New Technology for developing countries... and perhaps the US.

This is a great new technology, and at a relatively low cost. Hopefully it will spread very quickly in developing countries to help meet its needs for energy, much better for the environment than large fossil fuel plants. It will also be cheaper than building transmission lines and support infrastructure.

This also holds significant opportunity for the US. Many places in the US still use septic systems which could be modified, to capture the methane gas for later use... or immediate use. It would probably be done at a relatively low cost... and make the home energy independent.

Just as we use heating oil, natural gas, petro, coal, etc. We need to explore a wide assortment of technologies... to meet our current and future energy needs. This is just one that should be explored and developed.

CNN.Com/Fortune Magazine 2/27/08

Waste not, want not

Plastics maker Sintex seeks to solve India's energy and sanitation problems in one stroke - with an at-home biogas digester.

By Jeremy Kahn

(Fortune Magazine) -- Sintex Industries, a plastics and textiles manufacturer in Gujarat, India, is betting it can find profit in human waste. Its new biogas digester turns human excrement, cow dung, or kitchen garbage into fuel that can be used for cooking or generating electricity, simultaneously addressing two of India's major needs: energy and sanitation.

Sintex's digester uses bacteria to break down waste into sludge, much like a septic tank. In the process, the bacteria emit gases, mostly methane. But instead of being vented into the air, they are piped into a storage canister.

A one-cubic-meter digester, primed with cow dung to provide bacteria, can convert the waste generated by a four-person family into enough gas to cook all its meals and provide sludge for fertilizer. A model this size costs about $425 but will pay for itself in energy savings in less than two years. That's still a high price for most Indians, even though the government recently agreed to subsidize about a third of the cost for these family-sized units. "We want to create a new industry for portable sanitation in India that's not available now," says S.B. Dangayach, Sintex's managing director.

Government officials plan to end open defecation by 2012 (hundreds of millions of Indians use railroad tracks or other outdoor locales instead of toilets) and say biogas plants are part of the solution. A.R. Shukla, a scientific advisor in the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, says India could support 12 million such plants, but only 3.9 million - mostly pricier models big enough to accommodate entire villages - have been installed to date. And last year the government fell far short of its target for new installations.

The future can be glimpsed on a dusty, rutted road in a poor South Delhi neighborhood. Here 1,000 people use an immaculately clean public toilet constructed by a nonprofit foundation, the Sulabh Sanitation Movement. The biogas digester attached to toilets provides cooking gas for a 600-student school and vocational-training program the foundation runs. In the past, nongovernmental organizations like Sulabh were the only ones offering biogas digesters.

But Sintex is hoping cities, real estate developers, building managers, and hospitals will jump at a ready-made way to harness the same energy.

Biogas digesters are just a small fraction of Sintex's business. The company has installed only about 100 of them. But it plans to increase investment and production tenfold in the coming year. That growth potential has helped Sintex stock more than double this past year. Human waste may be a stinky business, but to investors it smells like money.

A Sintex digester can turn manure into fuel for cooking and electricity.