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.

Biogas is a champion of sustainability, offering clean, renewable energy and helping to solve the organic waste problem by transforming it into biofuels, says Alex Enrich-Prast, a professor at universities in Brazil and Sweden. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 7 2024 (IPS)

“I don’t know of a more sustainable technology for the transformation of society than biogas,” said Professor Alex Enrich-Prast, an activist for this energy alternative with a highly diversified and decentralised expansion in Brazil.

It is not only a renewable and clean energy source, obtained by the anaerobic degradation of organic waste, he argued before entrepreneurs and stakeholders gathered at the 11th national Biogas Forum on 2-3 October in Rio de Janeiro.

Biogas, he added, is also key to the world’s ability to deal with rubbish and waste in general, a problem that punishes humanity, which makes this energy circular.“Biogas follows segmentation by type of substrates. Its business model for sugar cane is different from that of pig farming, dairy cattle, basic sanitation, and other crops”: Cícero Bley Junior.

A researcher on the subject at Brazilian universities and at Linkoping University in Sweden, biologist Enrich-Prast surprised his audience by saying that “biogas, in Brazil, is more relevant for the production of biofertilisers than for energy”.

In Europe, the expansion of this energy source responds to the ‘geopolitical strategy’ of reducing dependence on Russian gas in a continent whose temperatures require heating. The war in Russia-invaded Ukraine uncovered the drama.

In the case of Brazil, a tropical agricultural power, the dependence on imported fertilisers, which account for more than 80% of national consumption, stands out, explained the professor.

As Russia and Ukraine are major suppliers of fertilisers, the war prompted an increase in domestic production, to be partially covered by waste whose biodigestion generates both biogas and an improved manure, rid of gases. The resulting fertiliser, which contains micronutrients, can produce a better fertiliser than chemical ones.

In addition to the geopolitical and economic risks, imported fertilisers are of fossil origin, undermining the low-carbon agriculture that Brazil is trying to promote as part of its climate change mitigation goals.

Renata Isfer, president of the Brazilian Biogas and Biomethane Association that promotes the Biogas Forum, an annual meeting, which took place in Rio de Janeiro in September. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

High cost is the stumbling block

“The difficulty is the cost. Biofertilisers are still more expensive than fossil or mineral fertilisers, and agriculture is not willing to pay that price,” Renata Isfer, president of the Brazilian Biogas and Biomethane Association (Abiogás), the forum’s promoter, told IPS.

Technological advances and the scale of production could reduce costs, but the global market’s environmental demands could lead to a faster path by setting more sustainable and less polluting production, she acknowledged.

In any case, “biogas is vital. There will be no human colonisation on Mars without biogas there,” Enrich-Prast, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro currently on loan to his counterpart in São Paulo, told IPS.

In the midst of his teaching, the specialist promotes cooperation between Brazil and Sweden. Together with other researchers, he founded the company Inova Biogás, with the aim of contributing to energy productivity and the quality of biofertilisers.

He values the experience of Europe, where biogas, which when refined becomes biomethane equivalent to natural gas, is now a significant energy input, having explored much of its potential.

In Brazil it is an emerging industry, still lacking in public policies, investments, proprietary technologies and regulations, which is being developed through private, sectoral and experimental initiatives and is designing an expansion through local arrangements, in a territorial decentralisation and by productive ecosystems.

A truck that uses biomethane as fuel and can travel more than 500 kilometres with its eight yellow canisters. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Segmentation

“Biogas follows segmentation by type of substrates. Its business model for sugar cane is different from that of pig farming, dairy cattle, basic sanitation, and other crops,” summarised Cícero Bley Junior, an icon of the sector, currently with his consulting company Bley Energías.

“Everything is biogas, but biogas is only part of the process and the business”, from the activities that generate the substrate or input for biodigestion to the biomethane used in various types of industry, in trucks and other vehicles, he said.

Founder, first president and current president emeritus of Abiogás, Bley drove the biogas movement in southwest Brazil when he was superintendent of renewable energy at Itaipu Binacional (2003-2016), the hydroelectric power plant shared between Brazil and Paraguay on the border between the two countries.

A business model is emerging around the agro-industrial cooperative Primato, in Toledo, a municipality of 150,000 inhabitants in the west of the southern state of Paraná and the country’s largest producer of pork, where Bley currently concentrates his work.

In the transport of animal feed alone, the cooperative has 70 trucks, each of which travels an average of 200 kilometres a day using diesel.

The plan underway to replace fossil fuel with biomethane would result in huge cost savings and a reduction of 89% in greenhouse gas emissions, he said.

Local arrangements are emerging or may emerge all over the country, with an abundance of biomass, from the melon-producing export area in the northeastern state of Alagoas, to another nearby fishing community that grows and consumes cassava, to the heart of the Amazon with many macrophytic aquatic plants, he said.

For the time being, the main production of biogas and biomethane is concentrated in older landfills and in more recent years in sugar cane ethanol plants.

Biogas and biomethane plant of a power plant of Cocal, an ethanol and sugar producer in the west of the southern Brazilian state of São Paulo. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Local production and consumption

One of these, Cocal, in the west of the southern state of São Paulo, supplies part of its biomethane to the gas market in three nearby cities. For this purpose, Necta, which distributes natural gas in most of the state, has built a local pipeline network.

This is also planned to supply a 16-plant ceramics cluster in Santa Gertrudes, another small São Paulo city of 24,000 inhabitants. But this is not the priority of Comgás, the gas distributor in the east of São Paulo state, which includes Santa Gertrudes.

A major problem in the ceramics pole, the city’s air pollution has been reduced by the adoption of natural gas as an energy input, instead of the former use of coal and firewood, according to David Penna, the company’s engineering manager.

The current priority is the replacement of diesel consumption by trucks on the roads with biomethane, which is considered equivalent and does not require technological alterations to vehicles.

Studying the flow of trucks on the roads with statistics is now one of the tasks undertaken by several natural gas distribution companies to identify priority locations for future refuelling stations.

But these are long-term plans, as replacing diesel trucks with gas-powered ones takes time, since these vehicles have a long service life and the automotive industry is slowly increasing production of gas-powered trucks, Penna told IPS during the Biogas Forum.

(Re)energisa, an energy transition company, part of the Energisa electricity generation and distribution group, has also embraced biogas, after concentrating on solar photovoltaics.

It is installing a plant in Campos Novos, in the centre of the southern state of Santa Catarina, Brazil’s largest pork exporter, to generate 25,000 cubic metres of biomethane per day, using waste from the surrounding meat and dairy industry.

It solves the problem of waste from local industry, but the focus is on the production of biofertilisers through composting, according to Roberta Godoi, vice-president of Energy Solutions at (Re)energisa.

Iná de Cubas next to the biodigester she obtained with the Energy of Women of the Earth project, in the municipality of Orizona, in the Brazilian state of Goiás. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
ACREUNA / ORIZONA, Brazil , Aug 26 2024 (IPS)

A community bakery, family production of fruit pulp, and the recovery of water springs are some of the initiatives of the Energy of Women of the Earth, organised since 2017 in the state of Goiás, in central-western Brazil.

A common resource is non-conventional renewable energy sources, such as solar and biomass, which are fundamental to the projects’ economic viability and environmental sustainability.

The network includes 42 women’s organisations in 27 municipalities in Goiás, a state that, like the entire central-western region, has an economy dominated by extensive monoculture agriculture, especially soybean, corn, sugar cane and cotton.

It is an adverse context for small-scale family farming, due to low population density and distant urban markets. A movement to strengthen the sector has intensified in this century, with the Agro Centro-West Family Farming Fairs promoted by local universities.

There are 95,000 family farms in Goiás, 63% of the state’s total number of farms.

“The network is the link between the valorisation of rural women, family farming and energy transition,” Gessyane Ribeiro, an agronomist who coordinates the project that uses alternative energy sources to empower women in agricultural production, told IPS.

The Energy of Women of the Earth project, which generated the network, is promoted by Gepaaf, a company known by the Portuguese acronym of its name, Management and Elaboration of Projects in Consultancy to Family Agriculture, and born from a study group at the Federal University of Goiás.

Non-repayable funding from the Caixa Economica Federal, a state bank focused on social and housing support, allowed the company, in partnership with two institutes and the university, to deploy actions involving 92 women farmers and to set up 60 family projects and another 16 collective projects until June 2023.

In Acreúna, a municipality of 21,500 inhabitants, 14 women farmers run a bakery that provides a variety of breads, pastries, cakes and biscuits to local public schools, which have around 3,000 students. They are women from the Genipapo Settlement, where 27 families received plots from the government’s land reform programme.

Solar energy made the settlement’s Residents’ Association’s enterprise viable, along with basic education schools in nearby towns. The National School Feeding Programme requires beneficiary schools to allocate at least 30% of their purchases to family farming.

In Orizona, a municipality of 16,000 people, Iná de Cubas received a biodigester and eight photovoltaic panels, which generate biogas and electricity for its production of fruit pulp, also for school meals.

Another technology distributed by the project, the solar pump, recovered and preserved one of the springs that form a stream in Orizona. The equipment, powered by solar energy, pumps water from the spring to a pond belonging to Nubia Lacerda Matias, where her cows quench their thirst.

Before, the animals went straight to the spring, fouling the water and damaging the surrounding forest. The area was fenced off, protecting both the water and the vegetation, which grew and became denser, to the benefit of the people who live downstream.

Loana Defaveri, technical manager of Cetric, is photographed at the bioenergy ecopark in Chapecó in southwestern Brazil. The aerial photo in the background shows the various components of the complex, which receives industrial waste and produces biogas, electricity, biomethane and other by-products. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
CHAPECÓ, Brazil , Apr 29 2024 (IPS)

Biogas sounds like redemption, the conversion of the sinner. Its production involves extracting energy from filth, from the most disgusting environmental pollution, and at the same time avoiding the worsening of the global climate crisis.

The Industrial and Commercial Solid Waste Treatment Center (Cetric) is dedicated to extracting biogas from the waste that abounds in the municipality where it is based, Chapecó, in southern Brazil. “Making use of industrial waste is an important and innovative niche in Brazil, opening up new paths for the emerging biogas market.” -- Heleno Quevedo

With a population of 255,000 and numerous meat processing plants, Chapecó is a main hub in the western part of the state of Santa Catarina, the largest national producer and exporter of pork and also a major poultry producer.

For this reason, biogas production is proliferating in the region, using manure from pig farms, partly due to pressure from environmental authorities to prevent animal waste from continuing to contaminate rivers and soil to the detriment of the environment and human health.

On Apr. 3, the Federation of Santa Catarina Industries launched the Decarbonization Hub program, with the goal of treating 100 percent of swine manure in the next 10 years, among other challenges to meet the agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It does not seem feasible, but it points in the right direction.

The Cetric group of companies was founded in 2001 with a specific mission: to take care of waste from nearby agribusiness and other smaller sources, from its evaluation and collection to its transportation, processing and disposal.

It then expanded nationally. Today it is active in 12 of Brazil’s 26 states, with four Bioenergy Ecoparks, including the first one in Chapecó, 17 transshipment units with warehouses and 19 emergency teams at strategic points.

“Making use of industrial waste is an important and innovative niche in Brazil, opening up new paths for the emerging biogas market,” said Heleno Quevedo, an energy engineer and creator of the news portal Energía e Biogás, in a telephone interview with IPS from Santo André, a city neighboring São Paulo, also in the south.

The photo shows a truck running 100 percent on biomethane and, in the background, the industrial waste landfill in Chapecó, in southwestern Brazil. The company Cetric acquired another 28 trucks that will use fuel from its own production. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Industrial waste as a business

Cetric’s business is the management of waste wherever it is, not just landfills, chemical engineer Loana Defaveri, the company’s technical manager, told IPS. Guidance on the handling of this material in industries is part of their activity.

The company also acts in emergencies, such as accidents with dangerous loads on highways, cities or production sites. It is a kind of firefighter in these cases and deploys specialized personnel with the necessary tools and vehicles for prompt assistance, dispersed throughout 19 locations in the country.

In mid-April, a team dealt with a spill of propionic acid, used to preserve food, when a truck overturned in Paraná, a neighboring state. The most frequent are accidents involving trucks carrying fuel such as ethanol and diesel, Defaveri said at the company’s facilities.

The CSTR reactor is more productive than covered lagoon biodigesters because temperature, acidity and other indicators of the substrate that generates biogas are controlled. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

A Command Center, a rotating team of four people, monitors by video the fleet of more than 200 Cetric trucks 24 hours a day from the company’s headquarters and the emergencies addressed.

But the ecopark in Chapecó is the heart, the center of innovations and the circular economy of the Cetric Group, which is involved in a range of activities.

Bioenergy production began in 2005, but was suspended due to the scarcity and low durability of biogas equipment. It resumed 15 years later and now has five covered lagoon biodigesters and a continuous stirred tank reactor, known as CSTR.

Only organic material is used for this purpose. The waste collected by the company is class 1, hazardous waste, generally chemical, and class 2, which includes inert waste such as iron scrap or concrete, and waste that degrades, such as organic waste, which is the bioenergy part.

Four generators produce one megawatt of electricity with the biogas produced at Cetric’s own ecopark. This power supplies the consumption of the Brazilian company’s industrial solid waste treatment complex. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Biogas from landfills and biodigesters

From the large landfill covered with impermeable black tarpaulin, which accumulates most of the garbage, biogas is extracted that only serves to generate heat, because it contains little methane, Defaveri explained. Burning this biogas reduced 80 percent of the firewood previously consumed in the ecopark.

For electricity generation and the refining that converts it into biomethane, the biogas that comes out of the biodigesters, which has 71 percent methane, and the reactor, with 73 percent, is used, she said.

In this energy sector, four biogas generators produce one megawatt of power, electricity estimated to be sufficient for the company’s consumption.

Another part of the biogas is refined by membranes, activated carbon and other processes to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) and sulfuric acid (H2S) to obtain biomethane, which is the fuel used by a 100 percent gas truck and 15 other hybrid trucks that consume gas and diesel.

Another 28 trucks recently acquired in Chapecó will also use 100 percent biomethane or natural gas as fuel, as the two gases are equivalent.

A truck stores biomethane in yellow cylinders, ready to supply trucks transporting industrial waste being treated at the Cetric Ecopark in Chapecó, a municipality in southern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Productivity still low

But production is still not very efficient, despite the progress represented by the CSTR reactor. “We only produce 10 percent of our biogas potential, but we are increasing productivity with technological advances, new investments and personnel training,” Defaveri noted.

Cetric Chapecó currently produces 250 cubic meters of methane per hour and intends to reach 1,500 cubic meters per hour, i.e. six times the volume, which requires heavy investment and also depends on the substrate, as they call the input, she said.

The effluent resulting from this process undergoes a complex treatment, which includes waste separation, sand filters, membranes, electrolysis and even a reverse osmosis device.

This makes it possible to obtain water of sufficient quality for reuse in washing vehicles and other equipment, chemical engineer Diego Molinet told IPS. The solid part goes to composting for processing that can result in biofertilizer.

The effluent cannot be used as fertilizer, a common practice among small biogas producers such as pig farmers, because it can saturate the soil, with an excess of some components, such as phosphorous, said Molinet.

