It's been a wild, exciting ride... but our blindly wasteful squandering of the planet's fossil fuels will soon be a thing of the past. In the United States alone (the worst example, perhaps, but not really unusual among "modern" nations), every man, woman and child consumes an average of three gallons of oil each day. That's well over two hundred billion gallons a year.
If we continue burning off petroleum at only this rate -- which isn't very likely since population is climbing and the big oil companies remain chained to "sell-more-tomorrow" economics -- experts predict the world will run out of refineable oil within (are you ready for this?) n30 years.
So where does that leave us? Well, number one, we obviously must get serious about population control and per capita consumption of power and, number two, if we don't want to see brownouts and rationing of the power we do use, we'd better start looking around for ecologically-sound alternative sources of energy.
And there are alternatives. One potent reservoir that's hardly been tapped is methane gas.
Hundreds of millions of cubic feet of methane -- sometimes called "swamp" or bio-gas -- are generated every year by the de- composition of organic material. It's a near-twin of the natural gas that big utility companies pump out of the ground and which so many of us use for heating our homes and for cooking. Instead of being harnessed like natural gas, however, methane has traditionally been considered as merely a dangerous nuisance that should be gotten rid of as fast as possible. Only recently have a few thoughtful men begun to regard methane as a potentially revolutionary source of controllable energy.
One such man is Ram Bux Singh, director of the Gobar Gas Research Station at Ajitmal in northern India. Although some basic research into methane gas production was done in Germany and England during World War II's fuel shortages, the most active exploration of the gas's potential is being done today in India.
And with good reason. Population pressure has practically eliminated India's forests, causing desperate fuel shortages in most rural areas. As a result, up to three-quarters of the country's annual billion tons of manure (India has two cows for every person) is burned for cooking or heating. This creates enormous medical problems -- the drying dung is a dangerous breeding place for flies and the acrid smoke is responsible for widespread eye disease -- and deprives the country's soil of vital organic nutrients contained in the manure.
The Gobar (Hindi for "cow dung") Gas Research Station -- established in 1960 as the latest of a long series of Indian experimental projects dating back to the 1930's -- has concentrated its efforts, as the name suggests, on generating methane gas from cow manure. At the station, Ram Bux Singh and his co- workers have designed and put into operation bio-gas plants ranging in output from 100 to 9,000 cubic feet of methane a day. They've installed heating coils, mechanical agitators and filters in some of the generators and experimented with different mixes of manure and vegetable wastes. Results of the project have been meticulously documented and recorded.
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