Gobar Gas Fuels Home Businesses Worldwide

So what’s Gobar Gas? It’s otherwise known as “biogas”. In places without instant electricity as close as your nearest wall plug, it’s a way to transform naturally occurring waste into clean energy that can cook food, heat homes, or generate electricity for cell phones and other small devices that make business easier.

Here’s the “recipe”:

“Gobar” is the Nepali word for cow dung. The “Gas” refers to biogas derived from the natural decay of dung, other waste products, and any biomass. In Nepal, villagers use buffalo, cow, human, and other waste products for biogas production. Pig and chicken dung are used in some places, as are raw kitchen wastes, including rotted vegetation.

Gobar is typically mixed with a roughly equal amount of water, and gravity-fed through a pipe into an airtight underground “digester,” where naturally occurring bacteria feast on the mixture. This anaerobic process produces small but precious amounts of gas. That gas can be fed directly into a heat source, such as a cooking stove, and used to fuel it.

With all the amenities we have for now in the west, this doesn’t sound so revolutionary, but as the article shows, it’s use puts Nepal 50 years ahead of Afghanistan!