Diego Molinet, a chemical engineer at Cetric, holds in his hands the result of the treatment of effluents from the industrial waste treatment process, with production of biogas and biomethane: a glass with clean water for non-potable reuse and another glass with solid material that can be converted into fertilizer after composting. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Effluent treatment also produces ARLA 32, a pure urea compound that is mandatory in heavy vehicle exhaust to reduce the emission of pollutant gases, such as nitrogen oxide. It is of growing use in the automotive industry.

“Cetric enjoys a good reputation” and plays an important role in Chapecó by preventing the city from having to send its industrial waste to other municipalities, Marck Gehlen, the city government director of the environment, told IPS.

Its emergency service has already controlled several accidents in the city. One was a fire at a fuel distribution company, whose rapid control prevented contamination of water courses and risks to the population, said Gehlen, an environmental engineer who has worked in the sector for more than 10 years, three years as director.

One concern is the sometimes dangerous truckloads of industrial waste that crisscross the city, he admitted.

With four meatpacking plants on the periphery of the city, Chapecó has had some problems, such as the stench emitted by the plants, although that was brought under control years ago. In general, the companies have adopted measures to avoid environmental damage and one of them has already transferred potentially polluting activities away from the city.

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.

Leide Aparecida Souza, president of the Association of Residents of the Genipapo Settlement in the rural area of Acreúna, a municipality in central-western Brazil, stands next to breads and pastries from the bakery where 14 rural women work. The women's empowerment and self-esteem have been boosted by the fact that they earn their own income, which is more stable than from farming, and provide an important service to their community. CREDIT: Marina Carolina / IPS

By Mario Osava
ACREÚNA/ORIZONA, Brazil , Apr 16 2024 (IPS)

A bakery, fruit pulp processing and water pumped from springs are empowering women farmers in Goiás, a central-eastern state of Brazil. New renewable energy sources are driving the process.

“We work in the shade and have a secure, stable income, not an unsteady one like in farming. We cannot control the price of milk, nor droughts or pests in the crops,” said Leide Aparecida Souza, who runs a bakery in the rural area of Acreúna, a municipality of 21,500 inhabitants in central Goiás."The Network is the link between the valorization of rural women, family farming and the energy transition. We chose family farmers because they are the ones who produce healthy food." -- Jessyane Ribeiro

The bakery supplies a variety of breads, including cheese buns and hot dog buns, as well as pastries, cakes and biscuits to some 3,000 students in the municipality’s school network, for the government’s school feeding program, which provides family farming with at least 30 percent of its purchases. Welfare institutions are also customers.

The bakery is an initiative of the women of the Genipapo Settlement, established in 1999 by 27 families, as part of the agrarian reform program implemented in Brazil after the 1964-1985 military dictatorship, which has so far settled 1.3 million families on land of their own.

Genipapo, the name chosen for the settlement, is a fruit of the Cerrado, the savannah that dominates a large central area of Brazil. Each settled family received 44 hectares of land and local production is concentrated on soybeans, cassava and its flour, corn, dairy cattle and poultry.

Six solar panels will reduce the costs of the women’s bakery, installed on the former estate where 27 families were given land in Acreúna, in the Brazilian state of Goiás, as part of the country’s ongoing agrarian reform program. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Bakery empowers rural women

The women of the Association of Residents of the Genipapo Settlement decided to create a bakery as a new source of income 16 years ago. They also gained self-esteem and autonomy by earning their own money. In general, agricultural and livestock income is controlled by the husbands.

Each of the women working at the bakery earns about 1,500 reais (300 dollars) a month, six percent more than the national minimum wage. “We started with 21 participants, now we have 14 available for work, because some moved or quit,” Souza said.

A year ago, the project obtained a solar energy system with six photovoltaic panels from the Women of the Earth Energy project, promoted by the Gepaaf Rural Consultancy, with support from the Socio-environmental Fund of the Caixa Econômica Federal, the regional bank focused on social questions, and the public Federal University of Goiás (UFG).

Gepaaf is the acronym for Management and Project Development in Family Farming Consultancy and its origin is a study group at the UFG. The company is headquartered in Inhumas, a city of 52,000 people, 180 km from Acreúna.

Due to difficulties with the inverter, a device needed to connect the generator to the electricity distribution network, the plant only began operating in March. Now they will see if the savings will suffice to cover the approximately 300 reais (60 dollars) that the bakery’s electricity costs.

Iná de Cubas stands next to the biodigester that she got from the Women of the Earth Energy project in the municipality of Orizona, in the center-east of the Brazilian state of Goiás. The biogas generated benefits the productive activities of small farmers in rural settlements, as do solar plants on a family or community scale. Image: Mario Osava / IPS

“It’s not that much money, but for us every penny counts,” Souza said. Electricity is cheap in their case because it is rural and nocturnal consumption. Bread production starts at 5:00 p.m. and ends at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. from Monday to Thursday, according to Maristela Vieira de Sousa, the group’s secretary.

The industrial oven they use is low-consumption and wood-burning. There is another, gas-fired oven, which is only used in emergencies, “because it is expensive,” said de Sousa. Biogas is a possibility for the future, which would use the settlement’s abundant agricultural waste products.

Alternative energies make agribusiness viable

Iná de Cubas, another beneficiary of the Women of the Earth Energy project, has a biodigester that supplies her stove, in addition to eight solar panels. They generate the energy to produce fruit pulp that also supplies the schools of Orizona, a municipality of 16,000 inhabitants in central-eastern Goiás.

The solar plant, installed two years ago, made the business viable by eliminating the electricity bill, which was high because the two refrigerators needed to store fruit and pulp consume a lot of electricity.

The abundance of fruit residues provides the inputs for biogas production, an innovation in a region where manure is more commonly used.

The refrigerators in which Iná de Cubas keeps the fruit and fruit pulp that she prepares for sale to schools in Orizona in central Brazil consume a great deal of electricity. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

“I only use an additional load of animal feces when I need more biogas,” said Cubas, who gets the manure from her neighbor’s cows, since she does not raise livestock.

On her five hectares of land, Cubas produces numerous species of fruit for her cottage industry.

In addition to typical Brazilian fruits, such as cajá or hog plum (Spondias mombin), pequi or souari nut (Caryocar brasiliense) and jabuticaba from the grapetree (Plinia cauliflora), she grows lemons, mangoes, oranges, guava and avocado, among others.

For the pulp, she also uses fruit from neighbors, mostly relatives. The distribution of her products is done through the Agroecological Association of the State of Goias (Aesagro), which groups 53 families from Orizona and surrounding areas.

Agroecology is the system used on her farm, where the family also grows rice, beans and garlic. The crops are irrigated with water pumped from nearby springs that were recovered by the diversion of a road and by fences to block access by cattle, which used to trample the banks.

“The overall aim is to strengthen family farming, the quality of life in the countryside, incomes, and care for the environment, and to offer healthy food, without poisonous chemicals, especially for schools,” explained Iná de Cubas.

Biodigesters made of steel and cement, solar energy for different purposes, including pumping water, rainwater collection and harvesting, are part of the “technologies” that the Women of the Earth Energy project is trying to disseminate, said Gessyane Ribeiro, Gepaaf’s administrator.

In the area where Iná de Cubas lives, the project installed five biodigesters and seven solar pumps for farming families, in addition to solar plants in schools, she said.

The eight solar panels on the roof of the Cubas family’s house, in the rural area of Orizona, make small agro-industrial processes viable, adding value to the wide diversity of native fruits from different Brazilian ecosystems, such as the Cerrado savannah and the Amazon rainforest, along with species imported throughout the country’s history. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Network of rural women

The Women of the Earth Energy Network, brought together by the project and coordinated by Ribeiro, operates in six areas defined by the government based on environmental, economic, social and cultural similarities. In all, it involves 42 organizations in 27 municipalities in Goiás.

The local councils choose the beneficiaries of the projects, all implemented with collective work and focused on women’s productive activities and the preservation of the Cerrado. All the beneficiaries commit themselves to contribute to a solidarity fund to finance new projects, explained agronomist Ribeiro.

“The Network is the link between the valorization of rural women, family farming and the energy transition,” she said. “We chose family farmers because they are the ones who produce healthy food.”

“We offer technological solutions that rely on the links between food, water and energy, to move towards an energy transition that can actually address climate change,” said sociologist Agnes Santos, a researcher and communicator for the Network.

Recovering and protecting springs is another of the Women’s Network’s activities.

Two solar panels run a pump installed in a spring in the forest to pump the water needed by the 29 cows owned by Nubia Lacerda Matias’ family in Orizona, in the state of Goiás, near Brasilia. Thus the cows stopped drinking water in the springs, which are now fenced off, vital to protect the water source for local families living downstream. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Nubia Lacerda Matias celebrates the moment she was invited to join the movement. She won a solar pump, made up of two solar panels and pipes, which bring water to her cattle that used to damage the spring, now protected by a fence and a small forest.

“It’s important not only for my family, but for the people living downhill” where a stream flows, fed by various springs along the way, she said.

But the milk from the 29 cows and corn crops on her 9.4-hectare farm are not enough to support the family with two young children. Her husband, Wanderley dos Anjos, works as a school bus driver.

Iná de Cubas’ partner, Rosalino Lopes, also works as a technician for the Pastoral Land Commission, a Catholic organization dedicated to rural workers.

In his spare time, Lopes invents agricultural machines. He assembles and combines parts of motorcycles, tractors and other tools, in an effort to fill a gap in small agriculture, undervalued by the mechanical industry and scientific research in Brazil.

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.

The Toledo Bioenergy Center, in southern Brazil, is under construction, but its biodigesters are already operating with manure and the carcasses of disease-free dead animals from 16 pig farms. The goal is to generate one megawatt of power and for pig farmers to participate in the production of biogas without having to invest in their own plants, so their waste is biodigested and turned into fertilizer, instead of polluting rivers and the soil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
TOLEDO, Brazil , May 8 2023 (IPS)

It is the “best energy,” according to its producers, but biogas from livestock waste still lacks an organized market that would allow it to take off and realize its potential in Brazil, the world’s largest meat exporter.

“There is a lack of steady consumers,” said Cícero Bley Junior, who has been a pioneer in the promotion of biogas in the west of the southern state of Paraná, since he served as superintendent of Renewable Energies at Itaipu Binacional (2004-2016).

Itaipu, a gigantic hydroelectric plant shared by Brazil and Paraguay on the Paraná River which forms part of the border between the two countries, encourages nearby pig farmers to take advantage of manure to produce biogas, avoiding its disposal in the rivers that flow into the reservoir, whose contamination affects electricity generation in the long run.“The animal protein chain must also see itself as a generator of energy, just as the sugarcane sector defines itself as a sugar and energy industry since it began producing ethanol (a biogas) almost 50 years ago.” -- Cícero Bley

The companies that form part of the animal protein chain, in general the meat industry that purchases animals ready for slaughter and offers breeding sows and technical assistance to livestock producers, should also buy biogas and its biomethane derivative from the breeders, Bley said.

“The animal protein chain must also see itself as a generator of energy, just as the sugarcane sector defines itself as a sugar and energy industry since it began producing ethanol (a biogas) almost 50 years ago,” he told IPS.

But the companies do not do so: none of them are affiliated with the Brazilian Biogas Association (Abiogás), he lamented. The dairy industry could greatly reduce the cost of picking up milk from farms if it replaced diesel with biomethane in its trucks, he said, to illustrate.

If no such decision is taken, there will be no large investments in gas-fired engines either, which can use natural gas or biomethane, also called renewable natural gas.

In addition to the environmental benefits, such as the reduction in water pollution and the decarbonization of energy, biogas offers economic advantages by making use of manure that was previously considered waste and converting it into biofertilizer.

It also drives a new equipment industry and local development by decentralizing energy and fertilizer production.

“It’s the best energy, for sure,” said Anelio Thomazzoni, a pig farmer from Vargeão, a small municipality of 3,500 inhabitants in the west of the state of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil. His farm has a 600-kilowatt biogas power plant and a 1-megawatt solar power plant.

“The correct use of crop waste, as fertilizer after biodigestion, made it possible for me to reduce by 100 percent the purchase of potassium chloride and phosphorus,” formerly essential fertilizers, he told IPS by phone from his town.

A visitor in Toledo examines the external controls of the mixer, an essential piece of equipment in the production of biogas and whose absence or mishandling can affect the operation. The complexity of biodigestion, compared to photovoltaic solar energy, is a factor that is slowing down the expected progress of biogas in Brazil, despite its multiple benefits in energy, environmental and economic terms. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Frustrated potential

Brazil today produces only 0.5 percent of the biogas that could result from agricultural, livestock and industrial waste, urban garbage and sewage, estimated Bley, who founded the International Center for Renewable Energies-Biogás (CIBiogás) in 2013.

Brazil would have the potential to replace 70 percent of the diesel it consumes if it allocated all the biogas to the production of biomethane, according to Abiogás. In terms of electricity, it could reach almost 40 percent, but today it is limited to 353 megawatts – around 0.0018 percent of the total – according to the government’s National Electric Power Agency.

In global terms, Brazil is only ninth in biogas electricity generation, accounting for 2.1 percent of the global total, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

The sugarcane sector joined the effort five years ago in promoting biogas, with larger plants for power generation or biomethane refining in the southern state of São Paulo. New initiatives are attempting to accelerate the development of this energy market in the southern region of Brazil, which concentrates two-thirds of the national production of pork.

Residues from the production of sugar and ethanol from cane represent 48 percent of Brazil’s biogas potential, followed by the animal protein chain, which accounts for 32.2 percent, estimates Abiogás. The rest comes from agricultural waste and sewage.

This large pre-treatment tank uses pig carcasses, an abundant material that is still little employed in the production of biogas, which the Toledo Bioenergy Plant in southern Brazil will process to reach a generation capacity of one megawatt, playing a sanitary role at the same time. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Innovative initiatives

The Bioenergy Plant under construction by CIBiogás, a nonprofit technology and innovation institution in Toledo, a city of 156,000 people in western Paraná, seeks to “validate a possible business model,” explained Juliana Somer, a construction engineer who is operations manager at the Center.

Pig farmers provide the “substrate” and receive back a part of the “digestate”, as the manure converted into a better fertilizer is called, without the gases that make up the biogas, extracted in the biodigestion process. With that they fertilize their land.

To generate electricity, biogas must have at least 55 percent methane. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is another component, making up about 40 percent. Hydrogen sulfide must be removed to prevent corrosion of the equipment.

“The objectives are environmental, social, energy-related and the dissemination of technologies,” said Rafael Niclevicz, environmental engineer at CIBiogás. To that end, an area of ​​high pig farm density was chosen, with about 120,000 hogs in five square kilometers.

The manure is collected daily, 70 percent by trucks and the pig farmers themselves, and the rest by pipelines from the nearest farms. Currently, 16 pig farmers, whose herds total about 40,000 animals, supply the plant, which also collects carcasses of disease-free dead pigs.

“The model makes sense for pig farmers who do not want to invest in facilities to produce biogas on their own. It solves the problem of waste disposal and there are socio-environmental benefits for everyone,” said Somer.

This Enerdimbo truck is powered by biomethane and is used to collect manure from 40 pig producers that feeds the company’s large biodigesters in southern Brazil. Solar power is added to biogas to provide 2.5 megawatts of energy, enough to supply 5,000 medium-sized households. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The plant is a joint project between the municipal government, which ceded the land, and Itaipu Binacional, which provided funding. The goal is an installed capacity of one megawatt.

