CAIRO: He is a man on a mission. The passion, the spirit and the results speak for themselves. “I just love doing what I am doing,” he told Bikya Masr at a local Cairo cafe recently, only hours after he had been repairing one of the 8 biogas digesters. Working in Cairo's more impoverished neighborhoods, Culhane has found a niche that very few have been able to tackle. When he first began to enter the Darb al-Ahmar and Manshiyet Nasr areas, he had an idea of how to develop and build the digesters, but when local kids began to tell him there were similar parts, cheaper parts, available that they could use, the American could not refuse. “They came up to us when we were looking for certain parts and told us they knew where to get some similar pieces,” Culhane continued. “They knew their area better than I did and what they brought helped create a group of people working together for a unified purpose.” So, instead of maintaining the rigid plans for the digesters that he had, he compiled local material and, in a sense, winged it, employing both areas people to help create functioning digesters that are able to provide homes with a few hours of gas daily. The process is ongoing and Culhane often returns to Cairo to see how the digesters are progressing. Cutting costs has been easier than expected. He said that now they can make a digester for less than $200 and as the community continues to see that it can be successful, he envisions more digesters coming to fruition as funding comes in. Biogas can be used as a low-cost fuel in any country for any heating purpose, such as cooking. In Egypt, Culhane has employed kitchen waste as the main source of making the digesters work. Residents can collect the organic waste left over from the day's cooking, take it up to the digester, put it in and this releases methane that can then travel through pipes into the stove or oven for cooking purposes. In a sense, Culhane explains, a digester functions much the same way a cow's stomach works. The organic waste is put into the digester, then is converted into a gas that can be used as a power source. It is not outlandish to say a digester is truly a cow's stomach powering the boiling of tea and coffee in the home. But how did it all begin for Culhane in Egypt? “When I got back from India after the trip with the India Youth Climate Network in January I built two functioning digesters. I built one on Hanna Fathy's roof in the Zabaleen neighborhood and one on Hussein Farag's roof in Darb Al Ahmar,” Culhane tells of the first push for biogas in Egypt. “That is for two reasons — one, we always replicate all of our actions in both neighborhoods to connect them together experientially so we can draw on the strengths that come from difference and diversity,” he continued. “It acts as a bridge — build the same technological system (first it was the 34 solar hot water systems, 17 in each community, starting with the initial 2; then 2 identical biogas systems) then let the communities interact and share data and experience. It also acts as a scientific control for me — if I only make one of something and I have problems I don't know what the problems are due to. Could it be something social (lack of maintenance, improper use etc.) or physical/engineering? So we always work in two's (ideally 3′s).” Still, funding remains slow and sporadic. Often individuals will pass along an amount of money to Culhane to build another digester, but until government's and NGO's see the usefulness of digesters and biogas, it is a slow process, he said. The Egyptian government has shown some interest in the new technology, but has yet to implement a wider strategy to bring biogas to the wider population. Either way, Culhane believes in his mission to bring energy to the people who need it, especially as the world continues to witness a decline in the amount of energy and power available to all people. Undoubtedly, Egypt's move toward cleaner, renewable and alternative energy sources won't stop with Culhane. And Culhane is unlikely to leave Egypt fend for itself. He is here for the long-run. BM
