BANGKOK (dpa) – Not too long ago Somchai Nitikanchana, the proud owner of 40,000 pigs, was an unpopular guy in his neighbourhood.
“In the past, people tried to prevent pig farms from starting up near their homes because they polluted the environment, caused a tremendous stink and attracted flies,” said Somchai, the owner and manager of SPM Feedmill Company and two pig farms.
Six years ago, tired of being the local pariah in Paktho, Ratchburi province, 100 kilometres west of Bangkok, Somchai looked into a new technology promoted by Chiang Mai University that promised to take the stink out of pig farming, and create some bio-gas in the process.
Working on pilot projects with funding from the German Agency for Technology Cooperation (GTZ), the northern university had developed and adapted German technology for turning pigs’ waste into biogas for several pilot projects.
When Somchai expressed interest in the technology in 1995, the government’s National Energy Policy Office (NEPO), backed by the Energy Conservation Fund, had taken over up the Chiang Mai University project as an important experiment in energy conservation.
NEPO’s chief task is to find workable ways of conserving energy consumption in Thailand, which is dependent on oil imports for more than 50 per cent of its energy needs.
Since 1995, NEPO has been trying to encourage the Thailand’s 140 large pig farmers, raising more than 5,000 animals each, to invest in a fairly simple technology that will transform pig excrement into biogas, which in turn will reduce their operating costs by slashing electricity and cooking gas bills.
To entice farmers into the programme, NEPO subsidizes 30-40 per cent of the investment costs with money from the Energy Conservation Fund, a government fund.
So far, 22 large farms with about 600,000 pigs (Thailand’s total pig population is close to 6 million) have joined the programme, including Somchai’s operation.
Somchai’s total investment in the biogas technology for his three operations – two pig farms and a feedmill, amounted to 43 million baht (977,272 dollars), of which NEPO paid 11.6 million baht (263,636 dollars).
The technology is fairly simple, involving building cement ponds for the pig waste covered by tough plastic sheets that eventually puff up with methane gas and carbodioxide as the waste decomposes. The gas is piped off and used to fuel the farm’s feedmill, heat pens for baby piglets and cool pens for adult ones.
It can also be used for cooking. Another environmental benefit is that the process stripped the waste of its most toxic chemicals, and thus prevents the waste water from polluting nearby waterways.
On one farm alone the biogas has helped Somchai reduce his monthly electricity bill from 300,000 baht (6,818 dollars) to 100,000 (2,272). With the feedmill, he is saving 3 million baht (68,182 dollars) a year in fuel bills.
“This has been one of our most successful projects under the Energy Conservation Fund,” said Piyasavasti Amranand, NEPO’s secretary general.
Over the next five years, NEPO hopes to get another 90 large pig farms under the programme, or 4 million pigs.
He figures the biogas their excrement will generate is not insignificant. One pig’s annual waste output creates about the equivalent of one cylinder of liquified petroleum gas (LPG).
At 300 baht (6.80 dollars) per cylinder, 4 million piggies could save the country 1.2 billion baht (27.3 million dollars) in LPG use.
“It may not seem significant compared to the overall energy use, but for each farm the savings is significant, and for the whole country its the beginning of a much bigger savings,” said Piyasavasti.
NEPO thinks the same technology being applied to Thailand’s pig farms can be used to treat waste water in other industries such as food processing, alcohol production and chicken farming, all of them big businesses in the country.
The successful biogas experiment has also allowed the government to issue new environmental standards on wastewater treatment at pig farms, which will go into effect in February, 2002. Without the technology, such standards would have been difficult to enforce.
Meanwhile, the technology has proved a major boon for Somchai’s social life.
“Now I have no problem with wastewater, the stink has disappeared and the flies have gone,” said Somchai. “And the villagers love me because I give them work.”
