Homemade Natural Gas: The MOTHER EARTH NEWS Methane Digester

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This methane digester steadily produced 41 cubic feet of biogas for almost three months on a single load of manure.
This methane digester steadily produced 41 cubic feet of biogas for almost three months on a single load of manure.
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This vertical methane digester design was built and tested by the MOTHER EARTH NEWS editors in 1973.
This vertical methane digester design was built and tested by the MOTHER EARTH NEWS editors in 1973.
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A horizontal digester should produce methane at a lower cost and with fewer complications than the vertical design.
A horizontal digester should produce methane at a lower cost and with fewer complications than the vertical design.

Discovering Methane Production

Thanks to a brief paragraph which appeared in Mechanix Illustrated, I first became aware that a burnable fuel could be produced from organic waste in the mid-1950s. The mini-article lightly mentioned that a few British sanitation engineers were powering their cars with some of the sewage gas generated by the garbage disposal plant at which they worked. That skimpy but tantalizing report intrigued me and I squirreled it away in the files I’ve maintained since I was 8 or 10 years old. A few years later, I added a 1963 Farm Journal article about making electricity from manure-based biogas.

The second piece described a methane digester built by Dr. George W. Groth, Jr., on his 1,000-head pig ranch in San Diego County, California. According to the Farm Journal article, Groth used a 6,000-gallon composting unit to produce biogas with which he fueled a war-surplus electrical generator. The generator, in turn, furnished electricity for the farm, but just how much, the report didn’t say.

Over the years that followed, I collected other scraps of information about methane production. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and WEC Supplement furnished some exceptionally valuable leads during 1969, and a big packet of material from Clarence E. (Fireball) Burr in early 1970 really convinced me — once and for all — of the practicality of anaerobic bacteria and their useful by-products.

Burr, who served for years as Chairman of Health in the People’s Lobby of Los Angeles, teamed up in the early 1930s with consulting engineer Russell P. Howard. The two men then spent the next thirty-seven years fighting — together and singly — to introduce the merits of anaerobic waste digestion to municipal officials. It was a long, discouraging battle. So long and so discouraging that, when Clarence happened to see a copy of MOTHER EARTH NEWS in 1970, he more or less turned to the publication as a last resort.

  • Published on Jan 1, 1974
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