In Ouro Verde, 22 kilometers from Toledo, a similar plant, Enerdinbo, receives the “substrate” from 40 farms within a radius of 15 kilometers, where more than 100,000 pigs are raised, for a total generation capacity of two megawatts, to which are added 500 kilowatts from a solar plant.

It is enough to provide electricity to 5,000 households, estimates EDB Energía do Brasil, the company that offers businesses and residential consumers the possibility of reducing their electricity bills by 10 percent by joining the cooperative that benefits from the electricity generated by Enerdinbo.

The business of EDB, created by businesspeople in Cascavel, 60 kilometers from Ouro Verde, is to implement small renewable energy plants to distribute the benefits of distributed generation among members of the cooperative, with the investment by the consumers themselves to save on energy costs.

Enerdinbo and the Toledo Bioenergy Plant seek to expand biogas by avoiding the difficulty for pig farmers and other small farmers or ranchers to invest in the energy business.

A view of one of the three large biodigesters of Enerdimbo, a plant of the EDB Energía do Brasil company that distributes the benefits of distributed electricity generation to numerous members of the cooperative, whose power bills are thus reduced by 10 percent. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Demand from animal protein producers

“Small and medium-sized rural producers are true heroes who face various risks when deciding, in isolation, to implement a waste treatment project generated in the animal protein chain for the production of biogas on their properties,” said a manifesto from the producers and bioenergy specialists.

The document, released at the South Brazilian Biogas and Biomethane Forum on Apr. 18 in Foz do Iguaçu, in the far west of Paraná, calls for greater support from the public sector and from companies that link biogas production and the meat industry, for their “strategic value for Brazil’s energy transition.”

Only 333 animal waste biogas plants are suppliers to the national electricity grid, that is, 0.005 percent of Brazil’s 6.5 million livestock farms, the document stressed.

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.

By Luis Brizuela
CANDELARIA, Cuba, Dec 20 2022 (IPS)

Mayra Rojas is one of a small but growing number of people in Cuba benefiting from the production of biogas, a renewable energy source still little used in a country highly dependent on fossil fuels.

The biodigester in the back of her house in the rural community of Carambola, Candelaria municipality in the province of Artemisa, 80 kilometers west of Havana, brings Rojas the benefits of not using firewood and electricity for cooking, with the consequent reduction in electric bills and cooking time.

It was built in 2011 with the help of her husband Edegni Puche, who worked in the installation of the gas pipes and other aspects.

Rojas and Puche, who raise pigs and grow fruits and vegetables on their small family farm, were advised by 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).

Rojas also received materials from the municipal government and the local pig company to build the small-scale Chinese-type fixed-dome biodigester of about six cubic meters in size.

She estimates that the total cost of the project ranged between 500 and 600 dollars at the exchange rate at the time.

Construction costs depend on the size, type and thickness of the material, as well as the characteristics of the site.

However, experts estimate that the average minimum cost for the construction of a small-scale biodigester – which more than covers the cooking needs of a household – currently stands at around 1,000 dollars in a country with an average monthly salary equivalent to 160 dollars at the official exchange rate.

Rojas says that “before, when we cleaned the pens, the manure, urine and waste from the pigs’ food piled up in the open air, in a corner of the yard. It stank and there were a lot of flies.”

The organic matter is now decomposed anaerobically by bacteria, but in a closed, non-polluting environment that provides methane gas as an energy resource, instead of releasing it into the atmosphere.

Thanks to the alternative energy source Rojas can also keep her nails painted and her hair clean for longer.

It also helped her husband and two young children become more involved in household chores, cleaning the yard and taking care of the animals on the family farm, “and created greater awareness of environmental care.”

In addition, biogas technology provides biol and biosol – liquid effluent and sludge, respectively – which are ideal for fertilizing and restoring soils, “as well as watering and keeping plants green,” says Rojas, who has a lush garden where she grows varieties of exotic orchids.

Her biodigester has also proven useful 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.

There are an estimated 5,000 biodigesters in Cuba, with the potential to expand the network to 20,000 units, at least the small-scale ones, according to conservative estimates by experts.

More than 90 percent of Cuba’s electricity comes from burning fossil fuels in aging thermoelectric plants and diesel and fuel oil engines, in a nation where a significant percentage of the 3.9 million homes use electric power as the main energy source for cooking and heating water for bathing.

Thales Motta, director of GNR Fortaleza, stands in front of the biomethane plant located in northeastern Brazil, the development of which required overcoming prejudices, mistrust and misinformation to open up the market for gas generated from garbage. Now biomethane is expanding, making use of landfills and agricultural biomass. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
FORTALEZA, Brazil , Sep 5 2022 (IPS)

The increasing productivity with which humankind generates waste has gained at least one sustainable counterpart: the extraction of biogas from landfills, a growing activity in Brazil.

"There was a great deal of prejudice even among engineers, skepticism in the gas companies. We had to present analyses and quality tests that were more rigorous than the ones required for fossil fuel gas. But we broke down the barrier of discredit and opened a new market, proving that it is a safe, stable gas with predictable prices.” -- Thales Motta
Two small plateaus stand out in the landscape on the outskirts of Caucaia, one of the 19 municipalities that make up the metropolitan region of Fortaleza, capital of the state of Ceará in the Northeast of the country.

Although they look similar, one of the hills receives about 5,000 tons per day of solid waste collected in the metropolitan region of 4.2 million inhabitants. The other, the old sanitary landfill which began to operate in 1991, is already closed, but it is the one that generates more gas.

“We are pioneers in the production of biomethane from garbage,” said Thales Motta, director of Fortaleza Renewable Natural Gas (GNR), a partnership between the private companies Ecometano, of the MDC renewable energy and natural gas group, and Marquise Ambiental, of Fortaleza, which manages the Caucaia landfills.

Biomethane is the by-product of biogas refining that removes other gases, such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide.

GNR Fortaleza produces about 100,000 cubic meters per day of this gas, which is sold to the state-owned Ceará Gas Company (Cegás), which mixes it with natural gas in its pipelines.

“We supply 15 percent of the gas distributed by Cegás, which trusted the quality of our biomethane,” Motta said during IPS’s visit to the GNR plant, inaugurated in December 2017.

This labyrinth of pipes collect biogas from the landfill and refine it to produce biomethane with 95 percent purity. The renewable gas is mixed with natural gas for industrial use, in vehicles and thermoelectric plants, as well as in homes and businesses in the metropolitan region of Fortaleza, in northeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Initial difficulties

Ecometano’s pioneering activity is due to another plant, Dos Arcos, established in 2014 in São Pedro da Aldeia, a coastal city of 108,000 inhabitants, 140 kilometers from Rio de Janeiro. Its capacity is limited to 14,000 cubic meters per day.

“There was no regulation for biomethane then and the National Agency of Petroleum, Natural Gas and Biofuels denied us authorization to sell it,” said Motta, an electrical engineer. There were losses; the sales were made directly to a limited number of customers, such as supermarkets.

But the company persevered and the regulation came out in 2017, shortly before the start of GNR Fortaleza’s operations.

“There was a great deal of prejudice even among engineers, skepticism in the gas companies. We had to present analyses and quality tests that were more rigorous than the ones required for fossil fuel gas,” said the plant manager.

“But we broke down the barrier of discredit and opened a new market, proving that it is a safe, stable gas with predictable prices,” he added.

A view of the new Caucaia landfill, near Fortaleza, capital of the state of Ceará in northeastern Brazil, which receives about 5,000 tons of garbage a day. It already produces biogas, but will do so on a larger scale in a few years. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Advantageous costs

At the beginning, biomethane cost 30 percent more, but today it is 30 percent cheaper than natural gas, in view of the rise in fossil fuels, he pointed out. Its price depends on internal factors, such as inflation, and is not subject to unpredictable oil prices on the international market or exchange rate fluctuations, he stressed.

“Biomethane competes with fossil gas on an advantageous footing today. But even if oil becomes cheaper, the market is predisposed to betting on biomethane” because of environmental issues, he said.

“Cegás decided to distribute biomethane because it considers it strategic to diversify its mix with a cleaner, renewable and sustainable gas, thus contributing to reducing pollution and improving the environment,” the company’s president, Hugo de Figueiredo Junior, told IPS.

“It is also an opportunity to expand suppliers, competition and conditions to offer better prices to the end consumer,” he added.

Cegás, in which the state of Ceará is a majority shareholder, was a pioneer within Brazil in the injection of biomethane into its network, starting in May 2018.

The nearly 15 percent proportion of biomethane in the total volume constitutes “one of the highest percentages of renewable gas injected into the grid by a distributor in the world,” Figueiredo said.

That proportion may expand in the future, but biomethane faces several challenges, he added.

There is a need to disseminate existing technological solutions and facilitate access to them, expand knowledge about potential uses of green gases, and improve regulation and processes for the collection and disposal of solid waste and wastewater, he said.

The old landfill, now covered, still generates biogas that is converted to biomethane by refining, in Caucaia in northeastern Brazil. The dark lake is leachate, a highly polluting waste liquid that is treated before being discarded by sprinkling it on the soil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Expansion

In terms of production, GNR Fortaleza is now the second largest biomethane plant in Brazil. It is surpassed by Gas Verde, from Seropédica, a town near Rio de Janeiro, which has been producing 120,000 cubic meters per day since 2019.

Many interested parties visit GNR, which has become a reference point for gas generated from waste because it has developed process technologies that make it possible to integrate equipment from different national and international suppliers, “with its own codes that are open” to anyone, said Motta.

Currently, many companies that extract biogas from landfills for electricity generation are preparing to convert their plants to biomethane production, he said.

“We receive visits here from universities and groups of interested parties. We have to build an auditorium for lectures. There was no laboratory for biomethane analysis in the Northeast. Now we have one and research on this gas is mushrooming,” Motta said.

But it is necessary to take a broader view, he acknowledged. Landfills are limited. A minimum of 2,000 tons of waste per day is needed to make a biomethane plant viable, he estimated. Only large cities with at least one million inhabitants generate that much solid waste.

“We have to look for other kinds of biomass,” he said.

Hundreds of trucks travel the roads transporting garbage to the Caucaia landfill, some 20 kilometers from Fortaleza, the capital of the state of Ceará in Brazil’s Northeast region. About 5,000 tons of garbage are produced daily from the metropolitan region, which has 4.2 million inhabitants. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

This process is already underway, especially in the South and Southeast regions of Brazil, where largescale agricultural production offers a large volume of waste. Sugarcane is the main source of biomass, as it is also planted to produce ethanol, whose consumption in vehicles is on par with that of gasoline.

Livestock manure, especially from pigs, drives the production of biogas for electricity generation, and a growing proportion goes towards conversion into biomethane, especially for use in vehicles.

“Biomethane is a suitable fuel for the energy transition, has more predictable prices (than fossil fuels) and can be produced in regions far from the existing natural gas network,” which in Brazil is concentrated along the eastern coast, Figueiredo, the president of Cegás, said from the company’s headquarters in Fortaleza.

But not having a pipeline nearby can frustrate large projects, Motta said. He gave the example of a sugar agribusiness company that could produce 30,000 cubic meters of methane a day. As this is double its own consumption and the nearest big city is 90 kilometers away, the project was unfeasible.

Harnessing gas from garbage, and from biomass in general, has become an urgent necessity in the face of the climate emergency. Methane contributes more intensely to the greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide, the most prevalent greenhouse gas, which is used to gauge threats to the climate.

Brazil and other countries pledged to reduce methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030, as a crucial step towards keeping global warming to a maximum of two degrees Celsius by 2050.

GNR Fortaleza, located in Caucaia, a city of some 370,000 inhabitants 15 kilometers from Fortaleza, plays an environmental role. But in terms of employment, it generates only 32 direct jobs and an uncertain number of indirect jobs, including outsourced services, temporary consultants and suppliers of certain equipment.

Cegás serves only 24,000 gas consumers in Greater Fortaleza. According to its data, industry accounts for 46.26 percent of consumption, thermoelectric plants for 30 percent and motor vehicles for 22.71 percent. There is little left – just 0.73 percent for households and 1.22 percent for commerce.

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.

View of the solar park in the municipality of Escobar, located an hour's drive from Buenos Aires. Inaugurated this month, it is the first municipally financed and managed solar energy project, at a time when private investment has withdrawn from large clean energy projects in Argentina. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
ESCOBAR, Argentina, Jul 18 2022 (IPS)

The multitude of solar panels stands out along a dirt road in an unpopulated area. Although located just an hour’s drive from Buenos Aires, the new solar park in the municipality of Escobar is in a place of silence and solitude, symbolic of the difficulties faced by renewable energies in making inroads in Argentina.

The Escobar plant, inaugurated this month, is the first solar energy park with municipal investment and management, at a time when private initiative has practically withdrawn from clean energy projects in this South American country of 47 million people, which has been in the grip of a deep economic and financial crisis for years.

“There are 3,700 photovoltaic solar panels that produce electricity to be sold to one of the electric cooperatives that distributes power in the area. With this plant, we seek to position ourselves as a sustainable municipality and access financing for new projects,” Victoria Bandín, director of Innovation in the Municipality of Escobar, told IPS during a tour of the grounds of the six-hectare park.

Located 50 kilometers from the Argentine capital, to which it is connected by a freeway, Escobar is a municipality on the northern edge of Greater Buenos Aires, a gigantic metropolitan area of 15 million inhabitants where the country’s greatest wealth and poverty live side by side.

Escobar’s extensive green areas have attracted thousands of families in recent years seeking to get away from the cement and noise of Buenos Aires, which has fuelled the construction of dozens of upscale high-security private housing developments.

Escobar is also home to a large community of Bolivian immigrants, who play a key role in the production of fruits and vegetables. In fact, the fresh food market that supplies the stores of several municipalities in the area bears the name “Bolivian Community”.

Next to the market, which is very close to the solar park, the white, inflated tarp of a biodigester, in which the market’s organic waste is processed, stands out.

Eliseo Acchura is about to send spoiled food discarded by stallholders to the biodigester at Escobar’s fruit and vegetable market. The biodigester, operating since last year, produces biogas that is then converted into electricity used in the market. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“I pick up almost a ton of fruit and vegetables per day that the stallholders discard, and after 40 to 60 days of decomposition in the biodigester, we have biogas,” Eliseo Acchura, who works on the project inaugurated last year with support from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), told IPS.

The biogas is used to generate electricity to supply part of the market.

“We have rural areas and we seek to preserve ourselves as a green place on the edge of the great gray blob that is the greater metropolitan area,” Guillermo Bochatón, coordinator of the Sustainable Escobar program, which is carrying out several environmental initiatives, told IPS.

The rise and fall of renewables

Clean energies experienced a boom in Argentina starting in 2016, thanks to the Renovar Program, which managed to attract domestic and foreign private investors.

Through this program, the national government guaranteed the purchase of electricity for 20 years at a fixed rate in dollars and created a guaranty fund with the participation of international credit institutions to guarantee payment.

The share of renewable sources in the total electricity mix, almost non-existent in 2015, grew significantly since 2016, reaching a record high of 13 percent on average in 2021.

Today, Argentina’s electricity system has an installed capacity of almost 43,000 MW, of which 5,175 MW are renewable. The main source of generation is thermal (powered by natural gas and, to a lesser extent, oil) making up 59 percent of the total, followed by large hydroelectric projects, which make up 25 percent (only hydroelectric projects of less than 50 MW are considered renewable).

