Is Biogas the Next Green Energy Boom for China?

Filed in archive Venture Capital on January 24, 2008

Tam, an English teacher in China, published an interesting blog post yesterday on what might be a new frontier in green energy for China: biogas.

In Guangxi, according to her blog (which references a BBC feature) villages are turning human and animal waste into a usable gas with some fairly simple technology. Villagers build a dung "digester" with a grant from the government. They feed it with human and animal waste, and it produces a gas than can be for cooking, heating, etc.

I did a little blog surfing and found this report on how 22 million China households use biogas. According to the report, China hopes to see 300 million Chinese using biogas by 2020.






Tam goes on to discuss the environmental impact: how many trees are being saved, how biogas use impacts coal consumption, etc.

Zichi Lorentz evidently saw the same BBC piece that TAM watched. Zichi goes into much more detail on the impact of biogas and has a diagram on his site of a digestor that would produce biogas.

Of course, the venture capital questions have more to do with whether biogas digester can be profitably marketed in China in an industry the government hope will expand. We have solar panels and windmills. May biogas the next big VC attraction...