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Bio Gas
Tue Oct 07, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook's weekly installment on global climate
change. Bio-gas stoves are very popular in Nepal. These stoves burn gas derived from
anaerobically digested animal wastes. Now, environmentalists and researchers are looking at
the role bio-gas plants might play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Manisha Ariel
reports.
When her mornings chores are over 36 year old, Saraswati Bhetwel, gathers dung from the floor
of the shed, where she keeps her cows and buffalos, mixes it with the cattle urine, that gets
collected in a small pond nearby and pours the mixture into a bio-gas plant.
Saraswati's bio-gas plant is six cubic meters in size and requires 80 pounds of dung everyday.
Bio-gas stoves replace traditional stoves that burn firewood, animal dung, and agricultural
waste and produce greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane; which
scientists believe are responsible for global warming. Says Barbara Haya, a researcher with
the UC Berkeley's energy and resources group.
BH: If we just look at the emissions reductions from the collecting and burning of the various
fuels used in traditional cooking stoves, a single bio-gas plant, over the course of one year,
can prevent the release of 1 to even 5 tons of carbon dioxide depending on what fuel is being
displaced.
Haya believes bio-gas plants should be paid for by industrialized countries through the clean
development mechanism. The CDM is a procedure that allows industrialized countries to
partially meet their targets of greenhouse gas emissions by funding cutback projects in
developing countries. There are 80,000 bio-gas plants in Nepal and there is potential for a
million more.
The Weather Notebook is a production of The Mount Washington Observatory. Our series on global
climate change is funded by the New England Science Center Collaborative and the Roy A. Hunt
Foundation.
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