Among renewables, the largest share last year came from wind (74 percent), followed by solar (13 percent), small hydro (7 percent) and bioenergies, according to official data

Of the 189 renewable energy projects in operation, 133 were commissioned over the last four years.

The biodigester at Escobar’s wholesale fruit market was inaugurated last year and is part of the environmentally friendly initiatives launched in this municipality near the Argentine capital. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Clean energies today face two major problems in this country, according to Marcelo Alvarez, a member of the board of directors of the Argentine Chamber of Renewable Energies (CADER).

One has to do with infrastructure due to the saturation of the electricity transmission networks that deliver electric power to large cities. Another is the lack of financing, as a result of the macroeconomic conditions in the country.

“Even private ventures in distributed generation today are practically reserved only for environmental activists, because the lack of financing and extremely low electricity rates make them unprofitable,” Alvarez explained.

He said that the way things are going, the country is not likely to meet the goal set by law in 2015, for 20 percent of the national electricity mix to come from domestic sources by 2025.

“From a technical point of view, Argentina’s potential for renewable energies is enormous, because it has the necessary natural resources. And economically too, because in the medium term the costs of electricity production will fall,” Gabriel Blanco, a specialist in renewable energies from the National University of the Center of the Province of Buenos Aires (UNICEN), told Ecoamericas.

“The main obstacle is that there is no political will, because the decision is to bet on the energy business of fossil fuels, large hydroelectric and nuclear power plants,” he added.

The Escobar solar park has an installed capacity of 2.3 MW and required an investment of some two million dollars, which will be recovered with the sale of electricity within seven years, said the mayor of Escobar, Ariel Sujarchuk. “Between 23 and 53 more years of useful life of pure profit will be left after that,” he added.

The inauguration was also attended by Environment Minister Juan Cabandié, who pledged more than 1.7 million dollars in government funds for the expansion of the solar park, which has a large piece of land available for the installation of more panels.

In his speech in Escobar, Cabandié criticized industrialized countries for failing to comply with the financing needed to transform the economies of developing countries, as pledged under the Paris Agreement on climate change, adopted in the French capital in 2015.

The minister said that “the sector responsible for damaging the planet is in the Northern, not the Southern, hemisphere,” and argued that it is the countries of the North that must assume “the responsibility of financing the transition to sustainability of the countries of the South.”

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.

The biodigester and part of the biogas plant of the Cocal company, surrounded by a sugarcane plantation on all sides, in the municipality of Narandiba, in the west of the southern Brazilian state of São Paulo, where sugarcane has replaced cattle ranching as the main economic activity. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
NARANDIBA, Brazil , Dec 20 2021 (IPS)

First came sugar. For four centuries, it was the main sugarcane product in Brazil. But since the 1970s sugarcane has grown and diversified as a source of energy: ethanol, electricity and biogas.

“Sugarcane is the green oil,” said André Alves da Silva, commercial and new products director of Cocal, as the company Comércio Indústria Canaã Açúcar e Álcool Ltda. is better known, which started large-scale production of biomethane, i.e. refined biogas, a renewable and clean equivalent of natural gas.

“We have a biofactory here,” he told IPS in an interview in the Cocal plant in Narandiba, a municipality located in the west of the southern state of São Paulo.

Referring to the plant whose scientific name is Saccharum officinarum as “sugarcane” has become obsolete in this region.

In addition to sugar and ethanol, electricity is generated from sugarcane bagasse, and biogas and other by-products are also created, such as biofertilizers, carbon dioxide gas and dried yeast, leftovers from alcohol fermentation, which, when processed, serve as protein-rich animal feed.

Biomethane in place of gas

The big novelty is biomethane, produced since June, as the starting point of a project that will bring gas to three closely grouped cities: Narandiba, Pirapozinho and Presidente Prudente, with a combined population of 264,000 people.

GasBrasiliano, a company of the state-owned oil conglomerate Petrobras, will be in charge of distribution and is building a 65-kilometer gas pipeline, which is scheduled to be inaugurated in June 2022.

“It is our first biomethane project, the first among many,” Alex Gasparetto, director-president of the distributor that holds the concession for piped gas in the west and north of São Paulo state, an area encompassing 375 municipalities and 9.2 million inhabitants, told IPS.

São Paulo, the richest and most populated state in Brazil, home to 46 million of the 214 million inhabitants of this enormous country, accounts for more than half of the national sugarcane production, in more than 150 agroindustrial sugar or ethanol plants next to sugarcane plantations, most of them in the GasBrasiliano concession area.

Sugarcane is the “green oil”, says André Alves da Silva, commercial and new products director of Cocal, an agroindustrial company located in Narandiba, in southern Brazil, which uses almost everything from sugarcane to produce electricity, biogas, biomethane, biofertilizers, yeast as animal feed and other gases, in addition to sugar and ethanol. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“The potential is huge, sugarcane biomethane can replace all the diesel and liquefied petroleum gas (for cooking) consumed in the state, a privileged situation,” said Alessandro Gardemann, president of the Brazilian Biogas Association (ABiogás).

“Cocal is a demonstration project, which goes from sugarcane cultivation to the final consumer with the supply of biomethane for the entire year,” he told IPS by telephone from Londrina, a city in the southern state of Paraná where his technology services company, Geo Biogas & Tech, which promoted biogas in the sugar-energy sector, is headquartered.

Solution for seasonal limitations

Geo’s technological contribution was decisive for the Cocal biomethane project to take off. It has long been known how to make biogas from vinasse, but this liquid residue from the ethanol (or alcohol) distillery can only be used during harvest season, generally from April to November.

The vinasse is bulky and smelly, impossible to store for many days in the ponds built to collect it before it is put into the horizontal biodigesters where the organic material is broken down in an anaerobic process that produces biogas.

To ensure a year-round supply, Geo adapted a German technology to incorporate into biodigestion another waste product, cachaça or filter cake, a dark sludge resulting from the processing of sugarcane juice to make sugar. Cachaça, for Brazilians, is the name for sugarcane brandy.

A treatment process that removes impurities and part of the moisture converts this waste, which used to be discarded, into raw material for biogas. It has “10 times more organic matter than vinasse,” which is why it is more productive, Eduardo Baptista, supervisor of industrial production at the Cocal biogas plant, told IPS.

A sea of sugarcane plantations flood Narandiba and its neighboring municipalities in the southern state of São Paulo, where the agroindustrial company Cocal grows it as the raw material for its biofactory for energy, fuels and agricultural inputs. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

This innovation made it possible to overcome seasonality, as it is stored in four open-air tanks next to the two vertical biodigesters, specifically for the cachaça. “During the harvest, we use the vinasse and between harvests, the cachaça,” avoiding interruptions in the production of biomethane, explained Alves, the company’s commercial director.

A second factor in favor of the project, he said, was that there is local demand for gas that could not be met by the GasBrasiliano pipeline, whose nearest point is more than 100 km from Presidente Prudente, the main city in the region, with a population of 230,000.

Extending the existing network to this limited market would not be economically viable, but a 65-kilometer gas pipeline from Cocal is, said Gasparetto, GasBrasiliano’s director-president.

The third factor is environmental. With biomethane, Cocal seeks to reduce the greenhouse gases emitted in its ethanol production. Replacing diesel with green gas decarbonizes the activity by 95 percent. Additional reductions can be obtained with the new fuel in trucks and agricultural equipment, an alternative that is currently being tested.

In addition, the waste from which the biogas is extracted is converted into clean biofertilizers, which emit 75 percent less carbon than chemical fertilizers, said Cocal’s commercial director.

Lastly, the decision was also based on the dual use of biogas: electricity or biomethane.

“Having two options reduces the risks,” the proportions can be modified according to demand and prices, Alves said. Currently, 53 percent of the biogas is refined into biomethane and 47 percent is used for electricity generation.

The vinasse pond at the Cocal plant, in the Brazilian municipality of Narandiba, feeds the biodigesters that produce biogas, later purified and refined for use in electricity generation or conversion into biomethane, a renewable and clean fuel equivalent to natural gas. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Cocal has also been generating energy by burning bagasse since 2002. Today it can supply electricity to a city of 730,000 inhabitants, the company reports.

Social contributions

For all this energy production, Cocal has two industrial units, each with its own sugarcane fields around it. The first was installed in 1980 in Paraguaçu Paulista, 135 kilometers from Narandiba.

It employs a total of 5,500 workers in 22 municipalities and has 125,000 hectares planted to sugarcane, mostly on land leased under 20-year contracts, according to Alves. The harvest reached 8.7 million tons of cane last year.

Narandiba currently has about 6500 inhabitants, after 2000 arrived, attracted by the local operation of Cocal, inaugurated in 2008, said the town’s mayor, Itamar dos Santos Silva, who estimated at 600 the direct and indirect employees of the sugar and alcohol plant a year ago – almost 10 percent of the population.

The municipality, which had stagnated when cattle ranching dominated its economy in the last decades of the last century, has prospered again. “Sugarcane totally changed the social and economic situation in the region,” the mayor said in a meeting with IPS in his office.

Deposits of cachaça or filter cake, a residue from sugar production, proved advantageous in the generation of biogas at Cocal’s two plants in western São Paulo state, in southern Brazil. The reason is that the residue contains a lot of organic material and is available when there is a lack of vinasse between sugarcane harvests. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

In addition to offering more jobs, Cocal pays even the lowest-earning employees double what a ranch worker used to earn, he said. With the rise in purchasing power, “every day a new house is built in Narandiba” and commerce and the demand for schools, health services and recreation has grown, Dos Santos Silva said.

Tax revenue also increased, but it lagged behind the immediate demands created by the influx of new residents, lamented the mayor, whose plans include attracting industry and stepping up the training of young people for the new supply of technical jobs in the sugarcane agro-industry.

Environmental sustainability was the main motive for Liane, a company that makes food products such as biscuits and pasta, to sign the first contract for the purchase of biomethane distributed by GasBrasiliano in Presidente Prudente.

Biomethane does not pollute like fossil fuels and probably has lower costs than “the natural gas that comes to us by truck from far away,” Mauricio Calvo, Liane’s industrial director, told IPS by telephone from the company’s headquarters.

Initially, biomethane will go to companies, fuel stations, shopping malls, hotels and large restaurants, i.e. large consumers.

The supply of piped gas to households remains a long-term goal, Gasparetto told IPS by telephone from GasBrasiliano’s headquarters in Araraquara, a town 280 kilometers from São Paulo.

The biofuel from this mini biogas power plant in the municipality of Entre Rios do Oeste, in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná, is supplied by local pig farmers, who earn extra income while the municipality saves on energy costs for its facilities and public lighting. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 11 2021 (IPS)

The number of victims of serious burns, some fatal, has increased in Brazil. Without money to buy cooking gas, the price of which rose 30 percent this year, many poor families resort to ethanol and people are injured in household accidents.

A larger number of poor Brazilians have returned to using firewood, less explosive but also a cause of accidents and of health-damaging household pollution. It is cheaper in the countryside, while in the cities people burn boards and old furniture, not always as widely available as alcohol or ethanol, which can be purchased at any gas station.

In fact, biofuels, such as wood, ethanol, biodiesel and biogas, have been competing with fossil fuels since the industrial use of coal began in England in the 18th century. Economic and environmental factors influence private and public decision-making with regard to their production and use.

A commitment made by 103 countries at the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) on Climate Change, which is taking place in the Scottish city of Glasgow during the first 12 days of November, to reduce methane emissions from 2020 levels 30 percent by 2030, may now give biofuels a new boost.

Replacing oil, gas and coal with other sources will help contribute to that goal.

“In Brazil, the demand for ethanol was imposed for economic reasons: high oil prices; and energy reasons: the risk of shortages,” said Regis Leal, an aeronautical engineer and specialist in Technological Development at the state-owned National Laboratory of Biorenewables.

Ethanol in the seventies

Ethanol is a fuel produced from sugarcane, corn or any vegetable with a high sucrose content, which is mainly used in motor vehicles. Brazil is the world’s second largest producer of ethanol, after the United States.

The National Alcohol Programme (Proalcohol) was created in Brazil in 1975, two years after the first big oil crisis that more than tripled the price of a barrel of oil. Brazil, which at the time imported more than 80 percent of the crude oil it consumed, lost the momentum of an economy that had grown by more than 10 percent per year between 1968 and 1973.

With alcohol or ethanol replacing gasoline or mixed with it, the aim was to reduce dependence on imported oil, while intensifying the search for hydrocarbon deposits for self-sufficiency, which Brazil only achieved three decades later.

This sugar mill and ethanol distillery are in the southern Brazilian state of São Paulo, much of whose territory has been turned into one large sugarcane field. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

In the United States, the use of ethanol began to be fomented in the 1980s, but for environmental reasons, Leal told IPS in an interview by telephone from Campinas, a city in the interior of the state of São Paulo, near the country’s largest sugar and ethanol-producing area.

In cities located at high altitudes, such as Denver, the capital of the western U.S. state of Colorado, at 1,600 metres above sea level, lower oxygen levels lead to incomplete combustion of petroleum derivatives and, consequently, greater carbon monoxide contamination and health damage, he explained.

Mixing in MTBE (methyl tert-butyl ether), a combination of chemicals, added oxygen, but because it was a highly toxic product it was soon replaced by ethanol, made from corn in the case of the U.S.

In both Brazil and the United States, biofuel production also bolstered or stabilised the price of sugar and corn by absorbing surplus production.

This is an aspect that is misunderstood by those who condemn biofuel production for apparently reducing food production. This is a false dilemma, because it must be analysed on a case-by-case basis, said Suani Coelho, coordinator of the Bioenergy Research Group (GBio) of the Energy and Environment Institute at the University of São Paulo.

“In Tanzania, a FAO (U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation) study evaluated the production of ethanol from manioc. The hypothesis seemed doubtful, also because the energy balance of cassava is not so good. But in Tanzania there is a surplus of the crop that cannot be exported. So it is worth taking advantage of it to make ethanol,” said Coelho, a chemical engineer with a doctorate in energy.

In Brazil, where ethanol is made almost exclusively from the more locally productive sugarcane, corn was incorporated in the industry in 2017, with a distillery in Lucas do Rio Verde, in the state of Mato Grosso, the country’s largest producer of soybeans, corn and cotton.

Lucas do Rio Verde is in the state of Mato Grosso, the region of Brazil with the highest soybean and corn production, which is crowded with agribusiness warehouses and silos. The first corn ethanol distillery was set up there to take advantage of the surplus corn production. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“Corn is produced there as a second crop, after soybeans, in the same area, in a volume that is not viable for export. So it makes sense to use it for ethanol,” she told IPS by telephone from São Paulo.

Ethanol led to a great improvement in the urban environment.

In Brazil it has already replaced 46 percent of gasoline, according to the sugarcane industry association (Unica), with an annual production of 35 billion litres. It is used as fuel alone in motor vehicles or as a 27 percent blend in gasoline.

The United States produces 50 to 70 percent more than Brazil, depending on the year. Together, they account for about 84 percent of world production, a level of concentration that hinders free international trade in ethanol.

Biofuels or electrification

Coelho and Leal do not agree with the claim that the electrification of transportation tends to hinder the expansion of biofuels to other countries and major producers.

Developing countries do not have the capacity to make large investments to build new infrastructure, such as electric recharging points for vehicles. Moreover, “Brazil is going through a crisis, it is increasing fossil fuel thermoelectric generation, making the energy mix dirtier, and it has no other way to increase the supply of electricity,” argued Coelho.

