Projects
Envisaj Mercy, the Mercy College Environmental Sustainability and Justice League Biogas team traveled with Culhane to Lancaster Pennsylvania to build a backyard biogas system at the home of the Kelseys from Juice Plus.
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Our second small scale biogas build in Turkey following the one I did the previous year at the same time with Yaşat Hacıbaloğlu -- the network of biogas investigating youth grows ever stronger and brighter -- things have been stalled here in the DIY realm because youtube is banned by the government so it isn't easy to access open source video instruction, but there is no substitute for face-to-face workshops anyway, so I am privileged to have been able to share a solution with the students of Koc University's Environmental Engineering Club this afternoon/evening.
In March of 2014, Solar CITIES' Culhane flew into St. Louis on a night flight from Rio where he was working on his Brazil biogas project with Solar CITIES Solutions, to deliver the keynote address at the Euphrates Institute conference on sustainability and to receive their prestigious "Visionary of the Year" Award. During the keynote he demonstrated the utility and safety of biogas by having a woman from the audience lie down on an air mattress filled with methane which he then used to light LED lamps using a "PowerPot" thermoelectric generator.
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We built this Solar CITIES IBC/ARTI Hybrid Biodigester system on January 15th at Kibbutz Lotan after Culhane field tested the new design early in the fall at Mercy College. The new idea was to use buckets for the feed in and slurry out, simulating a Puxin or fixed dome digester using water displacement to allow for some gas build up in the IBC and creating water pressure to force the gas out. It also gives an ability to easily pour food waste in, acting as a "mega funnel".
In 2011, at the end of the Arava Institute Alumni Conference in Aqaba, Jordan, at which T.H. Culhane was the keynote speaker, a team of alumni and Culhane crossed the border to Israel with Arava biogas expert Yair Teller, and built two "salchicha" flexible bag type digesters at the Arava Institute in Kibbutz Lotan.
On April 27, 2013, at the end of my presentation tour for Earth Week, an enthusiastic student who had attended one of my talks, Yaşat Hacıbaloğlu, asked if he could learn how to build a home biodigester. Since I had a "day off" where Bosch/National Geographic/Fox was going to treat me to a day of sightseeing I decide instead to ask the driver if he could take me and Yasat into the local market to buy supplies and build a Solar CITIES style ARTI biogas system.
After the midnight build of a Solar CITIES modified ARTI biodigester in Erbil, Kurdistan tonight, during my last night in Iraq with new friends Maw'eid and Bryant and Dave (construction, security and IT professionals) , we said prayers in Arabic and English and each put some of my Iraqi grandfather's ashes in the tank so that his spirit may live on with the humblest yet most impactful of God's creation, the Archaea, helping guide their transformations toward the renewal of this proud and ancient civilization.
(Note the lat lon coordinates are not yet correct for this build)
Frank Finver and Victoria Reppert and a group of folks from the UN, including Chief Humanitarian Officer Karin Mayer, built this ARTI in the garden at the Embassy residences. It was used for a workshop and to demonstrate the gas and fertilizer and later dissassembled and delivered as a gift to Dr. Mukdad Al Khateeb at the Baghdad University of Technology.
A bright spot in the ongoing conflict in Iraq was our visit in April of 2013 to the Iraq Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST). After we built a family-sized biodigester on the grounds with their engineers, they surprised us by unveiling a host of great technologies that they are working with: solar vacuum tube-assisted air conditioning, super bright LED street lights, Iraqi-manufactured photovoltaic panels, a different type of biogas system to the ones we had built and purchased.
In the spring of 2013 Thomas Taha Rassam Culhane returned to his mother's native homeland of Iraq to conduct biogas trainings and workshops on sustainability in Baghdad and Erbil.