for the Promotion of Renewable Energy Sources and Respect for the Environment (Cubasolar) and the Movement of Biogas Users (MUB) encouraged people to build biodigesters, Rojas said.

Founded in 1983, MUB brings together some 3,000 farmers who use the technology in this Caribbean island nation of 11.1 million inhabitants.

An incentive to expand biogas in Cuba was provided by the international Biomas-Cuba project, which began in 2009 and is due to finish this year, focused on helping to understand the importance of renewable energy sources in rural environments, the role of biodigesters on farms and in waste treatment systems on pig farms, among other objectives.

With funding from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (Cosude), the initiative is coordinated by the Indio Hatuey Experimental Station, a research center attached to the University of Matanzas in western Cuba, and involves related institutions in several of the country’s 15 provinces.

Mayra Rojas, her husband Edegni Puche and the couple’s youngest son stand in the backyard of their home. Family support for household chores, cleaning the yard and caring for the family’s animales, along with increased awareness of environmental care are other benefits that the biodigester has brought to the life of this rural Cuban woman. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Methane, from enemy to ally

Experts agree that the proper management of biological methane resulting from the decomposition of agricultural waste and livestock manure can generate value and be a cost-effective solution to prevent water and soil contamination.

As a potent greenhouse gas, methane has 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide, according to studies.

Therefore, its extraction and use as energy, especially in rural and peri-urban environments, can be a solution for reducing electricity consumption and for helping to combat climate change.

More than 90 percent of Cuba’s electricity generation is obtained by burning fossil fuels in aging thermoelectric plants and diesel and fuel oil engines, which pollute the air and contribute to global warming.

There are an estimated 5,000 biodigesters in Cuba, in a nation where a significant percentage of the 3.9 million homes use electricity as the main energy source for cooking and heating water for bathing.

“We have to make people more aware that the biodigester not only protects the environment and provides energy, but also brings savings, because the manure that is not used is money that is thrown away,” says Rojas.

It also provides biol and biosol, liquid effluent and sludge, respectively – end products of biogas technology that are rich in nutrients, ideal for fertilizing and restoring soils, “as well as watering and keeping plants green,” says Rojas as she proudly shows the varieties of orchids in her leafy yard.

Her biodigester has also proven its usefulness to the community, because when there are blackouts due to tropical cyclones that frequently affect the island, “neighbors have come to heat up water and cook their food,” she adds.

Mayra Rojas turns on biogas on her small stove to brew coffee in her home in the rural community of Carambola, in the municipality of Candelaria, in the western Cuban province of Artemisa. She says that with this clean energy source she spends less time cooking and saves electricity. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Obstacles

Rojas says that a major impediment to the spread of biodigesters in local communities and the country is the island’s economy, whose three-decade crisis was aggravated by the COVID pandemic and the tightening of the U.S. embargo.

The decapitalization of the main industries and financial problems are major factors in the low levels of production of cement, steel bars, sand and other elements used to make biodigesters, which are also necessary to reduce the high housing deficit and fix the portion of homes that are in poor condition.

The availability of manure is another stumbling block with a deficient pig and cattle herd, which will have to wait for the most recent government measures aimed at stimulating their growth and balancing it with domestic demand for meat to take effect.

“I received the support of the municipal government, the local pig company, plus the technical advice from Cubasolar” to build the six-cubic-meter Chinese-type fixed dome biodigester, explains Rojas. “But not all families have enough animals or can afford to build one.”

Perhaps that is why in Carambola it is only possible to find five biodigesters in a community of about 120 homes and 400 local residents, she added.

“Building a biodigester has become too expensive,” acknowledged Lázaro Vázquez, coordinator of Cubasolar in San Cristóbal, a municipality adjacent to Candelaria, who provided advice for the construction of the one on the Rojas farm, which is considered small-scale (up to 24 cubic meters per day).

Although costs depend on factors such as the size, type and thickness of the material, and even the characteristics of the site, specialists estimate that the average minimum cost for the construction of a small-scale biodigester cooker for household use is around 1,000 dollars, in a country with an average monthly salary of about 160 dollars at the official exchange rate.

Vázquez told IPS that low-interest loans should be made available, because “it will always be more economical to make biodigesters using domestic products.”

He pointed out that in Cuba “there is potential” to expand the network of biodigesters, which could reach 20,000 units, at least small-scale ones, according to conservative estimates by experts.

Two pigs stand in a pen built next to the biodigester in the backyard of the home of farmer Mayra Rojas. Experts agree that proper management of the biomethane resulting from the decomposition of agricultural waste and livestock manure can generate value and be a profitable solution to prevent water and soil contamination in Cuba. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Biogas, circular economy and local development

During a Jul. 21 session of Cuba’s single-chamber parliament, economic stimulus measures were announced, including an aim to increase the production and use of biofuels and biogas.

“Although it can be used in transportation…the main benefit of the biodigester is environmental and the efficiency of biogas lies in its final use,” José Antonio Guardado, a member of Cubasolar’s National Board of Directors and coordinator of MUB, explained to IPS.

In this regard, Guardado reflected that the direct use of biogas for cooking is much more efficient than if it is transformed into electrical energy or used to power a vehicle.

The head of MUB recommended “understanding the value of biogas technology in a comprehensive manner, taking advantage of all of its end products. This includes the supply of basic nutrients for soil fertilization that has a direct impact on food production.”

This would contribute to the closing of cycles of the circular economy, based on the principles of reduce, recycle, reuse, which promotes the use of green energies and diversification of production to achieve resilience.

“Evidently this final product, from biogas technology, will only be achievable locally, with the participation of all the actors of the Cuban economy, and social inclusion,” Guardado said.

Ministerial Order 395, issued in 2021 by the Ministry of Energy and Mines, stipulated that each of Cuba’s 168 municipalities must have a biogas development program and strategy, and must coordinate their management and implementation with their respective provinces.

The appointment of a government official to head the commission, to prioritize the allocation of materials to build biodigesters, seems to confirm the authorities’ decision to promote sustainable energy development from the local level.

Aerial view of the biogas plant located in the industrial park of Zárate, a municipality in eastern Argentina, featuring three large biodigesters. CREDIT: Courtesy of BGA Energía Sustentable

By Daniel Gutman
ZÁRATE, Argentina , Mar 31 2022 (IPS)

Three giant concrete cylinders with inflated membrane roofs are a strange sight in the industrial park of Zárate, a world of factories 90 kilometers from Buenos Aires that heavy trucks drive in and out of all day long. They are the heart of a plant that is about to start producing energy from agro-industrial waste, for the first time in Argentina.

“This is the first plant that will generate biogas with waste from the food industry. For example, fats from dairy companies or leftovers from meat processing plants where beef, chicken and pork are processed,” Ezequiel Weibel, one of the partners in the company that designed and executed the project, tells IPS.

