7DAYS, United Arab Emirates
June 13 2005
Manure mission: the dung thing
Written by 7DAYS | Tuesday, 14 June 2005
Zhuzhuna Didebashvili is dreaming about warmth, hot tea, cheap power
and most specifically about cow dung. The 46-year-old farmer from the
tiny mountain village of Akhaldaba thinks cows could be the secure
energy source that will protect Georgians from the whims of the
global gas market.
“Every morning, before I go to work on my farm, I boil tea or milk on
this gas stove, and it all comes from the cows I keep,” she said,
pointing to a pipe connecting her stove to an underground tank where
she dumps her cow dung. By vigorously churning the tank every day,
she helps the noxious mixture rot and produce the methane that heats
her tea.
The gas helps to keep her immune from the energy shortages that have
plagued the small Caucasus nation since the end of the Soviet Union,
when Georgia was left without the capacity to supply itself with
power. Most Georgians cannot afford to supplement their energy supply
with expensive power imports from Russia and Armenia.
Didebashvili’s 62-year-old neighbour Elisabed has only three cows
but, enthused by her neighbour’s example, built herself a stove that
now helps her keep up her supply of jam. Only around 140 Georgian
households use cow-powered stoves. But for those families it has been
a major innovation that makes gas cooking easy in places too remote
for a steady supply.
Nine households in Akhaldaba – a village 25 km (16 miles) from the
capital Tbilisi where the power station was long ago looted in the
post-Soviet chaos – get gas from their cows. The others have to
depend on firewood for cooking and heat. “In the past I needed two
trucks of firewood for heating and cooking, now I need only one
truck,” Elisabed said.
Didebashvili dreams of owning enough cows to power a generator, but
appreciates this might be a long way off. “This is only a dream. In
order to get electricity, perhaps I would need a hundred cows, I
would have to become a true farmer,” she said.
For her gas she can thank Avtandil Bitsadze, an engineer who lost his
job in a factory with the economic collapse that followed the fall of
the Soviet Union and invented the stoves as a way around the
country’s periodic energy crises.
He has even won World Bank support for his plants, which cost about
$2,000 to construct. “I built the first power plants in 1994. Demand
for such plants emerged in Western Georgia, where peasants keep more
cows than in the east,” Bitsadze said, saying he took the idea from
similar plants in Britain and China.
“I didn’t invent this device, I just adapted it for the cooler
Georgian climate,” Bitsadze said. His plants can be extended to allow
farmers to heat their houses, although that would require at least
15-20 cows. “This is very a easy way to get energy. Gas can be
produced from anything that rots, but this gas is much purer than
natural gas, for example, from Azerbaijan,” Bitsadze said.
Georgia’s Ministry of Agriculture plans to finance a mere 65 more
such power plants, which will displace only a tiny fraction of the
1.2 billion cubic metres of natural gas Georgia imports from Russia
each year. But Bitsadze is thinking big. “If 240,000 families in
Georgia decide to build my plants, the country will be able to get an
extra 200 million cubic metres of gas a year,” he said.