Biogas from Cowdung: Its Scope and Prospect in Sivasagar District: A Case Study

Despite rapid growth of commercial energy, biomass remains principle energy source in rural and traditional sectors and contributes a third of India's energy. Biomass energy constitutes wood fuels (including charcoal, wood waste wood), crop residues (such as bagasse, rice husk and crop stalks) and animal dung (including biogas). The anaerobic digestion of animal manure for the production of biogas has many potential advantages. Biogas is another source of renewable energy, it is produced when biomass is subjected to biological gasification and a methane-rich gas is produced from the anaerobic digestion of organic materials (Sambo 2011). The clean and sustainable biogas stoves are more efficient then wood-fired mud-stoves. The present study will focus on generation of biogas from cowdung to address the household energy demand in an environmentally and user friendly way and its prospect and utilization in Sivasagar District. The cow dung yields biogas in the digesters that can be used for cooking and lighting and the digester slurry is a good manure. There are approximately more then 500 villages in the district. For the present study, only village areas were selected for the availability of cowdung. Only 13 stations have been selected for the present study from where a few villages have been selected for the present purpose. Although, due to availability of cowdung there is a lot of scope of production of biogas, only a few people in certain houses found to be involved in this practice. But most of them has discontinued this practice as they thought it to be labourious and time consuming. But it is high time to think about such an alternate source of energy and to remove the misconception from people's mind.