Leal said the demand for ethanol can grow a great deal. “Any increase in its blend in the United States, which accounts for half of the world’s gasoline consumption, will have a huge impact,” he said.

The ethanol expert also questions the environmental and climatic advantages of electric vehicles, taking into consideration the entire production cycle, transportation, batteries, employment and other aspects.

View of a vast oil palm plantation in Tailandia, a municipality in the state of Pará, in Brazil’s eastern Amazon rainforest. The intent to turn palm oil into biodiesel did not work out, because the oil serves a more attractive market in the food and chemical industries. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Biodiesel was not as successful as ethanol, but it also improved the urban environment and has a future, with some additional effort.

It is produced from vegetable or animal oils, even used, and other fatty materials.

Its main problem is that it is more expensive and therefore cannot compete with diesel fuel in order to replace it, Leal pointed out. Currently the diesel blend has been reduced from 12 to 10 percent, so as not to further drive up the cost of diesel fuel, the price of which is rising worldwide.

Another biofuel, which has been around for a long time but is now expanding, is biogas.

It is not only clean, but actually helps to reduce pollution, since it is the gas generated from garbage, wastewater, agricultural waste and animal excrement, which is no longer released into the air, thus reducing greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

Its use is incipient in Brazil, but it has the potential to replace 70 percent of the diesel fuel consumed in the country, at a lower cost, according to the Brazilian Biogas Association. And big cities and the country’s enormous agricultural sector offer plenty of raw materials.

By means of a simple refining process, biogas is converted into biomethane, equivalent to natural gas and, therefore, a fuel that can even be used to run heavy vehicles. If used for electricity generation, it could meet 36 percent of national demand, the association of companies in the sector estimates.

Small biodigesters produce biogas that could prevent the use of firewood and ethanol, and the resultant accidents and pollution, among poor families, especially in the countryside, noted Coelho.

“Appropriate public policies and low-interest loans for investments” could boost biogas and its environmental benefits, at a time when international financial institutions are cutting financing for coal-fired and other fossil fuel power plants, Leal said.

The two experts stressed that all these biofuels play an important role in making green hydrogen, produced from renewable energy sources, viable and recognised as central to the world’s energy future.

Biofuels have served humanity since its earliest past, not always in a sustainable way. The first was firewood, on which 2.8 billion people in the world still depend, according to an October 2020 World Bank report. But it is environmentally unsound, and leads to deforestation and household pollution.

The oils and resins that illuminated cities and homes in centuries past, before the advent of electricity, were also destructive. Oils extracted from whale blubber and from the eggs of Amazonian turtles are examples, almost driving certain species to extinction.

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.

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.

Two women fill sacks of charcoal made in mud igloos in the small town of San Juan Evangelista Analco in the mountains of the state of Oaxaca in southwestern Mexico. A group of women from this Zapotec indigenous village created a charcoal company in 2017, to take advantage of the wood that the community logs sustainably. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
OAXACA, Mexico, Apr 10 2020 (IPS)

Rosa Manzano carefully arranges pieces of wood in a big mud igloo that, seven days after it is full, will produce charcoal of high caloric content.

“Our forest also produces oak, which in the past was only sold as firewood and had little value. But with forest management and the work of women who have organised, we began this project,” Manzano told IPS, as she stacked the pieces of wood neatly and without leaving empty spaces inside the large igloo-shaped ovens.

Manzano belongs to the “Ka Niulas Yanni” – “active women” in the Zapotec language – Group of Women Charcoal Producers. The organisation was founded in 2017 by 10 women and two men in San Juan Evangelista Analco, a Zapotec indigenous municipality of fewer than 500 people, located in the northern highlands of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.

With financing from the government’s National Forestry Commission, the women built seven eight-cubic-meter igloo-shaped ovens and set up a warehouse for their community logging project. Under a 10-year plan that began in 2013, the community can extract 1,500 cubic meters of oak wood annually to make furniture and sell wood.

The charcoal makers light the ovens through a hole called a “rozadera”, and through a similar hole they check the progress of the fire and then block up the entrance with mud bricks. As the fire descends through the structure, smoke spews from the igloo’s “ears”.

“We work hard, because there is a market for charcoal, but being pioneers involves an effort,” says Manzano, a married mother of one, whose workday starts very early and ends mid-afternoon. She also works in the restaurant at a community-owned ecotourism site.

The women fire up the ovens twice a month, to produce 23-kg bags of black charcoal, which they sell for about five dollars a sack.

Wasted bioenergy

Despite these local initiatives, Mexico is wasting the potential of bioenergy, especially solid biofuels, including all forms of energy from different kinds of biomass.

This alternative source represents 10 percent of final energy consumption, with 23 million users of bioenergy for cooking (especially in rural areas), 10 million for heating (mainly in urban areas), 100,000 small factories and 100 medium and large ones, according to the Thematic Network on Bioenergy (RTB), an association of bioenergy researchers and entrepreneurs.

In Mexico, Latin America’s second-largest economy, almost 19 million tons of dry waste are produced and consumed annually in the residential sector for cooking, heating and water heating.

The installed capacity totals about 400 megawatts, based on raw materials such as firewood for domestic and industrial use, bagasse, charcoal and biogas.

Industrial uses of biomass are gaining ground in Mexico, such as the sawmill of the Sezaric Industrial Group, owned by the General Emiliano Zapata Union of Ejidos and Forest Communities, located in the municipality of Santiago Papasquiaro, in the state of Durango in northern Mexico. At the facility, forest waste fires the boiler that dries the wood and generates electricity. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

The country also generates some 70 million tons of organic waste per year, which can be used in this area.

In terms of electricity generation, the sector’s contribution is modest – 894 gigawatt-hours (Gwh) – compared to other alternative sources of energy. In the first quarter of 2019, gross generation totaled 80,225 Gwh, up from 78,167 in the same period last year. Gas-fired combined cycle plants produced 40,094, conventional thermal power plants 9,306 and coal-fired plants 6,265.

Hydroelectric plants accounted for 5,137 Gwh, wind farms 4,285, nuclear plants 2,382 and solar stations 1,037.

One technology that is expanding is the biodigester, for the treatment of manure and agricultural waste to obtain biogas and electricity. Some 900 of these operate in rural areas. Of this total, around 300 generate electricity, according to the state-run Shared Risk Trust.

In this country of 130 million people, around 19 million use solid fuels for cooking, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography. The main material consumed by 79 percent of these households is LPG, followed by firewood or coal (11 percent) and natural gas (seven percent).

In the southwestern state of Oaxaca, gas and firewood each represent 49 percent of household consumption.

“It is a renewable energy that is largely untapped in the areas of agriculture, urban waste and industry,” said Abel Reyes, president of the non-governmental Mexican Association of Biomass and Biogas.

The expert stressed to IPS that if the country were to develop the sector’s value chain, it would be equivalent to five or six points of GDP, with energy, economic, labour, health and climate benefits.

While bioethanol and biodiesel have boomed over the past decade, their growth now seems to be slowing down due to high costs compared to alternative sources and to competition with food crops.

Teresa Arias, president of the non-governmental organisation Nature and Development, noted that the industrial sector is interested in using waste to fire boilers, while households, hospitals, restaurants and hotels can use pellets of agglomerated sawdust.

“The most viable variables are determined by the market. It has a lot to do with competitiveness against fossil fuels. Solid biomass does not compete with natural gas, and in hotel heating it could compete with liquefied petroleum gas,” she told IPS.

The environmentalist said that “there is enough biomass for electricity, its costs just have to be lower or equal to those of the fuel they currently use. But it couldn’t compete with solar, although mixed systems could be installed.”

Forest and jungle management, agro-industrial residues, forest plantations, sugar cane and agricultural waste offer the greatest biomass potential. Replacing fossil fuels with bioenergy and solid biofuels would mean savings of some 6.7 billion dollars a year, in addition to social and environmental benefits, according to the RTB.

Although Mexico has adopted ambitious goals for bioenergy, the pro-fossil fuel policies of leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in office since December 2018, have clouded the picture, according to analysts.

The 2017 “Biogas Technology Roadmap” predicts production of between 32 million and 120 million cubic meters of biomethane per year from animal waste by 2024, and 57 million to 100 million by 2030, in the face of barriers such as low production attractiveness and lack of project financing.

With respect to solid biofuels in 2030, the map projects 160 petajoules of energy, 130 of which would correspond to households, 20 to the commercial sector and 10 to government institutions. The joule is the energy measurement unit that is equivalent to one watt per second and estimates the amount of heat required to carry out an activity. Each petajoule represents one quadrillion joules.

Arias, the environmentalist, who is preparing diagnoses of biomass in the north of the country, said the outlook is discouraging, because “there is no defined and determined policy for pushing alternative energies.

“They’re taking a position that looks to the past instead of the future; they’re taking steps backwards after many efforts to have a diverse energy mix that would make us less vulnerable, and to transition to climate benefits,” she said.

In this context, she proposed incentives for their use in households and businesses; adapting commercial technologies to the conditions in Mexico; increasing the efficiency of supply chains; disseminating the benefits of bioenergy; implementing favourable policies for this sources; and designing programmes for rural areas.

For his part, Reyes, from the Biomass Association, called for the design of regional and local policies, aimed at boosting the use of bioenergy with adequate financial support.

Meanwhile, the charcoal makers of San Juan Evangelista know what they want: to take care of the forest, foment self-employment and consolidate their organisation and thus their community.

“We are trying to earn an income, but we are working precisely because we know it has a future. We’ve tried to organise ourselves as women, because in the social sphere it’s difficult to get out,” Manzano said during the day that IPS accompanied their activities in this town, 48 km from Oaxaca, the state capital, and 540 km from Mexico City.

Along with other Oaxacan community-owned companies, the group offers its products on new digital platforms.

Some say the government does not support initiatives like those of her group, but Manzano and her colleagues are confident that wood and charcoal will continue to be available in Mexican kitchens thanks to sustainable efforts like theirs.

By Mario Osava
FOZ DO IGUAÇU, Brazil, Mar 18 2020 (IPS)

“It used to be complicated, I would have lunch with the flies,” recalls Pedro Colombari, laughing, on his 400-hectare farm where he fattens 5,000 pigs and raises 400 cattle outside of a small town in southern Brazil.

Biogas production keeps disease-carrying insects away by extracting the gases from animal waste through anaerobic biodigestion by bacteria. The settling ponds for the manure, which “produced 99 percent of the flies,” have disappeared, according to Colombari.

Using the biogas, the farmer generates electricity shared with neighbouring properties in a micro-grid set up in the municipality of São Miguel do Iguaçu, 42 km from Foz do Iguaçu on Brazil’s border with Argentina and Paraguay.

For fellow farmer Ademir Escher, the biggest benefit was the reduction of “70 to 80 percent of the stench” from the manure he uses to fertilise his hay crop.

Since last July, the waste from the 1,200 pigs he fattens on his three-hectare farm has been producing biogas for the mini power plant in Entre Rios, 133 km from Foz do Iguaçu.

Escher is one of 18 pig farmers who supply the fuel that produces the energy for almost all of the local government’s offices and services in the municipality of 4,600 inhabitants.

The mini power plant, with an installed capacity of 480 kilowatts, was created as part of programmes implemented by the Itaipu Binational Hydroelectric Power Plant, which promotes alternative energy sources in its area of influence as well as technological innovations, such as electric or biomethane powered vehicles, or purified biogas.

Itaipu, the second largest hydropower plant in the world, shared by Brazil and Paraguay, has an installed capacity of 14,000 megawatts.

That is equivalent to 29,166 mini power plants like the one in Entre Ríos.

But the binational giant, which accounts for about 11 percent of Brazil’s energy consumption and 88 percent of Paraguay’s, continues to promote biogas production, to generate both electricity and biomethane.

The use of livestock manure and organic waste to produce energy and biofertiliser reduces the sediment that runs into the rivers and pollutes the dam’s reservoir, explained General Luiz Felipe Carbonell, Itaipu’s coordination director.

All sediments affect water quality, which is “critical to power generation,” he said. But organic sediments are especially harmful, because they fuel the proliferation of aquatic fauna that damage the plant’s machinery and the dam, he said.

Water falls through these enormous pipes to activate the 20 turbines of the Itaipu hydroelectric plant on the Brazilian-Paraguayan border. Caring for the water in the reservoir, as well as reducing the pollution in the rivers that run into it, help make this binational plant one of the most efficient in the world, with a projected useful life of 184 years. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
FOZ DO IGUAÇU, Brail, Feb 10 2020 (IPS)

Fomenting biogas production among agricultural producers may seem at first glance to be a distraction from the purpose of Itaipu, the giant hydroelectric power plant shared by Brazil and Paraguay, but in fact it is part of their energy business strategy.

“Protecting the quality of the water (in the reservoir) is essential for power generation,” explained General Luiz Felipe Carbonell, coordination director in Itaipu Binacional, the company that manages the power plant on the Paraná River, which forms part of the border between the two countries.

The efficiency of Itaipu, the second largest hydroelectric power plant in the world in terms of potential, has been proven by the record amount of electricity generated: 103 million megawatts/hour in 2016, which exceeds the best performance of China’s Three Gorges power plant, whose installed capacity is 60.7 percent higher.

While the Brazilian-Paraguayan plant has a potential of 14,000 MW, the potential of Three Gorges is 22,500 MW. But generation depends on water flow, turbine efficiency and demand.

Biogas production in southwestern Brazil is on the rise, mainly due to the use of livestock manure. In the west of the state of Paraná, part of whose rivers flow into the Itaipu reservoir, there were 4.2 million pigs, according to the 2017 agricultural census.

Sedimentation is a risk that can shorten the life of a hydroelectric plant, which in Itaipu’s case is estimated at 184 years. In addition to the quantity, it is necessary to consider “the quality of the sediments,” noted Marcio Bortolini, adviser to the coordination director.

Organic waste, like the manure from pig farming, drives the proliferation of especially harmful species, like the golden mussel (Limnoperna fortunei), an invasive species that appeared in the Itaipu reservoir in 2001, he explained.

The mussel from Southeast Asia often clogs pipes and brings turbines to a halt when it latches onto hard surfaces.

Bortolini described this situation when he took part in a Jan. 27-29 workshop on biogas for Brazilian journalists, organised by IPS and the International Center for Renewable Energy (CIBiogás), with support from the U.S.-based Mott Foundation.

General Luiz Felipe Carbonell, Itaipu Binacional’s coordination director, says that caring for the environment is vital for the power plant’s productivity and longevity because it reduces sedimentation, among other things. Using organic waste to produce biogas helps eliminate invasive species in the reservoir that damage the dam and equipment. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

“Without good water quality, several species of fauna will settle in and affect our reservoir and the machinery,” said Carbonell, one of the army officers appointed to Itaipu and the Brazilian government under President Jair Bolsonaro, who himself retired from the army as a captain in 1988.

Efforts to combat the golden mussel and protect water quality managed to reduce the population of the invasive shellfish and keep it under control, said Itaipu administrators during the workshop held at the CIBiogás facilities in Foz do Iguaçu, the main city where the power plant is located.

“Besides the golden mussel, a danger to our maintenance service, we have the freshwater hydroid (Cordylophora caspia), an invasive species that corrodes concrete, and therefore represents a physical danger to the dam,” said the general.

