The Complete Biogas Handbook

How To Build a Small Biogas Digester

How to Build an Underground Masonry Digester
If reports are to be believed, some 14 million digesters have been built in China, and many
millions have been built in India and other countries as well. Depending primarily on the size of
the digester and local prices for bricks (etc.), such a unit may cost from US$350 to US$500 and
up, which is a great deal of money for a village family in most of the world. Consider that in the
year 2000…
“…about 59 percent of the Indian population (495 million
people) had an annual household income of less than [$280]”
World Resources Institute, “Resource consumption patterns and
implications: India”, 2006
Therefore the great majority of these millions of digesters have been built with government and
international NGO subsidies. (Is that “sustainable”?)
Speaking generally, virtually all of these digesters are either “fixed dome” or “floating dome” (also known
by some as “Chinese-style” and "“Indian-style” digesters, respectively), such as these two:

  

The process for building either type of digester (in any of their many variations) is roughly
similar. One digs a large pit, and (most often using brick) builds up the main structure of the
digester. Finishing touches are put on and in, and the digester is covered over with earth.
That’s a simple description of a process that can require significant work. And that implies that
in the transition from a digester made from, say, a single 55-gallon drum to a digester made from
two water tanks, to the point where one is considering an underground masonry digester, the
game changes.
Consider long-term use, for example. Based on what we have seen, almost all 55-gallon drum
digesters are fairly quickly abandoned— owners do not continue to feed and care for them—
because, as mentioned above, they can be difficult to deal with and they do not provide truly
practical amounts of biogas. Besides, most folks who build a 55-gallon drum digester are almost
always trying to scratch an itch rather than meet a need. They want to know, but they don’t
really need the biogas being produced. Use it, don’t use it: no biggie.
If we assume that a typical ARTI-style digester is 6ft/2m in diameter, and 6ft/2m high, then it will have a
volume of 170ft3/4.8m3/~1,300 gallons. With a 40-50 day HRT (retention time), then to maintain full output,
one must feed such a unit 25gal/100 liters of slurry every day. Think about it: every day you’d have to fill up
three-to-five 5-gallon containers with a mix of water, food scraps and other organic matter from around your
neighborhood. Every day.
(Of course, if you don’t want or need full output from the digester, you can feed it less. Put it on a diet.)
While data (known to us anyway) are not available, it would not be surprising if far fewer ARTI-
style digesters were abandoned, because they can provide a good supply of cooking fuel, most
folks who have them need that fuel, they would have a hard time paying to replace it, and the
units require a fairly significant financial investment. Some, of course, will be abandoned, and if
so our wager would be that a survey would find that owners (primarily in urban settings) found it
difficult to continue to gather the amount of organic matter needed to keep the digester properly
fed.
What has been found with studies of underground masonry digesters is that as long as the
owners/users were properly selected [meaning, for example, a)they have an on-going source of
organic matter to feed the digester, b) realistic expectations, and c) sufficient knowledge about
& d) a commitment to properly maintaining the digester], and if they continue to get good
support from the program that built the digesters, most of those digesters will continue to be
used, perhaps for 20 years or longer. And again, those who have the digesters would
actually need the biogas for cooking and lighting; they could only replace those functions with
considerable labor (gathering wood daily), or paying very scarce cash for kerosene or similar
fuels.
Similar points will apply to you, if you are considering building a small digester. That is, as the
size increases, the expense likewise increases, and as well, the time and money required to
maintain and feed the digester increases. To make it all work, you likewise would need to have a
certain situation and outlook. Thus, again, as we (asyou) transition from those smaller digesters
to larger digesters, doing it because “it would be cool” or simply to learn more about biogas
becomes less and less tenable as a primary motivation. Great place to start, but that can’t be all
you’ve got, or it won’t be sustainable.
In other words, it would only make sense to build a larger digester where
 you have enough time, money, knowledge ( TCBH?) and skill to do so,
 where there is enough organic matter on-site or conveniently nearby to keep it fed, and