“Until now, in this country we were used to biogas production using livestock effluents or crop residues, but not other kinds of organic waste,” adds Weibel, as he walks around the site and points to the sector where dozens of gigantic bags of pig blood meal are stockpiled.

Weibel is a young agricultural engineer who in 2011 created the company BGA Energía Sustentable together with his fellow student Martín Pinos, with the support of IncUBAgro.

IncUBAgro is a program of the School of Agronomy at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), which encourages innovative projects aimed at solving agricultural, environmental and productive problems.

The plant’s three biodigesters have a capacity of 12,000 cubic meters and are set up to receive some 146 wet and 35 dry tons of waste per day from the eastern province of Buenos Aires. In the huge tanks the waste will be stored without oxygen so that the bacteria can do their work.

The organic matter will undergo an accelerated decomposition process, which will convert it into biogas, composed of 60 percent methane and 40 percent carbon dioxide.

The biogas, in turn, will be fed to a generator that will produce electricity and inject it into the national power grid, which will distribute it throughout the country. The plant, which has an installed capacity of 1.5 megawatts (MW), is already completed and is only awaiting the clearing of the final red tape to start operating.

The plant is located at the end of a short dirt road about 10 kilometers from the highway to Buenos Aires, within the Zárate district, on the banks of the Paraná River, on an area of one and a half hectares.

Ezequiel Weibel (l) and Ezequiel Tamburrini stand with two of the three biodigesters in the background in Zárate, 90 kilometers from the capital of Argentina, which will convert waste from the agri-food industry into biogas. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

A better solution for organic waste management

“This is a family business that was founded by my father,” Agustín Patricio, one of the shareholders of Eittor, the company that owns the plant, tells IPS. “We have been treating industrial waste for more than 20 years. The organic waste was mainly used to generate compost, to be used as fertilizer…even though we knew it could be used to produce energy.”

Through international trade fairs, for several years the company had been following solutions for recycling and reusing waste for energy production developed in countries such as Italy and Germany.

“We are increasingly aware of the scarcity of energy and the pollution caused by its generation and use, and we believe that the idea of producing biogas with organic waste is a better solution,” Patricio adds.

The opportunity to carry out the project came when public policies in favor of the energy transition were adopted in Argentina – long dependent on natural gas and oil production – much later than in other countries in the region.

In September 2015 Congress gave an important signal in favor of clean energies by passing a law to promote renewable sources of electricity.

The new law set the goal for 20 percent of Argentina’s electricity to come from renewable sources by 2025. It also established that renewables would have dispatch priority, so they are the first to be injected into the grid when different sources are available.

As a result, on days of lower demand, the proportion of renewables is higher. According to official figures, the historical peak occurred on Sept. 26, 2021, when 28.84 percent of electricity consumption was covered by renewables.

This electricity generator will be powered by the biogas produced from agro-industrial waste. The Eittor company’s plant, located in the municipality of Zárate, will be connected to the Argentine national power grid. Renewable sources provided 13 percent of the electricity consumed in Argentina in 2021. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Renovar’s spring

With the momentum from the new law, the government launched – between 2016 and 2018 – the Renovar Program, which held three tenders for the construction of renewable energy projects.

The big incentive for private investors was that the purchase of electricity was guaranteed for a 20-year term at a fixed rate in dollars and a fund was set up to ensure payment, with guarantees from the World Bank, the Argentine Investment and Foreign Trade Bank and other international and national credit agencies.

Thus, renewable energies, which provided an insignificant proportion of Argentina’s electricity until 2015, experienced explosive growth from 2016, to the point that in 2021 they covered 13 percent of total demand, according to official data from the energy ministry.

Today, the country has 187 operational renewable energy projects with a total installed capacity of 5182 MW. Most involve wind power (74 percent), followed by solar power (13 percent), small hydroelectric projects up to 50 MW (seven percent), and bioenergies (six percent), such as the Zárate plant, which was one of the successful bidders in the last of the Renovar Program’s three tenders.

The Argentine electricity system has a total capacity of almost 43,000 MW and continues to be supported mainly by natural gas and oil-fired thermal power plants and large hydroelectric power plants.

However, the brief clean energy spring in Argentina is over: there are currently no new renewable energy projects.

Moreover, 33 projects awarded under the program that had not started due to lack of financing were cancelled this year.

“The Renovar Program was successful from its launch until 2018, when Argentina was hit by a serious financial crisis, foreign credit dried up and the government turned to the International Monetary Fund,” Gerardo Rabinovich, vice president of the Instituto Argentina de Energía General Mosconi, a private research center, tells IPS.

Ezequiel Weibel stands inside one of the biodigesters of the biogas plant that his company, BGA Energía Sustentable, built in Zárate in northeastern Argentina to use agro-industrial waste. The young engineer developed his renewable energy enterprise with the support of the innovative projects incubator of the Faculty of Agronomy at the University of Buenos Aires. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“This meant that the projects, even some of the ones already awarded, were no longer financially feasible. Foreign investors left and there is no capital market in Argentina to finance these capital-intensive projects,” says Rabinovich.

The expert points out that an additional problem is the saturation of the electric transportation system, which is especially important in a large nation like Argentina, where big urban areas are concentrated in the center of the country.

The Eittor plant is thus unlikely to be replicated for a long time in this Southern Cone country, which is the third largest economy in the region after Brazil and Mexico.

“This is a double solution, because energy is generated at the same time the environmental problem of waste disposal is solved,” Ezequiel Tamburrini, head of the biogas plant, tells IPS.

“I would say that in Argentina there is no collective awareness of the environmental problem of waste generation, and most people do not know that energy can be generated with waste. That is why we have to bring visibility to this type of initiative in the country,” he argues.

Yunia Cancio and her husband and son stand next to the biodigester installed on their El Renacer farm, in the municipality of Cabaiguán, Sancti Spíritus province, thanks to the Biomass Cuba project financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. CREDIT: Courtesy of Biomass Cuba

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, May 19 2021 (IPS)

Yunia Cancio cooked with firewood until a few years ago, when a biodigester was built on her family’s El Renacer farm in Cabaiguán, a municipality in the central Cuban province of Sancti Spíritus, under the Biomass Cuba project. That change meant a lot for her family’s quality of life, but it was not the only one.

“Life has improved a lot thanks to the biodigester, especially for me, because as the woman of the house I’m the one who cooks,” the 48-year-old farmer told IPS by phone from her family farm. “It’s a very clean fuel, more comfortable and safer, everything is more hygienic. Before I used to cook everything with firewood and my day-to-day workload was harder.”

She explained that using the biogas she normally cooks for 10 people a day and for 20 during the planting and harvest seasons, when the tobacco farm employs more workers.

Cancio and her family are among the residents of agricultural localities involved in Biomass Cuba, a project initiated in 2009 with funding from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), which is currently in its third stage and is to be completed in 2022.

