At Ibadan, Cook Your Food With Slaughterhouse Cow Waste

Imagine this. We hate to see the cow waste. Yes, those slaughterhouse wastes smell bad.  But our Dr. Joseph Adelegan has won many awards over trying to get energy from these wastes. He called it  Cows to Kilowatts.  The Cows to Kilowatts initiative started as a solution to the pressing issue of slaughterhouse water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. He does many interesting engineering by employing powerful anaerobic reactor to process animal waste and blood into quality biogas. He designed the stuff in Ibadan. The captured methane biogas can be used as cooking gas, fuel for household gas generators, and as biofuel for transportation. Any remaining sludge is used as fertilizer. What a bright man!

Imagine if Doc visits the slaughterhouse in your town or city and gives you fuel from that. The slaughterhouse waste problem is common in many Nigerian cities and we could be lucky if this reactor is affordable.

I do not know the commercial viability because it looks very huge. Yet, with government support, he could improve it.

But there is a major progress. The Cows to Kilowatts partnership built its first plant in Ibadan to treat slaughterhouse waste with a $500,000 grant from the U.N. Development Program. The company then raised an additional $200,000 from a World Bank competition and used it to build a bioreactor to generate electricity from cassava waste in the Nigerian city of Ilorin.

The Ibadan plant, which generates around 1,800 cubic meters of biogas per day, already provides affordable cooking gas to 5,400 homes. The initiative is also reducing pollution inside the homes of poor families because the cooking gas it sells is cleaner than commonly used fuels.

Hope someone called Vision 2020. We have got our own refinery. And it is refining, not crude oil, but cow wastes.