 where the expected outcome has sufficient value, as you see it, to offset the expense, time,
and hassle.
OK? That’s the lecture.
Now as far as how that translates, first consider a partial materials list for a typical underground
masonry digester (a “fixed dome GGC 2047 model”) adapted from the Biogas Sector
Partnership Nepal site (www.bspnepal.org.np). [Note 2/26/12: We had a link to the proper page
on BSP Nepal, but most of the entire site has disappeared as of late Feb, 2012. Even their own
main menu links give 404s. A good alternative reference is “Real Cost of Construction Survey of
a Typical Bio-gas Plant,” found here] The materials list is not complete, and so the totals
shown do not reflect the complete cost. Nevertheless, based on casual visits to a few hardware
sales websites, we assume the listed materials, purchased at retail in the US, would cost
 $8.25 for ~100 lb. bag of cement (50 kg = 110 lbs.),
 30¢ per brick (although as compared with Nepal, the size of our bricks may be different),
 both #34 “gravel” (1-1/2" to 2" rock fragments) and sand cost $35 per ton (where a m 3 of
small rocks, sand, or gravel is about 3,800 lbs.), and
 smaller gravel costs $28 per ton.
We will not show the cost of each item in the table below, but based on the above information, if
you are really interested, you can find out how we got the total costs we show by making your
own spreadsheet, or you can contact us and we will send you what we have. Since BSP indicates
one can use either rocks or bricks, we calculated based on which was cheaper.
We do not figure or include the cost of paint (last column below), because frankly it makes no sense to me
that anyone could do very much that is practical with a single liter of paint when using it on a several cubic
meter underground masonry digester. See further below for some suggestions for waterproofing the inside of
such digesters.
Plant Cost of partial list of Cement bags Rock (or) Bricks Gravel & Sand Paint
Size  materials needed, on
m3 described basis @50 kg/bag m3 bricks # of cement bags liters
4 $663 11-12 3.5 1,200 30 60 1.0
6 $775 13-14 4.5 1,400 35 70 1.0
8 $917 15-16 6.5 1,700 40 80 1.5
10 $1,111 19-21 8.0 2,000 50 90 2.0
For more on materials with which to coat the inside of the digester— after all it’s made from
brick or cement, and if it’s not coated it will not be gas–tight— see Plasters and Coats for
Digesters and Gas-Holders, pg. 61, in GTZ’s (now GIZ) publication. (All four reports in this
series are available from this page, down toward the bottom.)
Another report is from “Biogas plants in animal husbandry”:
Some tried and proven seal coats:
 multilayer bitumen [asphalt], applied cold (hot application
poses the-danger of injury by burns and smoke nuisance);
solvents cause dangerous/explosive vapors. Two to four thick
coats required.
 bitumen with aluminum foil: thin sheets of overlapping
aluminum foil applied to the still-sticky bitumen, followed by
the next coat of bitumen.
 plastics, as a rule epoxy resin or acrylic paint; very good but
expensive.
 paraffin [wax], diluted with 2–5% kerosene heated to 100°C
and applied to the preheated masonry. The paraffin
penetrates deep into the masonry, thus providing an effective
(deep) seal. Use kerosene/gas torch to heat masonry.
Werner, Stöhr, & Hees, “Biogas plants in
animal husbandry”, 1989 [emphasis
added]
Biogas digesters (actually either above or below ground) can also be made from ferrocement.
The Big Difference between a water tank and a digester is that for the latter, the entire tank
should be gas-tight, instead of just having the bottom and sides be water–tight, but that may be
less of a difference than it might sound. In any case, a fair to quite good resource on ferrocement
tanks (for water storage, not for biogas, but hey) is Technical Presentation of Various Types of
Cisterns Built in the Rural Communities of the Semiarid Region of Brazil. You may also wish to
look at some of the publications on this page.
Puxin, a Chinese company, makes a number of biogas-related products such as stoves, including
portable concrete forms to produce digesters more quickly. See the video on this page for
essentially all the information you need to understand how these portable forms work. (It would
be interesting to know if these forms would work if they were made from fiberglass…)
The third edition of the Biogas/Biofertilizer Handbook has some good information on
fibrocement digesters as an appendix (not the info in chapter 6). (You may wish to note that
rather more than half of the text of chapter 1 in this book is directly “adapted” from TCBH.)
As with any of these subjects, a good deal more can be said, but based on what we have seen
extant on the lovely explosion–in–a–library known as the World Wide Web (do you need the
acronym?), this page likely offers more resources than you will find elsewhere… Finally, we
end with a picture from BSP, the Biogas Support Program of Nepal:

See much larger original image here.