Many people have attempted DIY biogas projects and become discouraged after they failed to produce flammable gas. With my first blog entry, I would like to start at the beginning. This article does not get into gas yields or what biogas can be used for, it is a basic introduction to the five necessary conditions to create flammable biogas in the first place and – hopefully – encourages a few folks who have failed before to try again.

I can guarantee the reader on my life biogas works, and it works great. The ancient Assyrians used biogas to heat their baths in 3,000 BC, the famous gas lamps of Victorian England were fueled with biogas, Sweden runs all of its city buses with biogas and today there are an estimated 50 million households in China using biogas. There are no technical reasons every home in the world is not already using biogas for cooking energy and some light electric. The failure of any biogas project big or small are a result of violating one or more of these five easy-to-remember steps.

The microscopic organisms that produce biogas, known as Archaea, are among the oldest life forms on Earth. They predate the planet’s oxygen atmosphere — much less oxygen-breathing and CO 2 -absorbing plant life — by a cool 3.5 billion years. That’s billion with a “B.” Archaea are not bacteria, they are genetically closer to humans and other animals (eukaryotes), and form their own animal kingdom. As the Earth’s atmosphere became predominantly oxygen about 500 million years ago, archaea became isolated in the few remaining airless places, such as stagnant swamps, deep oceans, caves and hot springs, and of course the stomachs of vertebrates. To create biogas, we must recreate the conditions in which Archaea thrive in nature.

5 Steps to Making Homemade Biogas

The following table outlines the five steps to creating flammable biogas and I will get into further detail with each one. Biogas is reproduced in a special airtight tank called an anaerobic digester. The design of the anaerobic digester determines the first three steps.

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Step 1. Airtight Environment. A Ziploc baggie can be used for an anaerobic digester. The difficulty arises from trying to add fresh material without allowing oxygen into the system. The most common method of creating a continuous flow digester is the “teapot” or “P-trap” shape. Most biogas digesters are some variation of this teapot shape.