Waste Matters: The History of Biogas

While biogas has only come into the modern public periphery in the last few decades, it has actually been utilized throughout history. Evidence of the use of biogas goes back to as early as the 10th century BC, where its combustion was used to heat the bathwater of the ancient Assyrians.

Not much was known about the origins of the biogas until about 2,500 years later, when the scientist Jan Baptist Van Helmont recorded that decaying organic matter produced flammable gases.

In the 1700s, Count Alessandro Volta, famous for his invention of the battery, found a direct correlation between the amount of decaying matter and the amount of flammable gas produced.

Then, at the beginning of the 1800s, Sir Humphry Davy, the creator of the first electric light, determined that the flammable gas being produced from the decaying organic matter was methane.

Not too soon after, in 1859, the first known anaerobic digester plant was built in Bombay, India, and by 1895, biogas recovered from a sewage treatment plant in Exeter, England was used to fuel their streetlamps.

As science continued to progress, researchers in the 1930s identified anaerobic bacteria as the generators of biogas and found the ideal conditions for its methane production. However, modern anaerobic digestion only began to make traction in the 1970s, where the drive for alternatives to fossil fuels drove the innovation and widespread development of the biogas industry.

With the dramatic increase in demand for renewable energy in the 21st century, anaerobic digestion emerged as a solution to meet the growing decarbonized energy demand and national and global methane reduction targets.