The main cause of these threats is organic waste, which is why “we use it to produce biogas and at the same time to improve the environment and the quality of life of the populace,” Carbonell told IPS at the plant’s facilities.

Therefore, disseminating biogas as a source of heat, biomethane and bioelectricity, and promoting other energy alternatives, such as solar, hydrogen and less polluting batteries, does not distract Itaipu from its business of generating hydroelectricity, he said.

Ademir Eischer produces biogas using the manure from the 1,200 pigs on his farm. He is one of the 18 farmers who supply the mini biogas power plant in the municipality of Entre Rios, in the west of Paraná state. The main benefit, he said, was the elimination of the stench of the raw manure that fertilises his hay crop next to his home, because biodigestion removes the strong odour by making use of the gases. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The same is true with regard to the reforestation of the surrounding area, where 44 million trees have been planted, because it protects the environment and the reservoir by reducing erosion and maintaining the water table. These are measures that support water security, an indispensable factor for the business.

The general also mentioned the plant’s efforts to boost the well-being of the surrounding population, and said health conditions have improved as a result of the projects.

Itaipu runs several social, economic development and technological programmes. Electric vehicles, a biodiversity corridor, tourism, local development and child protection are part of this focus, as is the Federal University of Latin American Integration, installed within the Itaipu area.

“Cultivating Good Water” stands out as a wide-ranging programme, initiated in 2003, in which more than 2,000 public and private entities have been involved in more than 60 social, economic and environmental actions, including fish farming, medicinal plants, garbage recycling and recovery of more than 200 micro-watersheds.

The programme is based on the principle of caring for water in order to generate more electricity for longer periods and to produce biogas for energy, environmental and water quality purposes.

Biofuel production was increased at the initiative of Itaipu, in a mission transferred to CIBiogas, founded in 2013 as an autonomous, non-profit entity. Itaipu is one of its 27 partners, which include the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

From a biogas producer’s point of view, the environmental benefits have more to do with the air than with the water.

For example, the stench of “raw” manure has almost disappeared on the farm where Ademir Eischer uses manure to grow hay, his main source of income.

With just three hectares of land that runs up against the highway in the small municipality of Entre Rios, Eischer – who also fattens 1,200 hogs – can’t expand his pig farming operation, and the field planted with hay almost reaches his house.

“I’ve been working in haymaking for a long time and decided to start producing biogas because of the smell. When the manure goes through the biodigester, it loses 70 to 80 percent of its odour and we gain a lot in terms of quality of life,” Eischer told IPS during a visit to his farm.

Biodigestion consists of extracting methane (CH4), hydrogen sulphide (H2S, mainly responsible for the bad smell) and carbon dioxide (CO2), which make up the biogas, from the manure that can then fertilise the soil without the pollution and smell of the gases.

The production of biogas from the manure of pigs like these ones on Ademir Eischer’s farm is a new business with great potential in the western part of the state of Paraná, in southern Brazil, an area where there are more than four million hogs. Biogas also eliminates the waste that pollutes local rivers and leads to sedimentation in the Itaipú reservoir created by the dam built for the giant hydroelectric plant shared by Brazil and Paraguay. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Methane, which is removed in much greater proportion than the other gases, is 21 times more aggressive than carbon as a greenhouse gas that warms the planet, which is why its extraction and use as a source of energy contribute greatly to mitigating the climate crisis.

Eischer is one of the 18 pig farmers whose biogas generate almost all the electricity consumed by the municipal government of Entre Rios do Oeste, population 4,600, which inaugurated its own mini power plant in July 2019.

Another local pig farmer and biogas producer, Claudinei Stein, highlighted other benefits: the “reduction to almost zero of mosquitoes” that used to pester him and his employees on the farm, while posing the risk of transmitting diseases.

In addition, the manure minus the gases has improved the fertilisation of the soil where he grows soybeans and corn on his 12 hectares.

Pedro Colombari says that with the bio-fertiliser resulting from biodigestion he has managed to improve his pastures to the point of fattening 10 cattle per hectare per year – quite a feat in a country where, on average, farmers only raise a little more than one cow per hectare.

“Now I’m trying to double that productivity on an experimental two hectares,” with more intensive fertilisation and irrigation, he told IPS.

His 400-hectare farm, where he raises 5,000 pigs and 400 head of cattle and grows soybeans and corn, generates its own electricity using biogas, in a microgrid in which several generators, using varied sources and batteries, can operate together and outside the main grid, offering greater energy security.

A company in Pokhara has enlarged household digesters into an industrial scale plant that uses climate-friendly technology that could ultimately be scaled nationwide to reduce Nepal’s balance of trade gap.

By Kunda Dixit
KASKI, Nepal, Jan 17 2020 (IPS)

Nepal’s future may not be in hydropower, as most assume, but actually in the dung heap. A new industrial-scale biogas plant near Pokhara has proved that livestock and farm waste producing flammable methane gas can replace imported LPG and chemical fertiliser.

Over the past 30 years, Nepal has become a world leader in spreading locally-designed household biogas digesters. There are now 300,000 of them, helping reduce deforestation, improving people’s health and lifting women out of drudgery and poverty.

Now, a company in Pokhara has enlarged household digesters into an industrial scale plant that uses climate-friendly technology that could ultimately be scaled nationwide to reduce Nepal’s balance of trade gap.

Biogas has a three-fold advantage. It reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and is therefore climate friendly. It allows us to manage raw waste. And it can slash our import bill for LPG and chemical fertiliser

Kushal Gurung’s grandfather was in the British Army, and he also applied for recruitment but failed the eyesight test. So, he set up Gandaki Urja in Pokhara that works with wind, solar and hydropower, but he believes Nepal’s best option for sustainable growth lies in energy from waste.

“Nepal must abandon fossil fuels, but even among renewable energy sources biogas has a three-fold advantage. It reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and is therefore climate friendly. It allows us to manage raw waste. And it can slash our import bill for LPG and chemical fertiliser,” says Gurung. “It is a win-win-win.”

A tipper truck has just arrived from Gorkha at Gandaki Urja’s biogas plant at Kotre near Pokhara, which with its dome digester looks like a nuclear reactor. The truck tilts its container to empty 5 tons of smelly poultry waste into a pit where rotting vegetables and cow dung from a farm in Syangja are all being mixed before being fed into the 4,000 cubic meter digester that is kept inflated.

In the absence of oxygen, bacteria already in the cow dung go to work to break down the waste into methane, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide. The impurities are removed by filters to produce 200 cylinders of bio-CNG a day which are sold to big hotels and restaurants in Pokhara.

Customers pay a deposit for the cylinders and pressure regulators, and usually use up about two cylinders a day. The cost per kg for the bio-Compressed Natural Gas (bio-CNG) is the same as the state subsidised Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG). However, customers prefer the biogas because it saves them up to 30% cost because it has higher calorific value than LPG, and there is no residue that goes waste.

“So far, the customers are satisfied, and we see demand growing in the future as word spreads,” says Ashim Kayastha, Director of Gandaki Urja.

Half the plant’s revenue comes from bio-CNG and the other half from the effluent which is dried and sold as organic fertiliser. The plant can produce up to 11,000 tons of fertiliser a year and is sold to surrounding farms.

The future of bio-CNG depends on scaling up the technology since any municipality generating more than 40 tons of biodegradable waste per day could have its own biogas plant. Nepal imports 500,000 tons of chemical fertiliser a year, and if each of 100 municipalities produced 5,000 tons of organic fertiliser Nepal could slash its import bill.

This could also significantly reduce the country’s annual import of Rs33 billion worth of LPG from India which grew four-fold in the past 10 years, making up 2.5% of Nepal’s total import bill. But to scale up, industrial biogas needs the same government incentives as hydro, solar and wind power.

At the moment hydropower investors enjoy a 100% corporate tax holiday for 10 years, and 50% for the next five years. There is only 1% tax on imports of equipment for solar, wind and hydropower, there is no such provision for the equipment for industrial scale biogas. Instead, there is a tax on interest, and also VAT on bio-CNG.

“The government should look at this not only as an energy project, but at its multifaceted benefits,” says Kushal Gurung of Gandaki Urja. “There is a waste-to-energy and fertiliser angle, too. If we want to make Nepal fully organic in the next ten years, projects like these need to be prioritised.”

Gandaki Urja got a boost from an unlikely source, Business Oxygen (BO2) in Kathmandu which helps entrepreneurs running Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to scale up by injecting equity and providing technical assistance.

Says Siddhant Pandey of BO2: “We are always on the lookout for climate investments, and we realised that bio-CNG would be an incredible adaptive resilience investment. It would displace imports of LPG and fertiliser. It was going to be clean, no carbon footprint, and it made business sense because it met our internal return on investment expectation.”

The challenges are ensuring reliable sources of raw material and building knowhow for the technology within Nepal.

Says Pandey: “The Pokhara plant is a drop in the ocean, it can abe replicated in all 7 provinces. We know it is scalable, and it depends how proactive provincial governments will be.”

This story was originally published by The Nepali Times

"They're the ideal duo," because the combination of solar and biogas sources makes it possible to provide electricity around the clock, one during the day and the other at night, says Anelio Thomazzoni, a pig farmer who has become a producer of clean energy in southwestern Brazil.

By Mario Osava
VARGEÃO, Brazil, Dec 17 2019 (IPS)

“They’re the ideal duo,” because the combination of solar and biogas sources makes it possible to provide electricity around the clock, one during the day and the other at night, says Anelio Thomazzoni, a pig farmer who has become a producer of clean energy in southwestern Brazil.

Thomazzoni, who owns a farm in Vargeão, a small municipality of 3,500 people in the west of the state of Santa Catarina, where he raises and fattens 38,000 hogs, uses the manure to extract biogas and generate 280,000 KW-hours per month.

The generation of energy will increase 46 percent when the solar panels that he is installing on 6,000 square metres of his 100-hectare farm begin to operate. And it will rise further when his largest biodigester, currently under construction, is completed, because it will provide more biogas for his three electric generators.

A new farm, with 30,000 pigs, will represent more meat and more biogas that can be converted into electricity or biomethane, the purified gas used as fuel for trucks, tractors and passenger vehicles.

The enthusiasm of the 60-year-old Thomazzoni is fueled by the promising new business he has been developing over the past four years, which already generates significant additional income.

He also saves on energy costs by consuming a small part of the electricity generated.

And what is left of the manure after the gas is extracted is converted into fertiliser for growing hay and for a eucalyptus plantation used for firewood. “I have an integrated production system,” he tells IPS proudly at his farm.

With solar energy, he believes he will achieve a perfect combination, using biogas to generate electricity when there is no sunlight.

Biogas power plants, which are just beginning to take on an important role in Brazil’s energy mix, help provide stability to the electric grid affected by the expansion of solar and wind sources, whose intermittency must be offset by a “storable” source to ensure distribution without fluctuations or blackouts.

Biogas also contributes to mitigating global warming, by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and helps keep the environment clean by making use of garbage and urban sewage, agricultural waste and manure that would otherwise contaminate the water and soil.

For all of these reasons Thomazzoni has become an activist advocating this alternative source of energy. He heads a national association of pig farmers who produce biogas, which seeks to foment the production of this alternative fuel through agreements that entail mutual benefits, such as market expansion and the exchange of incipient technologies that require adaptation to local conditions.

Panoramic view of Vargeão, the town where Anélio Thomazzoni, a pig farmer and large producer of biogas electricity in southern Brazil, lives. The 3,500 inhabitants of the municipality are largely small farmers who descend from Italian immigrants that came to Brazil in the 20th century. As the main economic activity in the western state of Santa Catarina, pig farming represents great potential for biogas production. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
VARGEÃO, Brazil, Oct 2 2019 (IPS)

“Biogas is the best energy, it has no contraindications,” and if you combine it with solar it becomes “the best energy business,” at least in Brazil, says Anélio Thomazzoni.

His enthusiasm is not merely rhetorical. He raises about 38,000 pigs on his property, Gavea Farm, and uses their manure to produce biogas that generates electricity, about 280,000 kilowatts/hour, for his own consumption and for third parties.

He is also building a larger biodigester and is preparing to install 6,000 square metres of solar panels on idle land on his farm, to generate another 130,000 kilowatt hours per month, in a region where a typical family consumes less than 1,000 kilowatts per month.

“I will have solar energy during the day and electricity from biogas when there is no sun”, the “most profitable forula in the world” in terms of energy and with benefits to the environment, Thomazzoni said.

“In addition, solar energy will allow me to save part of the biogas that I will convert into biomethane,” he told IPS on his 100-hectare farm that he owns with his brother.

Biomethane, a fuel equivalent to natural gas, is produced by purifying biogas. It should become more important as a result of the government’s plan to create a “new natural gas market” with a supply at reduced prices due to the growing deep-water production off Brazil’s shore.

“Alessandro Gardemann, president of the Brazilian Biogas Association (Abiogas), told IPS, “The gas pipeline network only supplies areas near the coast, so in the interior of the country the solution will be locally produced biogas.”

Trucks will have biomethane in a country where they are already made to run on natural gas, he said. The country has 1.9 million cargo vehicles, which provide 60 percent of cargo transport and move most of the agricultural production, according to transportation authorities.

The entrepreneurial spirit of Thomazzoni, who has lived all of his 56 years in the municipality of Vargeão, population 3,500, in the southern state of Santa Catarina, is alive and well.

Pig farmer Anélio Thomazzoni stands between the three biodigesters with which he currently produces biogas for the generation of 280,000 kilowatt/hours on his farm in the small municipality of Vargeão, in southern Brazil. Part of the biofuel will be purified to transform it into biomethane, while 6,000 square metres of solar panels are installed to generate 130,000 kilowatts/hour. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

He is building a new farm on another 50-hectare property, to raise an additional 30,000 pigs, but genetically improved breeding animals. In addition to meat, they will produce biogas, electricity and biofertiliser.

The Thomazzoni family moved from Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state, to Vargeão in 1957, in one of the waves of southern migration to the north and west of the country.

Initially dedicated to traditional crops, such as corn and later soy, he shifted to pig farming three decades ago. In 2003 they had about 10,000 pigs and began to produce biogas, in response to a demand from environmental authorities, in a state with strict environmental requirements.

He owned the first biodigester in western Santa Catarina, thanks to credits from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the predecessor to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, aimed at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.

Since 2015 it has been generating electricity from biogas, after two years of technological difficulties and a near bankruptcy, because the distribution concessionaire, Centrales Eléctricas de Santa Catarina, demanded the installation of cables and took 20 months to authorise the generation of electricity.

“I had stopped dreaming,” having purchased the generators and equipment and with no way to pay the loans that were falling due, Thomazzoni said.

A new biodigester, three times bigger than the previous ones, is under construction at the Thomazzoni brothers’ Gavea farm in southern Brazil. To the sides are some of the 32 sheds where pigs are raised in different phases of their lives: maternity, nursery and fattening. In the last two decades the business has diversified with the production of biogás, electricity and biofertilisers. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The road to success also included other setbacks, such as the loss of a biodigester canvas carried off by heavy winds.

“I planned and did everything we have here,” says the agribusinessman, pointing out some of his own “inventions” with which he replaced equipment so expensive in the market that “it would have made my business unviable.”

One is the use of water heated by an electric generator that pumps it through tubes that run into the biodigester, raising the internal temperature to boost the fermentation and productivity of the manure, especially during the wintertime when temperatures go down.

