Biogas is a champion of sustainability, offering clean, renewable energy and helping to solve the organic waste problem by transforming it into biofuels, says Alex Enrich-Prast, a professor at universities in Brazil and Sweden. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 7 2024 (IPS)

“I don’t know of a more sustainable technology for the transformation of society than biogas,” said Professor Alex Enrich-Prast, an activist for this energy alternative with a highly diversified and decentralised expansion in Brazil.

It is not only a renewable and clean energy source, obtained by the anaerobic degradation of organic waste, he argued before entrepreneurs and stakeholders gathered at the 11th national Biogas Forum on 2-3 October in Rio de Janeiro.

Biogas, he added, is also key to the world’s ability to deal with rubbish and waste in general, a problem that punishes humanity, which makes this energy circular.“Biogas follows segmentation by type of substrates. Its business model for sugar cane is different from that of pig farming, dairy cattle, basic sanitation, and other crops”: Cícero Bley Junior.

A researcher on the subject at Brazilian universities and at Linkoping University in Sweden, biologist Enrich-Prast surprised his audience by saying that “biogas, in Brazil, is more relevant for the production of biofertilisers than for energy”.

In Europe, the expansion of this energy source responds to the ‘geopolitical strategy’ of reducing dependence on Russian gas in a continent whose temperatures require heating. The war in Russia-invaded Ukraine uncovered the drama.

In the case of Brazil, a tropical agricultural power, the dependence on imported fertilisers, which account for more than 80% of national consumption, stands out, explained the professor.

As Russia and Ukraine are major suppliers of fertilisers, the war prompted an increase in domestic production, to be partially covered by waste whose biodigestion generates both biogas and an improved manure, rid of gases. The resulting fertiliser, which contains micronutrients, can produce a better fertiliser than chemical ones.

In addition to the geopolitical and economic risks, imported fertilisers are of fossil origin, undermining the low-carbon agriculture that Brazil is trying to promote as part of its climate change mitigation goals.

Renata Isfer, president of the Brazilian Biogas and Biomethane Association that promotes the Biogas Forum, an annual meeting, which took place in Rio de Janeiro in September. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

High cost is the stumbling block

“The difficulty is the cost. Biofertilisers are still more expensive than fossil or mineral fertilisers, and agriculture is not willing to pay that price,” Renata Isfer, president of the Brazilian Biogas and Biomethane Association (Abiogás), the forum’s promoter, told IPS.

Technological advances and the scale of production could reduce costs, but the global market’s environmental demands could lead to a faster path by setting more sustainable and less polluting production, she acknowledged.

In any case, “biogas is vital. There will be no human colonisation on Mars without biogas there,” Enrich-Prast, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro currently on loan to his counterpart in São Paulo, told IPS.

In the midst of his teaching, the specialist promotes cooperation between Brazil and Sweden. Together with other researchers, he founded the company Inova Biogás, with the aim of contributing to energy productivity and the quality of biofertilisers.

He values the experience of Europe, where biogas, which when refined becomes biomethane equivalent to natural gas, is now a significant energy input, having explored much of its potential.

In Brazil it is an emerging industry, still lacking in public policies, investments, proprietary technologies and regulations, which is being developed through private, sectoral and experimental initiatives and is designing an expansion through local arrangements, in a territorial decentralisation and by productive ecosystems.

A truck that uses biomethane as fuel and can travel more than 500 kilometres with its eight yellow canisters. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Segmentation

“Biogas follows segmentation by type of substrates. Its business model for sugar cane is different from that of pig farming, dairy cattle, basic sanitation, and other crops,” summarised Cícero Bley Junior, an icon of the sector, currently with his consulting company Bley Energías.

“Everything is biogas, but biogas is only part of the process and the business”, from the activities that generate the substrate or input for biodigestion to the biomethane used in various types of industry, in trucks and other vehicles, he said.

Founder, first president and current president emeritus of Abiogás, Bley drove the biogas movement in southwest Brazil when he was superintendent of renewable energy at Itaipu Binacional (2003-2016), the hydroelectric power plant shared between Brazil and Paraguay on the border between the two countries.

A business model is emerging around the agro-industrial cooperative Primato, in Toledo, a municipality of 150,000 inhabitants in the west of the southern state of Paraná and the country’s largest producer of pork, where Bley currently concentrates his work.

In the transport of animal feed alone, the cooperative has 70 trucks, each of which travels an average of 200 kilometres a day using diesel.

The plan underway to replace fossil fuel with biomethane would result in huge cost savings and a reduction of 89% in greenhouse gas emissions, he said.

Local arrangements are emerging or may emerge all over the country, with an abundance of biomass, from the melon-producing export area in the northeastern state of Alagoas, to another nearby fishing community that grows and consumes cassava, to the heart of the Amazon with many macrophytic aquatic plants, he said.

For the time being, the main production of biogas and biomethane is concentrated in older landfills and in more recent years in sugar cane ethanol plants.

Biogas and biomethane plant of a power plant of Cocal, an ethanol and sugar producer in the west of the southern Brazilian state of São Paulo. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Local production and consumption

One of these, Cocal, in the west of the southern state of São Paulo, supplies part of its biomethane to the gas market in three nearby cities. For this purpose, Necta, which distributes natural gas in most of the state, has built a local pipeline network.

This is also planned to supply a 16-plant ceramics cluster in Santa Gertrudes, another small São Paulo city of 24,000 inhabitants. But this is not the priority of Comgás, the gas distributor in the east of São Paulo state, which includes Santa Gertrudes.

A major problem in the ceramics pole, the city’s air pollution has been reduced by the adoption of natural gas as an energy input, instead of the former use of coal and firewood, according to David Penna, the company’s engineering manager.

The current priority is the replacement of diesel consumption by trucks on the roads with biomethane, which is considered equivalent and does not require technological alterations to vehicles.

Studying the flow of trucks on the roads with statistics is now one of the tasks undertaken by several natural gas distribution companies to identify priority locations for future refuelling stations.

But these are long-term plans, as replacing diesel trucks with gas-powered ones takes time, since these vehicles have a long service life and the automotive industry is slowly increasing production of gas-powered trucks, Penna told IPS during the Biogas Forum.

(Re)energisa, an energy transition company, part of the Energisa electricity generation and distribution group, has also embraced biogas, after concentrating on solar photovoltaics.

It is installing a plant in Campos Novos, in the centre of the southern state of Santa Catarina, Brazil’s largest pork exporter, to generate 25,000 cubic metres of biomethane per day, using waste from the surrounding meat and dairy industry.

It solves the problem of waste from local industry, but the focus is on the production of biofertilisers through composting, according to Roberta Godoi, vice-president of Energy Solutions at (Re)energisa.