His Excellency President Oluwasegun Obasanjo graciously invited us to his home to build a biodigester and then brought us around Abeokuta to see his Presidential library and his farms and industrial operations and plantations and reforestation areas and to attend church services and give presentations at the local churches on the miracle and blessing of biogas as a way toward ending deforestation, one of his passions.
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Working in partnership with the German "development through the arts" association, Simama e.V., a Solar CITIES enhanced ARTI digester was built at the Mukuru Arts Academy in Mukuru Slum, Nairobi by Minke Noordam and Nils Andersch from Simama and Mac teachers Henry Okayao and David Redmond in 2010.
As part of the Blackstone Ranch/National Geographic Innovation Challenge Grant, Culhane returned to Kenya and built digesters at the school of fellow Nat Geo Emerging Explorer Kakenya Ntaiya.
Yube Boitumelo Siyangaphi, Joseph Kabimba and Kebonyemang Mashabe and I have built a three stage biodigestor at the worker's camp at CSU base camp, Selinda wildlife reserve, Botswana. It consists of a fiberglass-sealed 1000 liter horizontal digestor tank (primary digestor), a 200 liter used steel oil drum with a telescoping gas collector made from a second oil drum, chopped in two (with 5 cm cut out all around) and then brazed (torch welded) back together so it fits inside the first drum (5 leaks had to be patched with metal expoxy).
In their first attempt to alter the conditions exacerbating deforestation and destruction of the Gombe National Park Chimpanzee reserve, Solar CITIES directors Hanna Fathy and T.H. Culhane joined Grace Gobbo from the Jane Goodall Institute to build the first two village digestors in the region (one in each of two villages in M'Kalinzi) where the use of firewood is rapidly eroding the edges of the wildlife park and two in the city of Kigoma on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, where charcoal use is having an even greater negative effect on the fate of the forest.
In 2010 on a Blackstone Ranch Foundation/National Geographic Innovation Challenge Grant, Solar CITIES Egypt Director Hanna Fathy, from the Zabaleen Trash Recycler's Community, and Dr. T.H. Culhane, co-founder of Solar CITIES e.V.
Cultural affairs lead officer Frank Finver and Arava Institue graduate Dana Rassas brought Solar CITIES to the West Bank to do renewable energy workshops in 2010. On the last day of Culhane's stay he built Palestine's first food waste biodigester at the Palestinian Wildlife Society Eco-home demonstration area with Imad Atrash, Amer Rabayah, Mohammed Salem and friends. The program continues to this day with several dozen small scale biogas systems being built throughout the West Bank and Gaza.
First Bio-Gas Digester In Palestine.
The aim of this project is to use the Biogas in our Arial Home Initiative, and to use this model as an educational model for the Palestinian Communities to encourage them thinking in using this system. Incorporation with Wildlife Society Palestine and the Us-Consulate EWB-Palestine with a help from the American expert Thomas Culhane created the first Biogas system in Palestine.
It was here at the Sekem farm and science school outside of Cairo Egypt that Thomas Culhane, Hanna Fathy and Solar CITIES intern Mike Rimoin deployed their invention of the open-source solar heated 3 IBC Solar CITIES Biodigester, perhaps the first use of IBCs for biogas in the world. Culhane felt it necessary to build a biogas system out of IBCs because he had just won a National Geographic Emerging Explorer's Blackstone Ranch Innovation Challenge Grant with Dr.