Another is a compressor that injects air into the biodigester, at a cost of 180 reais (45 dollars) – 330 times cheaper than the three filters he had purchased. “There are swindlers in the market who hinder biogas projects,” he said.

He uses the semi-solid waste from the biodigestion process, technically known as digestate, as fertiliser for planting hay, which is more productive because it is a perennial crop that is incorporated into an “integrated production” system as livestock feed. Corn and soy only produce two alternating annual crops, he explained.

Biogas is at the center of a chain that is the very “description of the circular economy,” according to Gardemann, also director of Geo Energética, a company that runs a large biogas from sugarcane waste project in the state of São Paulo.

Anélio Thomazzoni stands next to one of the three electric generators on his farm in southern Brazil. In addition to electricity, the equipment heats the water that is pumped through tubes running into the biodigesters to raise the temperature high enough to ferment pig manure. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The waste from the production of food or livestock feed is used to produce biogas, whose by-product is returned to the soil as nutrients for new food production, he pointed out.

“Biogas is a 24-hour battery,” he said, to emphasise that it is “continuously available energy that can be stored and used at any time” of the day or night, qualities that are more necessary now, when the use of intermittent sources such as wind and solar power is on the rise.

Abiogas aims to raise the share of biogas to 10 percent of Brazil’s energy mix, up from less than one percent today. It has the potential to supply “40 percent of the national electricity demand or substitute 70 percent of Brazil’s diesel consumption,” according to the industry association.

“The announced potential is not always real,” warned Ricardo de Gouvêa, Santa Catarina state secretary of agriculture, at the Southern Brazilian Forum on Biogas and Biomethane, held Sept. 4-6 in Chapecó, a city in the western part of the state.

Of the agricultural inputs, listed as the main source, half are not used or have other uses such as direct planting, because there is still no fully validated technology and the benefits of biogas often do not offset the costs of implementation, especially for small-scale producers, he said.

But “biogas is in fact the best source and now is its turn,” said Péricles Pinheiro, head of New Business at CHP Brazil, a company that provides equipment and solutions for distributed generation of electricity produced from gas.

It represents more continuously available energy at a time of unstable electric supply due to the growing use of intermittent sources, the approaching end of the useful life of 80,000 kilometres of transmission lines, and a distortion in national consumption data, he argued.

The higher cost of energy in the hours of greatest consumption, from 5 to 9 PM, made many consumers turn to their own diesel generators in the evenings, causing an apparent “drop” in demand after dark, when people turn on their lights and many household appliances.

If this information is not taken into account, the operation of the national power grid can increase the risk of blackouts. Biogas would help reduce that risk by expanding its share of the energy mix, Pinheiro said.

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.

By Mario Osava
ENTRE RIOS DO OESTE, Brasil, Sep 20 2019 (IPS)

Biogas has the potential to provide 36 percent of the electricity consumed in Brazil or replace 70 percent of diesel if purified as biomethane, according to the Brazilian Association of Biogas and Biomethane (Abiogas).

This new source of energy is only recently gaining a foothold in this country, especially in the agricultural south. Its future is promising in an agro-diverse Brazil, which is the world’s largest producer or exporter of sugar, coffee, meat and soybeans.

Its expansion also serves environmental purposes, reducing soil and water pollution from livestock excrement and waste and urban sewage.

Entre Rios do Oeste, a small town of 4,400 people and 155,000 pigs in the western part of the state of Paraná, inaugurated a mini biogas thermoelectric plant on Jul. 24.

It is the product of a pioneering agreement promoted by the International Centre for Renewable Energies-Biogas (CIBiogas), which involves the municipal government, 18 pig farmers and the Paraná Energy Company (Copel).

With a capacity of 480 kilowatts, the plant will enable the municipal government to save what it used to spend on electricity for its 72 buildings, including offices, schools and other services.

The 18 pig farms, with around 39,000 hogs, will produce the biogas that, through a 20-km network of pipes, will reach the plant.

Copel financed the project with 17 million reais (about 4.5 million dollars) and receives the electricity generated, with which the municipality pays its energy bill.

The project took 11 years to crystallise from the initial idea. It harnessed an earlier experiment – the Agroenergy Family Farming Condominium of the Ajuricaba River Basin, in the municipality of Cândido Rondon, 34 km northeast of Entre Rios.

The west of Paraná, where pig and poultry farming is intense, is experiencing a biogas production boom driven by CIBiogás, an association of international and national institutions founded in 2013 at the Technology Park of Itaipu, the giant hydroelectric plant shared by Brazil and Paraguay.

The Haacke Farm in the nearby municipality of Santa Helena uses chicken manure and devotes part of its biogas to produce biomethane, which it sells to Itaipu as fuel for the hydropower plant’s vehicles.

Several companies already use biogas to generate their own electricity, such as Cerámica Stein, from Entre Rios.

BioKohler, a biodigester factory in the municipality of Cândido Rondon, is an example of the small industry and services that make up the local biogas economy. The Kohler family has also just installed its mini biogas thermoelectric plant, in partnership with a German company in the sector, Mele.

Romário Schaefer, 65, stands between the biodigester buried in the ground on the right and the blue tank holding whey that is mixed with the manure of the pigs he fattens in a row of pig pens (top left) to produce biogas, in the southern Brazilian municipality of Entre Rios do Oeste. In the background is his brick factory, which saves about 6,500 dollars a month in electricity by using biogas. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
ENTRE RIOS DO OESTE, Brazil, Aug 16 2019 (IPS)

Romário Schaefer is fattening up 3,300 pigs that he receives when they weigh around 22 kg and returns when they reach 130 to 160 kg – a huge increase in meat and profits for their owner, a local meat-processing plant in this city in Brazil.

Schaefer is not interested in the pork meat business. What he wants is the manure, which he uses to produce biogas and electricity that fuel his brick-making factory.

“I’m not a farmer,” he says as he shows us around his Stein Ceramics company in the middle of a 38-hectare rural property on the outskirts of Entre Rios do Oeste, a farming town of 4,400 people in western Paraná, one of three states in Brazil’s southern region, on the border with Paraguay.

He is explaining the difference between himself and neighbouring pig farmers who produce biogas and sell it to the Mini-Thermoelectric Plant inaugurated on Jul. 24 to generate energy that serves the Entre Rios municipal government and all of its facilities in the town itself and the rest of the municipality.

For them it is a new agricultural product, and has been recognised as such in Paraná for commercial and tax purposes. But for Schaefer it’s an input for his factory, which makes bricks.

Animal waste, which pollutes the soil and rivers, is becoming an important by-product in southwestern Brazil, where pig and poultry farming has expanded widely in recent decades.

The Haacke farm, in the municipality of Santa Helena, south of Entre Rios, uses the waste produced by its tens of thousands of hens and hundreds of cattle to produce biogas, electricity and biomethane.

Its biomethane, a fuel derived from the refining of biogas which is employed as a substitute for natural gas, is used in vehicles at the giant Itaipú hydroelectric plant shared by Brazil and Paraguay on the Paraná River, which forms part of the border between the two countries.

In Mariscal Cándido Rondon, a few kilometres to the north, the Kohler family, pioneers in the use of biogas on their large farm, took on another role in the chain of this energy which is more than just clean – it actually cleans the environment.

Part of Stein Ceramics, whose prosperity and ecological production were made possible by the biogas produced from the manure of 3,300 pigs. The factory produces enough bricks monthly to build 200 60-square-metre homes in the state of Paraná, on Brazil’s border with Paraguay. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

They created a biodigester company, BioKohler, which is present in many projects spreading throughout Paraná and other Brazilian states, not only selling equipment but also sharing know-how brought from other countries.

The new family initiative that can guide new projects is a biogas-fired power plant with an installed capacity of 75 kilowatts, built on the farm in partnership with the German company Mele, with many “tropicalised” technological innovations.

“Such a unit is only viable above 150 kilowatts of power, a scale that allows the cost of the investment to be recovered,” Pedro Kohler, who leads the family’s industrial branch, told IPS.

Schaefer looks at the question from the angle of the consumer who generates his own energy. “Without biogas my factory would not be viable, I would not be able to compete and survive in the market,” he said.

In recent years, many ceramic products factories, including brick-makers, went bankrupt in Brazil, something that also happened in the west of the state of Paraná, after the national economic recession of 2015 and 2016, which especially affected the construction industry and aggravated the rise in energy costs.

The pig fattening contract with the slaughterhouse allowed him to avoid bankruptcy, the businessman said.

Pedro Kohler, who heads a biodigester company in the western Brazilian state of Paraná, stands between a biodigester and deposits of biogas and biofertilisers from the thermoelectric plant he installed on his family’s farm in the municipality of Cándido Rondon. Innovative technologies and equipment, provided by their German partner Mele, will modernise the biogas sector in Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

“The meat-packing plant supplies everything: food, medicine and technical assistance. What I provide is the installations and the workforce; a couple of workers is enough because everything is automatic, and I keep the manure,” he told IPS on his rural property.

That makes it possible for him to deposit 1.8 million litres of pig waste in the biodigester, a large closed ball of black canvas, half buried in a pit measuring about 10 metres in diameter, where it ferments thanks to anaerobic bacteria.

The biodigester is the source of the biogas that feeds a generator which produces 23,000 megawatts/hour per month, enough to save 25,000 reais (6,500 dollars at the current exchange rate) – almost half of his electricity bill.

Actually, his mini-plant operates only four to five hours a day. It does so during peak evening consumption hours, when the electricity supplied by the distribution company is most expensive.

In the next few months, Schaefer hopes to put an additional 2,000 piglets in his fattening shed, where he is building new pigsties. He would thus expand biogas production, both to generate more electricity and to feed the kilns, replacing the burning of briquettes and wood waste.

The businessman has 19 years of experience with biogas, initially focused on burning it as a substitute for firewood, which was scarce, and on preventing pollution. As he explains, he proudly points to his “smokeless” fireplace.

In 2013, rising costs forced him to expand the biodigester and install the electric generator.

He also had to automate his factory to survive. “In the past we employed up to 90 workers, today there are only 20 and production has risen threefold,” he said.

Long sheds where thousands of pigs are fattened are becoming a familiar part of the landscape in rural areas of Entre Rios del Oeste, in southwestern Brazil, where a Mini Thermoelectric Plant was inaugurated on Jul. 24. The plant runs on biogas produced by a network of 18 pig farms and supplies the city government facilities. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Behind the progress made was great persistence, the ironing out of numerous problems and third party assistance. Sometimes he almost gave up, he confessed. Some solutions came to him by chance, like the biodigestion mixer recommended by a German embassy official, during a visit to his company.

Similarly, he learned about the advantages of incorporating waste whey into cheese production. This offers the dairy industry a sure way to dispose of it, while preventing pollution.

The main source of learning, technical support and drive for the various projects in western Paraná is the International Center for Renewable Energy-Biogas (CIBiogas), which operates in the Itaipu Technology Park.

Founded in 2013 as a non-profit association of 27 national, local and international institutions, CIBIogas has a specialised laboratory and implemented 11 biogas projects on farms and in agribusiness enterprises.

It is an energy source with varied uses and inputs that requires a lengthy learning process and depends on business models and markets that have yet to be defined and are not yet consolidated, said Rafael González, director of Technological Development at CIBiogás.

Each project has its unique characteristics. Changes in animal feed, which primarily seek to improve the production of meat or eggs, for example, can negatively affect the production of biogas.

“The hormones in pigs change their waste and biogas,” González told IPS.

There are also differences between animal manures, said Daiana Martinez, information analyst at CIBiogas. Cattle manure, for example, is more productive, but contains a high level of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) that causes corrosion, requiring more refining.

González said biomethane is the fuel currently used by 82 Itaipu cars and has already been approved in tests with tractors, buses and other large vehicles. It is best to produce it from bird droppings, which facilitate the removal of hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide, he explained.

Biogas can meet up to 36 percent of the electricity consumption of this South American country, which is the size of a continent and is home to 210 million people, CIBiogas estimates.

This potential is basically divided between agricultural waste, which includes livestock and sugarcane vinasse, and urban waste, including sewage and garbage dumps.

In addition to avoiding pollution and the emission of greenhouse gases, biogas has been shown by local experience to promote local development, through energy projects and a chain of businesses, such as equipment industries, services and productive arrangements, González said.

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.

Alexander López Savrán, a 32-year-old engineer who innovated the standard fixed-dome biodigester to make it possible to create distribution networks from materials readily available in Cuba, stands next to one of these systems in the rural town of La Macuca, in Cabaiguán, Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
HAVANA, Jan 8 2019 (IPS)

Black plastic pipes, readily available on the mainly empty shelves of Cuba’s shops, distribute biogas to homes in the rural town of La Macuca, buried under the ground or running through the grass and stones in people’s yards.

The strong blue flame in the kitchens of the eight homes supplied by producer Yuniel Pons is thanks to engineer Alexander López Savran, who innovated the standard fixed-dome biodigester to create distribution networks with the few basic materials available in this Caribbean island nation.

“A new biodigester has been designed to obtain pressure, which means that biogas can be distributed more than five kilometers away without the need for a compressor or blower. That is where the innovation lies,” the engineer, who lives in the city of Cabaiguán, capital of the municipality of the same name, where La Macuca is located, in the central province of Santi Spíritus, told IPS."Three years ago I had a big mess with animal waste, until I sought advice and began to make biogas…We are working on expanding the corrals so that another biodigester can benefit 15 more families, who have already been selected.” -- Yuniel Pons

López, 32, made headlines in 2017 when he received the Green Latin America Award in Ecuador, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology included him among the 35 young Latin Americans whose innovations improved the lives of their communities.

With a long-standing movement of biogas promoters and current regulations for private pork production favorable to its expansion, Cuba faces the challenge of creating efficient distribution networks to further exploit this ecological resource and raise the quality of life of rural localities, amidst an anemic economy.

“We started by taking a close look at the problem,” López recalled. “We had pork-raising centers that needed biodigesters, but the volume they were going to produce would be much greater than the consumption of those state facilities. On the other hand, we didn’t have the equipment to be able to distribute it.”

This fuel arises from the decomposition of organic matter, especially cattle manure and human feces. But on many farms with biodigesters there is a surplus of methane gas which, if not used, puts pressure on the equipment and is often released into the atmosphere, contributing to pollution.

In addition, biogas is most efficient for cooking because up to 70 percent of the energy is lost when it is used to generate electricity or fuel a vehicle.

“Two factors were considered: we had too much energy and there are difficulties in cooking food in the communities due to deficits in access to energy or electricity costs,” López said, referring to the dependence of most Cuban households on electric appliances.

After two years of study and design, López came up with the first prototype, which over time “has changed structurally to gain in efficiency, durability and performance,” he said, when interviewed by IPS in Pons’ home, where Pons lives with his wife Sandra Díaz and their son.

Sandra Díaz regulates the flame in her kitchen, which uses biogas from the innovative biodigester installed on her family’s land, in La Macuca, Cabaiguán, in the province of Santi Spíritus, in central Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Most of the biodigesters designed by López have been built as part of the Biomás Cuba project, which is coordinated by the state-run Indio Hatuey Experimental Pasture and Forage Station, located in the province of Matanzas, with support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.

This initiative, which seeks to bring about energy sustainability in the Cuban countryside, provides part of the inputs, while the producer provides another part, to build the biodigester, which with fixed-dome technology is expensive because it requires a large volume of building materials but is compensated with distribution and 40 years of durability.