According to Leidy Casimiro, a professor at the University of Sancti Spíritus and an expert with Biomass Cuba, in its different facets of renewable energy, training and agroecology, the initiative directly benefits more than 15,000 people, including 5,417 with biogas technologies.

The initiative is coordinated by the Indio Hatuey Experimental Station, a research centre attached to the University of Matanzas in western Cuba, and also involves related institutions in the eastern provinces of Guantánamo, Santiago de Cuba, Granma and Holguín, and the central provinces of Las Tunas and Sancti Spíritus.

The biodigester at the El Renacer farm began operating on Jul. 15, 2014. “It was built by my father-in-law and brother-in-law, with the help of my husband and children, who carried bricks and made the mixture. With a capacity of nine cubic metres, it was built under the supervision of Alexander López, an expert in biodigesters,” Cancio said.

She also explained that electricity savings have been significant on the 28-hectare farm where her family has long-term “usufruct rights” and where they raise pigs and a few head of cattle and grow tobacco, vegetables and fruit.

“Something really important was when we received a rice cooker that was powered by biogas, a wonderful thing that we hadn’t seen before; we enjoyed it very much,” she recalled when commenting on the changes brought by the biofuel.

The plant also created new routines. Since it is fed mainly by manure from the farm’s pigs, the biodigester is connected to the pigsties. From time to time, cow manure is added to make the biogas more potent, from the stables, which are farther away.

According to Giraldo Martín, national director of Biomass Cuba, “The results are very valuable because today we have farms that consume only 30-40 percent of the conventional energy they used before.”

Engineer Alexander López Savrán stands next to one of the standard fixed-dome biodigesters he has developed, installed on a farm in La Macuca, a village in the municipality of Cabaiguán, in the central province of Santi Spíritus, Cuba. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

In a telephone interview with IPS from the municipality of Perico, in the province of Matanzas, Martín explained that in all its stages, Biomass Cuba has provided technologies and created capacities so local residents could move towards the concept of agroenergy in rural areas.

He also mentioned the covered lagoon model, an industrial technology that treats large quantities of biological waste to provide high volumes of biogas on a daily basis, which may be used in the future to generate electricity for the national power grid.

“In social terms, Biomass has had a great impact in the communities where it has intervened, generating employment, producing food, and in Cabaiguán, receiving domestic fuel through the supply networks that conduct biogas from pig farming areas to homes, with social and environmental benefits,” Martín said.

“We have farms that use the solid and liquid waste from the biodigesters as an excellent fertiliser with abundant nutrients that also contributes to the recovery of degraded soils, which are widespread today in agricultural areas in Cuba,” he explained.

Cancio said these techniques are used on her family’s farm, where the effluent from the biodigester “is used to fertilise the farm’s organoponic crops, including varieties of vegetables, herbs and medicinal plants, and fruit trees.”

“We are diversifying and…we now have infrastructure to extract oils, add value to various products, obtain flour from our root vegetables (a staple of the Cuban diet), motivate us to improve consumption habits and create new recipes with things that we did not use before,” she said proudly.

However, the Biomass project has also had its setbacks.

Martín said that one of the barriers that Biomass has had to break down was the lack of understanding about the concept of treating animal waste and producing energy, something that has taken a great deal of explaining and “is still not completely worked out.”

Chavely Casimiro feeds a biodigester located at the Finca del Medio, a farm in the municipality of Taguasco, Sancti Spíritus province, central Cuba. CREDIT: Courtesy of Biomass Cuba

He also considered it a challenge to align the priorities in the bidding and purchasing system with the plans of companies and productive and service organisations, so that the equipment acquisition processes are efficient and allow the technologies and knowledge generated by the projects to be applied expeditiously.

The project director said the main impact of the initiative was the way it influenced public policies.

Biomass contributes to “understanding the importance of renewable energy sources in rural areas, the role of the contributions that farms can make with biodigesters, waste treatment systems on pig farms, the use of rice husks to produce electricity and steam to dry rice, as well as the use of residual wood from sawmills to generate energy,” Martín said.

Meanwhile, José Antonio Guardado, national coordinator of the Movement of Biogas Users (MUB), told IPS that there are between 4,500 and 5,000 biodigesters around the country. “A count is currently being carried out in order to have a more precise figure,” he said by e-mail from Santa Clara, capital of the province of Villa Clara.

The MUB, which brings together producers who use the technology of anaerobic digestion by the action of microorganisms, emerged in Cuba in 1983 and has 3,000 members throughout this Caribbean island nation.

Guardado said the most urgent task of this movement was the promotion of the closed cycle system.

“In our assessment, in less than five percent of the installed biodigesters, closed-loop criteria and concepts are used, which means that the surplus end products are used in the processes that are generated in the chain on the farm, such as fish farming, irrigation or fertilisation,” he said.

Guardado said the MUB and all other actors working on the issue at the local level should defend this technology until all existing biodigesters in the country are closed-loop, including the distribution of surpluses among neighbouring producers.

According to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, 95 percent of the national energy mix is made up of fossil fuels, while this year the generation of energy from renewable sources is expected to grow to 6.3 percent of the total energy produced in the country.

Cuba’s goal is for 24 percent of energy to come from renewable sources by 2030.

The biodigester of the Monje Agricultural and Livestock Cooperative, which brings together 550 small farmers in this town in northeastern Argentina on the banks of the Paraná River, produces biogas that feeds electricity to its oil plant and biofertilisers used on the crops. CREDIT: Courtesy of CopMonje

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, May 11 2021 (IPS)

“Until five years ago, we didn’t know about the circular economy, but today our waste generates environmentally neutral products that also offer a return,” says José Luis Barrinat, manager of a cooperative that brings together some 550 small farmers in Monje, Argentina.

Their story reflects a reality that has begun to spread in recent years in the rural areas of this South American country, a traditional powerhouse in food production. Today both small farmers and large agribusiness companies generate energy and other products from what was once considered waste and was solely an environmental problem.

The Monje Agricultural and Livestock Cooperative is located 370 km north of Buenos Aires, in the northeastern province of Santa Fe, and has a pig farm of some 200 sows which sells some 90 animals each week, Barrinat told IPS by telephone from his home town.“Farmers are beginning to realise that livestock production effluent is not a waste product but a raw material that can generate value, and that an environmental problem can become a profitable solution." -- Diego Barreiro

Until recently, the manure was collected in large open ponds, which were a major emitter of methane, one of the main greenhouse gases (GHG) contributing to global warming, into the atmosphere.

Everything changed, however, with the 2018 inauguration of a biodigester, where effluent from the pig farm are now treated together with other organic waste, such as decomposing grains.

The biodigester replicates nature by converting organic matter into energy using bacteria that carry out an anaerobic degradation process.

