Name: Creating power from poultry poop
Uploaded: 2025-12-05T18:14:09.065Z
Duration: 3 min 58 s
Description: Chickens create a lot of waste, which is hard to dispose of. A Coimbatore start-up is generating enough biogas from the muck to cover one farm’s power needs.

Chickens create a lot of waste, which is hard to dispose of. A Coimbatore start-up is generating enough biogas from the muck to cover one farm’s power needs.

Coimbatore

Farmers in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, have implemented a biogas facility that converts poultry waste into electricity. By using a conveyor belt system, chicken manure is efficiently transported to a tank where it is processed to generate methane, which is then used to power two farms.

This initiative not only reduces the environmental impact of methane emissions but also significantly lowers electricity costs for the farmers. The plant, which cost around 7 million rupees, is expected to pay for itself within five years and demonstrates the potential of on-site biogas technology for sustainable farming.

Creating power from poultry poop

Chickens may provide us with eggs and meat, but poultry farming also generates a lot of excrement that harms the environment. Bablan, a farmer in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, used to sell it as fertilizer. But it releases methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. And handling all that chicken manure was a messy, unpleasant job. Before, we needed a lot of manpower to handle the waste. But now, with the conveyor belt, we just need two people to handle the whole process. The waste reaches the tank via the belt. That tank is a part of a biogas facility, purchased with a neighbor from a local environmental technology company. It converts the waste into electricity, powering two farms. This plant costs around 7 million rupees, and we can recover that amount in just five years. Since this system requires very little maintenance, it is highly beneficial and profitable for farmers. Green solutions like this are urgently needed. In Tamil Nadu alone, there are around 5,500 poultry farms. Their waste releases methane, which is more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide, in terms of trapping heat in the atmosphere and driving up temperatures. So, we get 8 tons of poultry litter per day, and the biogas plant is constructed accordingly. It is possible to generate 800 to 1,000 kilowatts of electricity per day from 8 tons of waste. As you can see, this is the storage balloon where we have stored the gas that contains 80% methane, and with that gas, we can run the generator. In the biogas facility, the chicken waste is converted into electricity. It works like this. The excrement is mixed with water and fermented in a tank with bacteria to create methane. It is then further purified. Then we have two separators that remove moisture and carbon dioxide. We get filtered gas that has 80% of methane, and it is stored in this storage balloon. The gas is burned and produces electricity via a turbine. The stored gas from the balloon reaches the generator through the pipeline. Now, as you see, I'll start the generator without any supporting fuel. Bablan's 20,000 chickens produce a huge amount of waste each day, enough to generate around 500 kilowatt hours of electricity. Rather than sending it to the wider grid, Bablan and his fellow farmer use nearly all of it for fans and conveyor belts. Our electricity bill used to be around 400,000 rupees. At a price of roughly 10 euro cents per kilowatt, this was a major challenge for us. Now, with biogas, we can generate 1,000 kilowatts of power from 8 tons of waste. It has reduced our bill by about 2,500 euros, which is roughly three quarters of the entire amount. Chicken manure has been used for biogas for around 20 years, but only recently has it been possible to install compact plants right at the fuel source, on farms like this one.

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