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Dominican Republic has piped natural gas to minions of apartheid. DR uses twice as much charcoal per capita as Haiti, and cuts trees to smuggle charcoal into Haiti. DR offers to invade Haiti?!

In Haiti, there are plans to set down a megawatt gas turbine generator on an island, and to displace earthquake resettlers/refugees from Canaan in order to steal their compensation for loss of land to a gas terminal for Port au Prince.

Ghana is giving away stoves with refillable cylinders to hook users into supporting debt-based natural gas projects, but saying that free stoves will teach safety.

Vietnam makes methane biogas from human and farm animal sewage and food plant waste. Here



"piglet manure produced the highest CH4 yield of 443 normal litter (NL) CH4 kg(-1) volatile solids (VS) compared to 222 from cows, 177 from sows, 172 from rabbits, 169 from goats and 153 from buffaloes. Methane production from duckweed (Spirodela polyrrhiza) was higher than from lawn grass and water spinach at 340, 220, and 110.6 NL CH4 kg(-1) VS, respectively. The BMP experiment also demonstrated that the CH4 production was inhibited with chicken manure, slaughterhouse waste, cassava residue and shoe-making waste."

The waste is rich in plant nutrients, and it's often touted as a great organic fertiliser. Many of the resources listed below claim that.

However, the people who design biogas digestion systems are nearly always engineers, not biologists, and they tend to think chemicals are chemicals, as indeed they are, and these particular chemicals are indeed both nutrients and organic. But that doesn't make it a fertiliser — in fact it kills earthworms and wrecks the soil micro-life, which is the basis of soil fertility. This is what biologists say about it:

"Placement of E. foetida [manure worms] into sludge freshly removed from an anaerobic digester or in freshly-passed human excreta results in 100% mortality within a few hours." — From "Physicochemical Requirements in the Environment of the Earthworm Eisenia Foetida", by David L. Kaplan, Roy Hartenstein, Edward F. Neuhauser and Michael R. Malecki, Soil Biology and Soil Biochemistry, Vol. 12, pp 347-52, Pergamon Press, 1980.

Biogas digestion is an anaerobic process (no oxygen involved), unlike composting, which is aerobic (with oxygen). Compost gets hot, up to 60 deg C or more (140 deg F), biogas digesters don't get hot. Anaerobic digestion produces volatile fatty acids and volatile organic acids, both of which are phyto-toxins — plant poisons. Not what you want in your soil.

Add the sludge and supernatant to your compost pile. Biogas digestion makes the best sense when it's coupled with hot aerobic composting, then nothing will be wasted. Also, the heat in an active compost pile can be harnessed to produce a hot water supply, which means you can use the compost to keep the digester at working temperature during cold weather.

Another myth is that the digestion process kills off the pathogens in the manure (cow, pig, poultry and human manure are common feedstock for biogas digesters). Hot composting kills off pathogens reliably, when it's done right, but biogas digestion doesn't kill the pathogens in the manure.

"Indian biogas plants have short detention times. These are unlikely to destroy intestinal parasites, which are widely prevalent in rural areas of India. As a result, if the biogas sludge were used as a fertilizer, it would likely increase the spread of intestinal diseases." — From "Community Biogas Plants Supply Rural Energy and Water", UNDP

And:

"Work I did and studied in the 1970s with 'dungas' production (anaerobic digestion) in South Africa and India showed that the drawback was the high concentration of pathogens in the resultant slurry. ... It's the pathogen problem that caused me to abandon this line of research as a viable source of alternative energy production and return to aerobic composting." — Walker Bennett, Organic Gardening Discussion List, 15 Oct 1999.

This isn't a problem as long as you're aware of it. Adding the sludge and supernatant to the compost pile will kill all pathogens.

Video interview with Dr. Truong Tan Khanh, Tay Nguyen University in Buon Ma Thuot, on using biogas technology to manage livestock waste in Vietnam.

50 tons per day of food waste and 3 tons per day of sewage sludge--Hitachi Zosen Corporation has been selected to operate an organic waste methane fermentation and biogas supply system at a wholesale market in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, as part of the FY2014 Financing Program for Joint Crediting Mechanism (JCM) Model Projects, organized by the Global Environment Centre Foundation under the commission of the Japanese Ministry of the Environment.

According to the UNHCR there are currently about 300 refugee camps containing a total 2.4 million people with an average of 20,000 per camp. Around 1/3 of them are without proper latrines or waste disposal, which leads to increased risk for disease.

Using biogas as fuel also cuts down on pollution. There would be less need for wood fires and burning methane is more eco friendly than releasing it into the atmosphere.