The biodigester in Monje is made up of a large tank with waterproofed walls covered by a canvas reinforced with rubber that seals it hermetically, into which the effluent from agricultural activities runs through channels.

Barrinat explained that the resulting biogas has two uses: “We use it as fuel for an electric generator, which covers part of the consumption of our oil plant, and also for a grain dryer that we use when the harvest is wet. We also extract biofertilisers, which we use on our 35-hectare field.”

Building the biodigester cost nearly 100,000 dollars and was made possible thanks to a grant from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and advice from Argentina’s governmental National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA).

“The use of biogas has grown enormously since 2015 in this country, alongside research and the creation of knowledge,” said Jorge Hilbert, an international advisor at INTA. “Unfortunately, this came to a halt in the last two years, due to the financing difficulties that Argentina is experiencing,” he added, speaking to IPS in the capital.

In Cristophersen, a town in northeastern Argentina, biodigesters were built by Adecoagro, an agroindustrial company that invested six million dollars to produce biogas from the manure of 12,000 cows. Adecoagro has been selling renewable energy to the national electricity grid for more than three years. CREDIT: Courtesy of Adecoagro

Hilbert coordinates the Global Digital Biogas Cooperation project in the country, which last year investigated market conditions in Argentina, Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia and South Africa. The initiative was financed by the European Union, which is interested in exporting its biogas technology to emerging countries.

In the case of Argentina, the study noted that there are 100 biogas plants in operation and that the main potential for this renewable energy lies in the effluent from pork and beef production and the dairy industry.

Biogas generation received a boost in 2015, when the Law for the Promotion of Renewable Energies was passed. The following year the government launched the RenovAr Programme, by which the State guarantees the purchase of electricity generated with non-fossil fuel sources.

Environmental engineer Mariano Butti, an INTA researcher in the city of Pergamino, told IPS that thanks to RenovAr, 36 large-scale biogas plants have been built or are under construction, which inject energy into the national power grid.

However, Butti said by telephone from that city, located some 220 km from the capital, that there is still a long way to go, especially for medium and small farmers.

“The benefit of biodigesters is twofold, because they generate biofertilisers that replace chemical, fossil-based fertilisers, and because they cut GHG emissions from untreated effluent,” he said.

“Today in Argentina we are wasting a resource,” added Butti, who cited concrete examples, such as Navarro, an agricultural municipality located 120 km from Buenos Aires.

The expert explained that “Navarro has 20,000 inhabitants and 180 cattle farms, with a total of 38,000 cows. Today, they generate local electricity with two diesel engines and dump the effluent from livestock into a river, instead of making use of it.”

However, developing the potential of agricultural waste in Argentina is not an easy task.

In 2018, INTA developed a project for Chañar Ladeado, a town of 6,000 people, also in the northeastern province of Santa Fe, where the main activity is pig farming. Thanks to the effluent, biogas would have been supplied to the whole community, which currently uses bottled gas, but the plan collapsed because the financing fell through.

Faced with the failure of the initiative, a local pig farmer, Gabriel Nicolino, installed a biodigester on his own farm, which has 200 sows. “I did it with the help of INTA, a bit by trial and error, because in this country it is very difficult to get credit,” Nicolino told IPS by telephone from that town.

“I am starting to use the biogas as a fuel to generate electricity for the breeding barn, which includes heating the pigs in their first few weeks of life. I hope to recoup the investment in the long term,” he added.

José Luis Barrinat, manager of the Monje Agricultural and Livestock Cooperative, stands by the biodigester, next to the gas filter and the facilities where the gas is cooled before being sent to the electricity generator. The biodigester works with effluent from the pig farm and other organic waste. CREDIT: Courtesy of CopMonje

Who pays the environmental costs?

Ignacio Huerga, an INTA specialist from the city of Venado Tuerto, notes that the outlook for the generation of biogas from agricultural waste is very different depending on the scale of the farms.

“Large farmers have to think about investments of millions of dollars with technology imported from countries like Germany and Italy. Smaller producers are left with developments from universities or national companies that provide technology,” he told IPS from that city.

He added that “the problem of economic viability has to do with the fact that in Argentina nobody pays the cost of the environmental impact of their activity. If they had to pay it, things would be different. In any case, biogas is sure to grow over the next few years in this country.”

One of the large Argentine agribusiness companies that chose biogas is Adecoagro, which produces milk, grains, rice, sugar and ethanol in Argentina and also does businesses in Brazil and Uruguay. Adecoagro describes itself as a “producer of food and renewable energy under a sustainable model.”

The company has four dairy farms in the town of Cristophersen, Santa Fe, with 12,000 dairy cows.

“In 2004 we began to investigate how we could take advantage of cow manure. Back then we applied it on our fields as fertiliser, because our first natural biodigester is the cows’ stomachs, but we saw that there was more potential,” Lisandro Ferrer, head of Industrial Projects at Adecoagro, told IPS.

Thanks to the RenovAr plan, and using Italian technology, Adecoagro invested six million dollars in a biodigester and has been injecting electricity into the national grid since November 2017. “We have 1.4 MW in installed power. We could cover the energy needs of a town of between 500 and 1,000 residents,” Ferrer said by phone from Cristophersen.

“The biodigester is fed with 200 tons of cow manure per day, which is sent to three 5,000-cubic-metre concrete tanks. The way we see it is the cows transform the corn they eat into milk, and what is left over we transform into biogas to generate electricity,” he explained.

However, promoters of biogas still have to work to spark the interest of agricultural producers. Fourteen years ago Diego Barreiro founded the Argentine company Biomax, dedicated to the manufacture and commercialisation of biodigesters, and since then he has been touring the country explaining the benefits of the system.

“We are working hard to lower costs. Today we have 54 biodigesters installed and interest is growing. We have a farmer who, thanks to the biofertiliser made from pig manure, managed to increase the yield of his soybean field so much that in one year he recovered the investment,” Barreiro told IPS in Buenos Aires.

He said “Farmers are beginning to realise that livestock production effluent is not a waste product but a raw material that can generate value, and that an environmental problem can become a profitable solution.”

Claudete Volkswey and her husband smile together on their poultry farm in the municipality of Toledo, in the southwest Brazilian state of Paraná. The poultry shed is now heated using biogas instead of the wood-burning stove that used to keep her up at night, stoking it every two hours to keep the chicks warm in their first few weeks of life, as she explained at the South Brazilian Biogas and Methane Forum seminar, in her participation via videoconference. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RÍO DE JANEIRO, Apr 12 2021 (IPS)

“Biogas is worth gold to us, we can no longer live without it,” Claudete Volkswey, a poultry farmer in the municipality of Toledo, in the southwestern state of Paraná, Brazil, said enthusiastically about the new source of energy that has allowed her to get a good night’s sleep again, because she no longer has to get up to stoke the fire every two hours.