López estimated that his 10-cubic-meter biodigester costs the equivalent of 1,000 dollars in Cuba, but with an efficiency equal to that of a standard 15-cubic-meter biodigester. Less profitable are the polyethylene biodigesters, which cost about 800 dollars, serve just one home and have a useful life of up to 10 years.

So far, 10 biodigesters have been built with this local innovation in four localities of Cabaiguán: El Colorado (two), Ojo de Agua (one), Juan González (six) and La Macuca (one), which supply 102 homes and improved the lives of 600 people, saving 65 percent of electricity consumption per household.

And the technology was also replicated in Matanzas, although the engineer lamented the lukewarm reception by decision-makers with respect to the biodigester, which could contribute to the national plan for renewable energies to provide 24 percent of electric power by 2030, compared to just four percent today.

In well-equipped corrals, Pons keeps between 100 and 150 pigs behind his house as part of an agreement between state companies and private producers that in 2017 produced a record 194,976 tons, which did not, however, meet the demand of the country’s 11.2 million inhabitants. And that total was apparently not surpassed in 2018.

“Three years ago I had a big mess with animal waste, until I sought advice and began to make biogas,” recalled the producer, who is supported by Biomás. “We are working on expanding the corrals so that another biodigester can benefit 15 more families, who have already been selected.”

Farmer Yuniel Pons and his wife Sandra Díaz stand next to the biodigester installed by their house, which with its innovative system supplies energy to the kitchens of eight homes in La Macuca, a rural settlement in the municipality of Cabaiguán, in central Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

After lighting the gas stove in his kitchen, Diaz, a homemaker, explained that “cooking food like this is faster, it’s wonderful… I used to cook with an electric hotplate and pressure cooker, but they were almost always broken,” she said.

The network reaches the modest home of Denia Santos and her family, who live next door to Pons. “Now I cook with biogas and I also use it to boil (disinfect) towels and bedding, something I did with firewood that I would chop up myself,” said Santos, who takes care of her mentally disabled son.

Other benefits described by families who have biogas are that it is a better way to cook food for their animals and boil water for human consumption, and that it generates a strongersense of community as everyone is responsible for maintaining the biodigester.

José Antonio Guardado, national coordinator of the Movement of Biogas Users, which emerged in 1983 and today has more than 3,000 members spread throughout almost all of Cuba’s provinces, said he was happy with the trend in Cuban agriculture to create solidarity biogas networks.

Guardado told IPS that there is “greater awareness, political support and participative activities in the context of local development,” although obstacles to distribution persist because “materials in the market are not optimal, sufficient or affordable” and “there is a lack of institutional infrastructure to provide this service in an integrated manner.”

Meanwhile, in El Cano, outside of Havana, the solidarity plans of farmer Hortensia Martínez have come to a halt despite the fact that she used her own resources to build a biodigester with a traditional fixed 22-cubic-meter dome on her La China farm, to supply the farm itself and share with five neighboring homes.

“Now I plan to give it a boost, but we haven’t been able to implement it because we don’t have the connections to the community’s houses and it has valves, special faucets and a type of hose that makes it possible to bury the network underground,” the farmer, who is well-known for her community projects, especially targeting children, told IPS.

Diploma award ceremony for the 28 teenagers who completed the course on making LED lamps in a small farmers' association in Aparecida. The lamp on the ceiling is made at the "school factory" where young people study and work in the municipality of Sousa, in the northeast of Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
SOUSA, Brazil, Aug 21 2018 (IPS)

“We want to make history,” agreed the teachers at the Chiquinho Cartaxo Comprehensive Technical Citizen School. They are the first to teach adolescents about generating power from bad weather in the semi-arid Northeast region of Brazil.

The Renewable Energies course was the most popular one in the secondary education institution that began its classes in February this year in Sousa, a city in the interior of Paraiba, a state in Brazil’s semi-arid ecoregion.

Sixty of the 89 students chose that subject. The rest opted for the other alternative, marketing strategies, in the school named after a local engineer and entrepreneur who died in 2006.

“It was the local community that decided, in a public hearing, that these would be the two courses offered at the school,” 35-year-old Cícero Fernandes, a member of the school’s staff, told IPS.

“It’s about building a life project with the students. Renewable energies use different resources, but solar power is the predominant one here and is the focus of the course, because we have a lot of sunshine,” said Kelly de Sousa, who is the school’s principal at the age of 30.

The interest of the teenagers, most of them between 15 and 17 years old, reflects the solar energy boom they have been experiencing since last year in and around Sousa, a region considered the one with the most solar radiation in Brazil. The local Catholic church, businesses, factories and houses are already turning to this alternative source.

Energy, specifically electricity, is no longer something foreign, distant, that comes through cables and poles, at prices that rise for unknown reasons.

The municipality of Sousa, with more than 100 photovoltaic systems and a population of 70,000, 80 percent urban, is in the vanguard of the change in the relationship between society and energy that it is promoting in Brazil the expansion of so-called distributed generation, led by consumers themselves.

The share of photovoltaic generation in Brazil’s energy mix is still a mere 0.82 percent of the total of 159,970 MW, according to the government’s National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel), the regulatory agency.

Students in one of the classrooms of the Chiquinho Cartaxo Comprehensive Technical Citizen School, in the city of Sousa, where 60 students learn techniques and theories about renewable energies, especially solar power. The course was adopted after consultation with the local community at public hearings in this town in northeastern Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

But it is the fastest growing source. In the plants still under construction, it already accounts for 8.26 percent of the total. This refers to power plants built by suppliers.

Added to these are the “consumer units of distributed generation” as Aneel calls them, residential or business micro-generators which now total 34,282, of which 99.4 percent are solar and the rest are wind, thermal or hydraulic. The total power generated is 415 MW – three times more than 12 months ago.

The Northeast, the poorest and sunniest region, still generates little solar energy, in contrast to wind power, which is already the main local source, consolidated after drought made the water supply drop over the last six years.

The acceleration of the solar revolution in Sousa has been driven by civil society, especially the Semi-Arid Renewable Energy Committee (Cersa), a network of activists, researchers, and social and academic organisations created in 2014.

This unincorporated organisation with no formal headquarters operates in three areas, as its coordinator, 60-year-old Cesar Nóbrega, who lives in Sousa, told IPS: community training and empowerment, installation of pilot project systems and lobbying for public policies on renewable energy.

Genival Lopes dos Santos stands in the garden he cultivates together with his wife thanks to a solar water pump. With this system and other technologies adopted on their farm, they were able to continue to plant crops during the six-year drought in Brazil’s semi-arid Northeast, which began in 2012. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The technical school of Sousa proves that Cersa’s preaching fell on fertile ground. Other activities organised by the committee include short courses, seminars, and forums with the participation of university students, government officials and community organisations.

“I want to know how the panels absorb sunlight and generate energy, and that course was what I was hoping for,” said Mariana Nascimento, 16, who attends the school with her twin sister Marina. They live in the city of Aparecida, 20 km from Sousa.

The course drew not only young people. Emanuel Gomes, 47, decided to return to school to “learn to design residential (solar) projects, save energy costs and protect the environment.” He attends class together with his 18-year-old son.

“The students are enthusiastic, thirsty for knowledge and eager for practice,” and they proved it by participating in the seminar by the Solar Parish during their holidays, said the school principal Sousa, referring to the debate that took place at the inauguration of the solar power plant in Sousa’s Catholic church on Jul. 6.

Engaging and training students on energy and its environmental and economic effects is a task taken on by Walmeran Trindade a teacher of electrical engineering at the Federal Institute of Paraíba and technical coordinator of Cersa.

On Jul. 17, 28 students graduated from his 30-hour course at the “school factory” of LED lamps, examples of energy efficiency, in a rural town near Aparecida, supported by the Catholic Breda Institute.

“It is for professional training, income generation and promoting coexistence with the semi-arid climate,” the teacher told IPS. He travels more than 400 km from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraiba, to teach classes pro bono.

The lamps, made from plastic bottles, give off less light than mass-produced lamps, but are sold for just five reais (1.30 dollars), making them affordable to poor farmers. And they are made by “young people who are also poor,” and thus earn some income, he said.

“I made four lamps, I learned how it works and I want to work with energy, although I dream of studying law to defend society,” said 16-year-old Gaudencio da Silva, a second year high school student who participates in the “School Factory.”

Marlene and Genival Lopes dos Santos, a farming couple, stand next to the biodigester they obtained as part of the campaign for clean energy in the municipality of Sousa, in the northeast of Brazil. In addition to biogas, the biodigester also provides them with natural fertilisers for their orchard and garden. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Renewable energy pilot plants have mushroomed, meeting the second objective of Cersa.

In addition to the Solar Parish church, the Oliveiras Community Bakery and urban and rural solar systems are positive examples of the sun as an environmentally sound source that empowers consumers and communities.

The Farmers’ Association of the Acauã Settlement, which emerged under the 1996 land reform, now has a solar plant that ensures the supply of water to its 120 families. The energy pumps water to a reservoir on a hill 800 m from the community.

“We were paying 2,000 Brazilian reais (540 dollars) a month in electricity to pump water to a tank on a hill 800 m from the community,” Maria do Socorro Gouveia, the head of the Farmers’ Association, told IPS.

Another rural example of the use of solar power is the farming couple Genival and Marlene Lopes dos Santos, both 48 years old, who were also settled on land of their own thanks to the agrarian reform. In addition to generating electricity, they use solar energy to pump water from a well and irrigate small orchards and their garden.

A biodigester, another system that is spreading in the rural part of the municipality of Sousa, provides them with cooking gas. And they fertilise their crops with manure processed to produce biogas.

“The drought didn’t stop us from planting our crops,” the farmers, who are also engaged in fishing and beekeeping, said proudly.

“There is a need for the public sector” to promote public policies in these alternative energy sources, said Nóbrega. The municipality of Sousa spends six million reais (1.6 million dollars) a year on electricity.

Adopting solar energy in public offices and street lighting would represent a great saving in terms of spending on municipal services and infrastructure and, as a result, the money paid to the electricity distributor, based in the capital João Pessoa, would give a boost to the local economy, argued the coordinator of Cersa.

Kenyan farmer Veronicah Ngau shows off her young six-week old maize crops inside (left) and outside (right) of planting basins, an adaptation technique that conserves water. Credit: Ake Mamo/IPS

By Sam Otieno
NAIROBI, Kenya, May 17 2018 (IPS)

Promoting the widespread use of innovative technologies will be critical to combat the hostile effects of climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and many African countries are already leading the way with science-based solutions.

The Climate Technology Centre and Network (CTCN) and World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) provide support for countries in making sound policy, technology, and investment choices that lead to better approaches for mitigation, adaptation and resilience.A satellite program in Kenya measures the progressive impact of drought on loss of forage, triggering timely insurance payouts to help vulnerable pastoralists.

From biogas to solar installations and improved water conservation, success stories abound on the continent. The challenge now, experts say, is to scale them up. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), Africa’s renewable power installed capacity could increase by 290 percent between 2015 and 2030 — compared to 161 percent for Asia and 43 percent for Latin America.

The global Paris Accord is underpinned by its commitment to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, securing funding for alternative sources of energy and adaptation of technology in everyday activities that are geared towards shrinking humanity’s carbon footprint on the planet.

African countries have internalised and made considerable efforts towards these goals despite budgetary constraints, with the United Nations lauding the continent for embracing technology and innovation in its journey to fight climate change.

Jukka Uosukainen, CTCN’s director, spoke with IPS during the Climate Technology Centre and Network (CTCN) Africa Regional Forum held in Nairobi, Kenya April 9–10, stressing that technology is already changing the fortunes of people in the continent.

For instance, Mali has successfully applied field contouring technology in rural areas such as Koutiala, reducing the volume of water runoff from 20 percent to 50 percent depending on the soil type.

“This has improved the yield of crops in an area that experienced severe drought and bettered the quality of livelihoods owing to a rise in income,” he noted.

Uosukainen said that Senegal has launched massive biogas digester projects through the National Biogas Program by implementing biomethanisation technologies that facilitate faster access to cleaner energy within the republic. The country also utilises tri-generation and co-generation technologies that use waste as raw materials for energy production.

Furthermore, Mauritius has aptly integrated the use of boiler economizers, which capture the waste heat from boiler stack gases (called flue gas) and transfer it to the boiler feedwater.

This has reduced the country’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, cutting energy costs and boosting socioeconomic growth amongst its citizens.

Morocco has adopted photovoltaic technology that harnesses solar power for greater energy production. The Noor Ouarzazate IV power station spans 137 square kilometres and generates 582 megawatts of renewable energy for over 1 million people. This has helped increase the nation’s uptake of renewable energy sources to an impressive 42 percent, lessening the rate of air pollution and enhancing quality of life.

In Kenya, a 630 MW geothermal plant has come on line, providing electricity for 500,000 households and 300,000 small and medium-sized enterprises. Kenya alone has the potential to generate 10,000 megawatts from its geothermal resources, says an analysis by Bridges Africa.

Tony Simons, director general of the World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF), said that most African countries have chosen clean energy technologies as a part of their environmental solutions and ICRAF supports these efforts through its work in developing cleaner options for woody biomass-based energy, a key technology used across the continent.

According to ICRAF, Kenya is using water conservation technologies like sunken-bed kitchen gardens and terracing to successfully increase yield production and improve food security.

ICRAF has partnered with several eastern Africa countries such as Uganda, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Burundi in a project dubbed Trees for Food Security Project which conducts extensive research and development into special tree species for each nation.

This involves detecting the seedlings suitable for specific areas and ensuring modern agricultural techniques are employed during planting. The forest cover helps prevent desertification, reduces carbon dioxide emissions through photosynthesis and enhances of the aesthetic beauty of the lands.

And the Green Cooling Africa Initiative implemented in Ghana and Namibia encompasses modern air conditioning and refrigeration appliances that use minimal electricity and generate lower volumes of toxins into the atmosphere.

Simons called for gender equality in any strategies to address climate change because in all communities, knowledge of agricultural and natural resource management differs by gender, making it is essential to include women’s perspectives in addressing climate change at the farm and local level.

Rehabilitation of water projects is another field that’s getting attention, as African countries seek to reduce the overexploitation of such resources for the benefit of all stakeholders.

For instance, in Kenya, a policy of “green water” technology has been operationalized with the support of various local and international partners with the aim of curbing water shortages and channeling it to better uses.

This technology has enabled arid and semi-arid areas to have regular instances of water supply which is used for irrigation, animal husbandry and subsistence in homesteads. Therefore, it has limited the struggles that rural people undergo in search of water and pasture.

Also the government of Kenya, in partnership with the World Bank Group, the International Livestock Research Institute, and Financial Sector Deepening Kenya, implemented the Kenya Livestock Insurance program (KLIP) in the northern part of the county. KLIP, which is Africa’s large scale public-private partnership livestock insurance program, uses satellite imagery technology to provide early warning of drought.

The satellite measures the progressive impact of drought on loss of forage in the vulnerable pastoral regions of Kenya. It then triggers timely insurance payouts to help vulnerable pastoralists to purchase fodder and animal feed supplements to keep their core breeding alive until the drought has passed.

Acceptance of climate change technologies and innovations has resulted in better farming methods, higher crop yields, lower energy consumption and a reduction in carbon emissions throughout Africa.