- A former migrant worker and chauffeur has pioneered the use of biogas in his home village near the city of Yogyakarta on Indonesia’s Java Island.
- A net zero roadmap published by the International Energy Agency requires the production of biogas to quadruple by the year 2050.
- Critics of biogas at the industrial dairy scale say it absorbs conservation funding that is better spent elsewhere.
- Local residents near Yogyakarta city say the installation of anaerobic digesters has improved household finances and that they no longer need to queue to buy propane cylinders.
SLEMAN, Indonesia — A decade ago, Suyono’s neighbors found his antics collecting the goat and quail droppings outside his home verging on the strange. Today, it’s become the norm in many households in Minggir, a Javanese village producing its own gas.
“A lot of people just laughed,” Suyono, 50, told Mongabay Indonesia. “‘Um, pak, you can just buy it [gas] at the food stall.’”
In 2014, after a period living abroad in Malaysia as a low-paid migrant worker, Suyono returned home to Minggir village, which is located a few kilometers west of the city of Yogyakarta.
Once settled, he took a job as a driver at Yayasan Rumah Energi, a foundation that works on household renewable energy projects, like biogas.
Biogas is produced via anaerobic digestion, where microorganisms break down animal manure, biological waste or plant residues in a sealed environment deprived of oxygen.
The chemical reaction produces methane and other gases, which can be burned as alternatives to propane and butane cylinders, which governments burn billions of dollars a year on subsidizing (and whose price is determined by international markets).
Chauffeuring Yayasan Rumah Energi staff sparked Suyono’s interest in the foundation’s work on biogas. After studying the basics, Suyono went to work and began producing around 1.8 kilograms (4 pounds) at a time.
Within a few years, people increasingly began asking Suyono for help installing biogas infrastructure at local Islamic boarding schools and in nearby homes. Later, he helped build 500 units in farther-flung East Nusa Tenggara province.
Yayasan Rumah Energi says 133,459 people have benefited from this cleaner cooking fuel following installation of 28,861 units of digesters, according to the organization’s 2022 report.
Pilot light
Increased use of the gas derived from waste produced by Suyono in the village of Minggir is already factored into global greenhouse gas reduction scenarios.
The International Energy Agency’s Net Zero by 2050 scenario requires the world’s production of biogas to rise fourfold by 2030.
A government program in China backing anaerobic digesters led to installation of around 42 million units in just over 12 years. From 2028, India will require all piped gas to contain 5% biogas. The European Union’s REPowerEU program, which was announced in 2022 to phase out fossil fuel purchases from Russia, wants to burn 35 billion cubic meters (1.2 trillion cubic feet) of biogas annually by 2030.
Critics of industrial-scale biogas say it is expensive and enables dairy industries to greenwash their production of methane. In 2024, 15 U.S. lawmakers coalesced in opposition against the availability of conservation funding under the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act for production of biogas.
“The storage of hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquid manure in manure lagoons pollutes the air and water of surrounding communities and this inherently unsustainable manure storage system is only further entrenched by the adoption of anaerobic digesters,” the lawmakers wrote on Feb. 1, 2024.
However, there is far less objection to use of the small-scale biogas piloted in Minggir by Suyono, owing primarily to reduced leakage of methane and negligible additional land use.
“Because LPG is produced from fossil fuels, I think it’ll thin as time goes by,” Suyono said. “It will definitely become rare — it’s different to something like this.”
The IEA says biogas can provide “a sustainable supply of heat and power that can serve communities seeking local, decentralised sources of energy, as well as a valuable cooking fuel for developing countries.”
Civil society groups cite a broad range of benefits from greater application of community biogas.
Home anaerobic digesters, proponents say, could catalyze immediate health outcomes in remote and semi-remote areas while helping counter the worsening social health disparities caused by climate change.
Globally, more than 2 billion people rely on traditional solid fuels to cook food and boil water, according to the IEA.
However, burning fuels like wood and kerosene inside the home generates hazardous levels of indoor air pollution, a health risk borne disproportionately by women and children.
UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency, says this air pollution is responsible for a large share of the 700,000 children under the age of 5 who die each year due to preventable pneumonia.
In addition to realizing urgent health benefits, biogas advocates say growing the number of homes making their own gas could even support governments in low- and middle-income countries to chip away at highly expensive energy subsidies.
State subsidy spending on fuels also accounted for more than 22% of central government spending in the world’s fourth-most populous country in 2022, the year global energy prices spiked following Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.
The amount Jakarta disbursed on subsidized fuels that year was almost 90% of the combined state subsidy bill on administered goods, including fertilizer and rice.
Boiler room
Since installing a 3-meter- (10-foot-) wide anaerobic digester at home, Catur Suharno has never looked back to the hassle of refilling the family’s LPG canister.
“There’s no need to queue,” said Catur, who is a neighborhood ward in Donoharjo village, 20 kilometers (12 miles) east of Suyono’s home in Minggir.
Around three in five families here in Donoharjo are farmers, many of whom were already familiar with desiccating cattle manure for a homespun fertilizer.
“We would only dry it in the past,” Catur told Mongabay Indonesia. “Now, there’s a fermentation process.”
Catur later contributed to a community sewage treatment plant in 2011, in which around 60 households pay only 5,000 rupiah ($0.28) every month for the service.
That has stopped households dumping waste into the rivers that flow through the village from sources near Mount Merapi.
“It helps the community in terms of health rather than it going straight into the river,” he said.
Back in Minggir, Suyono chose not to worry too much about those who believed it would never work, as he stood over his 3-meter-wide digester, which is painted azure blue and encircled by seedlings.
The 50-year-old hasn’t spent money on a propane canister for a decade. From humble beginnings collecting manure at home, he has since shared expertise with his community and helped implement government biogas programs.
“It can feel challenging at first,” Suyono said. “But you have to see it as a long-term investment.”
This story was first published here in Indonesian on Feb. 28.
Converting biowaste to biogas could power cleaner, sustainable Earth future
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This story first appeared on Mongabay
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