Ademar Luiz and his wife, Zenilde Nunes Luiz, also celebrate the alternative energy source that has freed them from the complications of firewood and has made it possible to have hot water round the clock, a blessing in the cold winters of Laurentino, a municipality in the southern state of Santa Catarina.

In the Northeast, Brazil’s poorest region, biogas forms part of the movement that is helping to overcome rural poverty in that semiarid ecoregion by disseminating so-called social technologies, the best known of which is rainwater harvesting tanks for human consumption and irrigation in family agriculture.

Spreading the use of biodigesters, the same way the rainwater tanks have been widely adopted, totaling more than 1.3 million today, is the dream of Ita Porto, coordinator of Diaconia in the Sertão do Pajeú, an area comprised of 20 municipalities in the interior of the northeastern state of Pernambuco.

“For this to happen, they have to become a public policy, as the rainwater tanks are. This would add energy security to the water and food security that are already taken into account by the government,” Porto told IPS by telephone from Afogados da Ingazeira, where one of Diaconia´s main offices is located.

Her ecumenical Christian-inspired social organisation is an active participant in the Articulação Semiárido do Brasil (ASA), a network of 3,000 diverse associations aimed at development in the semiarid Northeast based on coexistence with the ecosystem, in contrast to earlier failed official strategies to “combat drought”.

There are about 800 units of the Sertanejo Biodigester, a model designed by Diaconia, built in Brazil, most of them in the semiarid Northeast. The initiative won a mention in the third edition of the Biodigester Network for Latin America and the Caribbean’s RedBioLAC magazine, in 2019.

Biogas is becoming an important energy source in this South American country of 212 million inhabitants, both for electricity and heat generation and for the production of biomethane to replace fossil fuels.

The enormous amount of agricultural, industrial and urban waste represents a potential of which only two percent is currently used, according to Alessandro Gardemann, president of the Brazilian Biogas Association, which groups companies and producers in the sector.

The advance of commercial production is made in sanitary landfills, in large agricultural and industrial units. In the south of Brazil, the expansion of pig and poultry farming is driving the biodigestion of their excrement, to boost profits, reduce costs and meet growing environmental demands.

They can play an important role in the energy system, providing power and balance, in the face of the major growth of intermittent sources, wind and solar, in addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

But it is the family biodigesters, noted for their proliferation rather than their size, that generate the most visible social and environmental benefits.

For Claudete Volkswey and her family, biogas meant keeping the poultry shed housing about 19,000 chickens and chicks on their farm warm without having to wake up “two or three times” in the middle of the night, sometimes in sub-zero temperatures, to stoke the wood-fired oven that was the previous source of heat.

This biodigester is on a small farm in the semi-arid region of the state of Pernambuco in Northeast Brazil. In general, local families now use biogas for cooking, replacing cooking gas cylinders, which are expensive in comparison to the income levels in this part of the country. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“Our health is at stake,” Volkswey said in her presentation via videoconference at the South Brazilian Biogas and Biomethane Forum, which took place from Mar. 29 to Apr. 1, virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The manure, which is like gold for biogas production, comes from the 9,000 “nursery” piglets that Volkswey’s son is raising on the family farm in Toledo, a municipality that concentrates the largest number of pigs in Brazil: around 1.2 million.

The cost of firewood used to be as high as 2,800 reals (about 500 dollars) a month. The biodigester that has heated the poultry shed for the past nine years was costly, as it was one of the first in the western part of the state of Paraná, “but it was worth it,” said Volkswey.

Not having to forage for or buy firewood is another advantage cited by Ademar Luiz, also a pioneer in biogas in his municipality, Laurentino, 120 kilometres from the coast of Santa Catarina.

He built a small biodigester in 2008, to try it out. Six years later he built a larger one that allowed him to fuel the stove and heat water for the household round the clock. He no longer uses firewood or the electric shower heater, which saves the family 90 dollars a month.

Farmers Ademar Luiz and Zenilde Nunes Luiz decided to produce biogas to cook and heat water in their house in Laurentino, a municipality where winters are cold in the southern state of Santa Catarina, saving on firewood and electricity. This screenshot was taken from their presentation at the South Brazilian Biogas and Biomethane Forum, held in late March in Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Luiz only uses the manure from his four dairy cows. He used to have 30 and produced 600 litres of milk a day, in addition to raising other cattle, but he sold almost all of them two years ago, when he was 56. It became difficult for him to care for so many animals because of his back trouble.

Producing milk is hard work and a dairy farm is like “a prison” as you have to be there every single day. “But I like it,” he told IPS by phone from his farm, where he also grows corn and soybeans. “With a tractor and harvesting machine, I can do it,” he added.

Luiz confessed that before he had the biodigester he used to dump the manure into the river, “for the bad luck of those who live downstream.”

There are many environmental benefits, because the biodigesters protect water, forests and the climate, as well as eliminating odors and mosquitoes.

A screenshot from Claudete Volkswey’s videoconference presentation at the South Brazilian Biogas and Biomethane Forum shows the poultry shed where she raises some 19,000 chickens. She decided to produce biogas on the family farm, using a biodigester fueled by the manure from the pigs that are also raised on her farm, and abandoned the use of the wood-burning stove, which would keep her or another family member up at night as it needed to be stoked every two hours to keep the newly hatched chicks alive on nights when temperatures sometimes drop below freezing. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

In addition, biodigestion converts the waste into fertiliser and as a result, he said, his corn harvest grew.

“That’s why I don’t understand why other farmers don’t join the move to biogas, the manure is free. I am the only one using a biodigester in this municipality,” he lamented. The necessary investments are paid off with what is saved in just a few years and are easily financed in the banks, he said.

His wife was also reluctant at first. She only approved of the novel system after discovering that the beans and chicken stew cooked on the biogas stove didn’t smell like manure, he joked.

Ita Porto emphasises that women benefit the most. In general, they are the ones in charge of fetching firewood and, because they do the cooking, their health is affected by constantly breathing smoke from burning wood or charcoal.

This biological digester was built by a regional university to supply biogas to a bakery run by a women’s cooperative in Pombal, a municipality in the semi-arid ecoregion in the Northeast Brazilian state of Paraiba. This waste-to-energy generator provides half of the electricity used by the bakery, which sells a large part of its products to the lunch programme in local schools. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

A World Bank study released in 2020 estimated that 2.75 billion people still use wood or charcoal for cooking. Many die of lung cancer, respiratory damage and heart disease as a result.

Widespread replacement of traditional stoves with safer and healthier cookstoves would have dramatic health, environmental and social effects, experts say.

Incipient and scattered actions are promoting the use of biogas in Brazil.

In the state of Ceará in Northeast Brazil, the non-governmental Centre for Labour Studies and Worker Advisory Services (CETRA) has been running a project since 2017 that envisages the construction of 1,800 biodigesters with support from several national and international institutions, Porto explained.

The route to massive dissemination of the technology could open up if one or more Brazilian states adopted this alternative as public policy, the activist asserted.

Terraces specially designed to prevent surface runoff during the rains have been key for growing vegetables on the sloping terrain of Finca Marta in the municipality of Caimito, Artemisa province, about 20 km from Havana, Cuba. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Jan 28 2021 (IPS)

Most beginnings are rocky and sometimes the obstacles seem insurmountable, before they are finally overcome. This was certainly the case for the Finca Marta, a farm in Cuba that had to begin by digging a well in search of water and with the hard-scrabble work of clearing an arid, stony and overgrown plot of land.

“It was an inhospitable environment, everything was totally abandoned,” agroecologist Fernando Funes told IPS. On Dec. 21, 2011, he and his family settled on an eight-hectare plot of land, some 20 km west of Havana, which they planned to farm against all odds.

“With Juan Machado, the local well digger who has become our shaman, we were digging for seven months, using only shovels, until at 14 metres deep we found water, more than we need. For us, this well is a metaphor for how far we are willing to go,” added Funes.

It was the solution to the main problem they faced in their decision to turn a relatively infertile, hilly plot of land without water into a productive farm, in a country whose water supply depends mainly on rainfall and where agriculture consumes about 60 percent of what is extracted from the watersheds.

The farm, which has 20 workers, now has a guaranteed round-the-clock water supply, from groundwater or rainwater that is harvested and stored in ponds and tanks. It is enough to cover the needs of both livestock and wild animals, as well as the crops. A solar pump now draws water from the well.

Farm management and production efficiency soon made it necessary to dedicate time and resources to the construction of greenhouses to produce seedlings, harvesting facilities, a rustic cowshed and a storage facility for beekeeping equipment and supplies, among other infrastructure.

Other efforts focused on the design of a sustainable energy system, incorporating various renewable energy alternatives such as solar panels for pumping water, a biodigester for capturing and distributing methane for cooking food, and solar water heaters.

“We have done all this ourselves by hand, with the resources, conditions and knowhow that we had,” Funes explained, after mentioning that further plans to take advantage of clean sources of energy include the installation of a windmill for pumping water and producing electricity.

It took seven months of digging without machines on the Finca Marta to find enough water in a 14-metre deep well for the farm’s organic crops and small livestock, some 20 km west of Havana. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

And terraces were created to prevent soil erosion when it rains, “on a farm where the only flat part is where the house is,” said Funes.

Each terrace has a stone wall at the bottom to prevent surface runoff during rainfall. The substrate is composed of a mixture of soil and organic matter from vermiculture and compost produced on the farm, with residue from the biodigester and other waste.

The result is the production of a variety of top-quality crops free of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, in harmony with the environment. “This gives us a comparative advantage in the market, because we offer a high diversity that gives us better chances of meeting demand,” Funes said.

Beekeeping soon became an important activity at Finca Marta, which started with one old hive. Today there are more than one hundred hives and about 40 tons of honey have been produced over the last eight years using modern techniques, mainly for export.

Forming part of a Credit and Service Cooperative, Finca Marta, located in the municipality of Caimito in the west-central province of Artemisa, markets vegetables directly to a group of private restaurants, hotels and state-owned companies, while providing certain products free of charge to a local centre that assists at-risk pregnant women.

Agricultural engineer Fernando Funes explains how the biodigester works that uses livestock manure to produce biogas for domestic consumption at Finca Marta, in the municipality of Caimito, in the Cuban province of Artemisa near Havana. This is one of the innovations for the sustainable development of the farm. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

“We are following a concept of production, processing, marketing and consumption. We do the whole chain ourselves,” said the agroecologist, who is determined to demonstrate in practice that it is possible to run an ecologically sustainable and socially just family farm that is also economically sustainable.

The project includes an ecological restaurant that opens once or twice a week to serve visitors interested in life in the Cuban countryside and in eating meals prepared with organic products. Agritourism boosts both knowledge and investment, because the income is reinvested in the production system.

“Coming in, we had a great deal of uncertainty, a lot of challenges ahead of us and it was very risky from every angle,” Funes acknowledged.

After four or five years of intense work, the farm was showing significant progress in terms of marketing and bringing in sufficient income to pay good wages and offer social benefits to the workers.

This is the largest pond dug on the Finca Marta farm for rainwater harvesting, part of the sustainable solutions used to turn a sloping, relatively infertile piece of land without water into a productive farm in the west-central Cuban province of Artemisa, which has now become a model for other farmers. CREDIT: Courtesy of Fernando Funes

“For me from the beginning it was an ethical and social commitment as a scientist for science to have an impact on the lives of people, who have to see an improvement in their income and living conditions in order to commit to a process of change,” said the agronomist.

But not only that. In his opinion, “the projection for the future is not only to continue enriching the farm, generating new jobs, and offering better wages and social benefits, but to begin to have an impact on transforming the area – that is, on local development.”

Funes, who has been dedicated to research and teaching for 20 years and has a master’s degree in Agroecology and Sustainable Rural Development and a PhD in Ecological Production and Conservation, plus 10 years of practical experience on his farm, has been part of a group of experts since October that will manage a government programme for the Development of Logistics and Supply Chains.

His farm also serves as a model for a network of 50 other farms that are adopting the concept of agroecological production, processing, marketing and consumption.

A woman plants vegetables on one of the terraces of Finca Marta, a farm using ecological farming techniques to tame inhospitable terrain with sustainable solutions, in the municipality of Caimito, in the west-central Cuban province of Artemisa. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

The purpose of the government group, as announced when it was created, is to put into practice the modern concept of managing the integration, coordination and synchronisation of interrelationships, including material, informational and financial flows to supply and transform resources and products, all along the chain from suppliers to consumers.

These projects are part of Cuba’s effort to strengthen organic agriculture in domestic food production and thus alleviate the country’s dependence on imports, which cover 70 percent of food needs.

Today, this Caribbean island nation of 11.2 million people produces fresh vegetables and condiments using clean technologies on more than 8,000 hectares, where an average of 1.2 million tons of vegetables are produced annually.

Airton Kunz, head of Research at Embrapa Pigs and Poultry, explains to visitors the Effluent Treatment System of the São Roque Pig Farm, part of which can be seen behind him, in Videira, in the southern state of Santa Catarina, Brazil's largest producer and exporter of pork. Biogas, bioelectricity and biomethane are by-products arising from the need to dispose of pork manure in an environmentally friendly manner. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
CHAPECÓ/CONCORDIA, Brazil, Sep 23 2019 (IPS)

The state of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil is the largest national producer and exporter of pork and this year it also leads in exports of chicken, of which it is the second-biggest producer in the country.

Economic and productive success, as is often the case, brought serious environmental impacts, with manure polluting water and soil. In the beginning, pigsties were installed on the banks of rivers to dispose of waste effortlessly, the old pig farmers recall.

The expansion of the sector later led to the need for strict sanitary and environmental measures, such as manure storage areas, after the adoption of a ban on dumping it into rivers. But even when the manure is kept in covered storage areas, it continues to emit greenhouse gases.

Biogas production then emerged as an alternative, but it doesn’t completely solve the problem, said Rodrigo Nicoloso, an agronomist and researcher with the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) Pigs and Fowl, based in Concordia, a municipality of 74,000 people that is a leader in pig farming.

Embrapa is a state entity linked to the Agriculture Ministry, made up of 43 specialised centres that have promoted agricultural development and know-how in Brazil since its foundation in 1973.

“The production of biogas requires only the carbon in the organic material,” which is why biodigestion leaves a large volume of waste known as digestate, Nicoloso told IPS, which he said is a semi-liquid by-product, rich in organic and mineral matter but difficult to manage.

This waste product, which no longer stinks, is a biofertiliser that contains the nutrients most used in agriculture: phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium. But in general pig and poultry farmers do not have enough land to absorb so much fertiliser.

The west of Santa Catarina is a mountainous area populated by small farmers and ranchers, and many farmers don’t even have land on which to use the byproduct of the biodigesters, said the researcher.

Selling it is not viable because of the cost of transporting the biofertiliser, because it is semi-liquid sludge, he said.

A truck, part of the fleet of vehicles that use biogas and biomethane as fuel in Chapecó, the western capital of the state of Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil, where there are a large number of pig and poultry farms and slaughterhouses. The meat industry has boosted the prosperity of the region, which will benefit further from energy by-products derived from pig and poultry farming. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

On the large farms which are numerous in west-central Brazil, this is not a problem because in general the fertiliser derived from biodigestion is used directly on the farm’s crops.

But in Santa Catarina disposing of the waste is becoming increasingly difficult as the excess waste is growing due to the steady concentration of pig farming – and, as a result, biogas production – on larger farms.

There are currently about 5,500 pig farms in Santa Catarina, half of what there were some 15 years ago, and just 2.2 percent have biodigesters, according to the survey presented by Nicoloso. There are now 135 farms with more than 5,000 pigs, compared to 50 before.

The Master Group, with seven farms and 1,000 employees, is an example of a large pig farming company. It also has an animal feed factory, a slaughterhouse and plants to produce everything from pig embryos to the final product.

Its São Roque Farm, in Videira, a municipality of 53,000 people, has 10,000 pigs, which made possible a biogas and electricity generation project with good returns, local manager Moisés Schlosser told IPS.

A group of speakers, researchers, businessmen and university professors who participated in the Southern Brazil Forum on Biogas and Biomethane. The challenges and potential of the sector were the themes of the three-day meeting in Chapecó, the main city in the west of Santa Catarina, where pig farming and the meat industry dominate the local economy. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Embrapa Pigs and Birds provides orientation for the Swine Effluent Treatment System on the São Roque Farm, which serves the farm and at the same time the development of techniques for the entire sector.

A novel experience is that it will use the bodies of pigs that die natural deaths in the biodigesters, rather than incinerate or bury them. They will be crushed and added to the solidified manure in a special biodigester, suitable for processing coarser waste. This will increase the production of biogas and reduce health risks.

“Animal health is the greatest asset of animal husbandry. But it can also be a guillotine, leading to the closure of a farm or a slaughterhouse,” Airton Kunz, head of Embrapa Pigs and Poultry research, told IPS.

Inserting biogas into the production chain, from the nursery to the slaughterhouse, energy, equipment industry, logistics and services such as technical assistance, it is necessary to avoid the mistakes made in the past.

Many producers still suffer from a bad experience with biodigestors donated by agribusiness companies interested in obtaining credits from the Clean Development Mechanism, aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and created with funds from multilateral climate agencies.

A miniplant for refining biogas to supply vehicles with biomethane, designed for pig and poultry farms and ranches, which can become autonomous in terms of fuel, producing biogas for their fleet and for other energy needs. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The farmers did not know how to use the equipment and could derive no benefits from it. “They saw the biogas burning, while they had to use firewood in their stoves,” recalled Paulo Oliveira, another Embrapa researcher.

Now there is a lot of know-how, “and universities, other research centres and associations participate, and there is a culture of innovation and cooperation” to guide the projects, said Kunz.

But each plant is a new challenge, it has its peculiarities and risks, he said. And there are a variety of biological inputs.

In any case, biogas is beginning to stand out as a new agricultural product, especially for the generation of electricity, in addition to the traditional use as a source of thermal energy in kitchens and in factories, in the west of Santa Catarina, where pig farming has been concentrated.

Between 2015 and 2018, the number of biogas plants in Brazil climbed from 127 to 276, almost half of which are in southern Brazil. Production rose 130 percent, from 1.3 million cubic metres per day to 3.1 million cubic metres, destined for electric, thermal or mechanical energy generation.

Several initiatives already produce biomethane, purified biogas, which replaces natural gas and oil derivatives as fuel for trucks and other vehicles.

The potential and challenges of these products were the themes of the Southern Brazil Biogas and Biomethane Forum, which gathered around 250 participants in Chapecó, a city of 220,000 inhabitants which is the capital of Santa Catarina’s western region, Sept. 4-6.

One way to make the digestate trade viable is to remove the liquid part and enrich it with chemical elements to turn it into organo-mineral fertiliser, said Vinicius Benites, head of research at Embrapa Soils, based in Rio de Janeiro.

This would make it easier to transport and better prices could be fetched by adding other nutrients to the usual nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) formula, he said. This enriched fertiliser provides greater productivity, Benites told IPS.

Composting and drying, reducing the volume by extracting water, also cut the cost of the logistics required to make commercialising the product viable, Nicoloso added.

He said that a scale of production of at least 5,000 pigs is essential to undertaking the risk of investing in generating electricity.

Technologies and solutions must be developed to incorporate small breeders into the biogas economy, said Clovis Reichert, coordinator of the Forum.

But the consensus is that the potential of biogas, whether from livestock, agricultural waste, garbage or urban sanitation, is immense.

Hydrogen production, already being researched in other countries, is part of its future, said Suelen Paesi, a professor at the University of Caxias do Sul, a city in the neighboring state of Rio Grande do Sul, which together with Santa Catarina and Paraná make up Brazil’s southern region, where livestock biogas is most advanced.

Claudinei Stein is a farmer who produces biogas using the manure of his 7,300 pigs, which he breeds and sells to a pork processing plant in southern Brazil when they reach 23 kilos of weight. To his right is the biofertiliser pond, with the manure used to produce biogas in a biodigester. At the far left are the pigsties. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
ENTRE RIOS DO OESTE, Brazil, Aug 6 2019 (IPS)

Pigs, already the main source of income in this small municipality in southwestern Brazil, now have even more value as a source of electricity.

The mini-thermal power plant of Entre Rios do Oeste, inaugurated on Jul. 24, uses the biogas provided by 18 farms, in a pioneering technical-commercial agreement in Brazil involving pig farmers, the city government, the Paraná Energy Company (Copel), the Itaipu Technological Park (PTI) and the International Center for Renewable Energies-Biogas (CIBiogas).

The project was executed by PTI – the Brazilian-Paraguayan hydroelectric power plant Itaipu‘s centre for teaching and development research – and CIBiogás, a non-profit association of 27 international, national and local institutions, which operates at the PTI headquarters.

The Entre Rios city government will benefit by generating electricity with the biogas it buys from the pig farmers. The electricity is injected into Copel’s distribution network, reducing the energy costs paid by 72 municipal office buildings and schools.

“It will produce savings that we will invest in health and education,” said Mayor Jones Heiden.

His municipality, in the western part of the southern state of Paraná and on the shores of the Itaipú reservoir that separates Brazil from Paraguay, was a natural choice for the project, as there are some 155,000 pigs, or 35 animals for each of the 4,400 local inhabitants.

Rafael González, CIBiogás’ director of technological development, told IPS in his offices that the city government also took an interest in the project and offered the area for the plant to be installed, resources for its operation and support for the pig farmers.

Of the more than 100 pig farmers in the municipality, only 18 who are located where the 20-km network of gas pipelines was installed are participating, after accepting the conditions for financing the biodigester, which converts the waste into biofertiliser while extracting the biogas.

“Some didn’t want to because it would take them more than 10 years to pay off the loan. There were 19 who were going to take part, but one pulled out after deciding to build his own biodigester and generator” in an individual business, taking advantage of the abundant manure produced by his 4,000 pigs, one of the participants, Claudinei Stein, told IPS.

The Mini-Thermoelectric Plant of Entre Rios do Oeste will generate 250 megawatt-hours, 43 percent more than the top consumption of all municipal government facilities. The plant will reduce their energy bill to almost zero in this municipality in southern Brazil, on the border with Paraguay. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

“That was the beginning, the second step will be public lighting,” opening up opportunities for other producers, said the mayor.

The mini-thermal power plant, with a capacity of 480 kilowatts, can generate 250 megawatts/hour per month, 43 percent more than the city government’s maximum consumption. It involves 215 tons of manure and 4,600 cubic metres of biogas produced daily by 39,000 pigs.

Stein has 7,300 feeder pigs which he receives from the Friella company when they weigh about seven kilos, fattens them, and returns them when they reach 22 or 23 kilos.

Friella is the main company in town, with three meat-packing plants where pork is processed and sold fresh or industrially processed, as well as an animal feed factory and its own hogpens.

But it outsources the breeding and fattening of most of the pigs. Stein explained that while it entails transportation costs, the company saves on installations, space and labour power.

Specialising in the second stage, in which each animal produces less than half of the manure from the entire fattening process, Stein estimates that he will earn an income of 1,800 to 2,000 reais (375 to 430 dollars) a month, enough to pay off the credit for the biodigester, which cost him 75,000 reais (19,800 dollars), in eight years.

The Mini-Thermoelectric Plant of Entre Rios do Oeste will generate 250 megawatt-hours, 43 percent more than the top consumption of all municipal government facilities. The plant will reduce their energy bill to almost zero in this municipality in southern Brazil, on the border with Paraguay. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

But he joined the project for other reasons: to produce biofertiliser and improve the environment. Biodigestion eliminates odors, mosquitoes and contamination of groundwater on his 13-hectare property and improves manure as fertiliser for planting corn and soybeans.

“This way I save money on chemical fertilisers,” he explained. “I also like bold initiatives,” said the 39-year-old farmer, who learned about the benefits of biodigesters at a young age, because there was one on a cousin’s farm where he worked.

But the installation of the Entre Rios plant was plagued by delays, despite the recognised advantages of biogas and its potential for expansion in the western part of the state, due to the heavy presence of pig and poultry farming.

The idea emerged in 2008, Mayor Heiden told IPS.

But the opportunity to bring it to fruition arose in 2012, when the National Electric Energy Agency – the regulator of the sector – outlined strategies and criteria for biogas projects, calling for proposals to be presented.

The projects for Paraná depend on funds that the Copel distributor must allocate to research and development projects, equivalent to 0.5 percent of its turnover.

“We registered the Entre Rios do Oeste project,” but the contract with Copel was not signed until 2016, Gonzalez said.

Difficulties then arose with energy and tax regulations, which blocked the city government from purchasing the biogas, defined as a processed industrial good produced by farmers, the director of CIBiogas explained.

View of a row of gas holders, large containers for storing the biogas that will fuel the mini-thermal power plant of Entre Rios do Oeste, which generates electricity using the gas extracted from the manure of part of the 155,000 pigs raised in this municipality in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná, on the border with Paraguay. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

New regulations were necessary, with a different interpretation, that recognises biogas as an unprocessed agricultural product, in order to design the business model for the mini-thermoelectric plant fueled by biogas, which is in the category of distributed generation by consumers.

The project then took on its definitive shape, with the city government buying biogas from the pig farmers who installed the biodigester.

But opening up credit lines to finance the equipment required more lengthy negotiations, to come up with a model replicable in other municipalities and regions and with different arrangements.

There was a precedent for the construction of a mini biogas power plant in the municipality of Marechal Cândido Rondon, 34 km northeast of Entre Rios. The Agroenergy Condominium for Family Farming of the Ajuricaba River Basin, later called Coperbiogas, emerged there in 2009.

In 2014 it began to generate electricity, as part of another CIBiogas project. But it didn’t last long. Today, only 15 of the 33 members remain in the cooperative, the mini thermoelectric plant was closed down, and the biogas is sold to a neighbouring poultry plant belonging to the Rondon Limited Mixed Agroindustrial Cooperative (Copagril).

“It was a successful project” and not a failure as some people saw it, according to González. “Its objective was not to become economically profitable, but to clean up the environment, clean up the river,” he argued.

In fact, it was part of Itaipu’s Cultivating Good Water Programme, which sought to prevent pollution of rivers from sewage that would end up in the reservoir created by the hydroelectric dam.

The project remains active: 250 cubic metres of biogas are transported daily through the 25-km network of pipelines to three gasometers, while a filtering system removes the hydrogen sulfide that causes corrosion.

The families continue to use gas in their homes and some use the gas for milking, thanks to which at least one of the farms has improved the quality of their milk, using biogas in the pasteurisation process, Daiana Martinez, a biogas information analyst at CIBiogás, told IPS.

In Ajuricaba, unlike Entre Rios, biogas is made from both cattle and pig manure. But the scale of production and the biodigesters are much smaller, which makes electricity generation economically unfeasible, said Pedro Kohler, owner of a local biodigester factory.