January 6, 2013
Culhane replaced two digesters at Mercy College in the fall of 2013. These digesters had been destroyed when his laboratory experiments rooms was dismantled. Culhane and Tasheem Hall filled the new digesters with horse manure from the stables at Rockefeller Park. They placed one of the digesters in a shed and kept the other outside. Over the long winter, both digesters froze solid but finally started producing gas at the end of May 2014.
August 3, 2012
James Goodman, youth leader of the the Zombie Response Team of California’s San Pedro Forest region, and his parents, Gary Goodman and Lesly Chamberlain, and his grandmother, Joanne DuBarr, and Africa development specialist Mark David Heath pose in front of the region’s first home scale biodigester. The inexpensive Solar CITIES IBC system is now in place for ‘what me worry’ disaster response, guaranteeing reliable clean power even when civilization goes down. Bring on the zombies, see if we care…
December 16, 2011
The Washington Math Science Technology School Biodigester was built by Solar CITIES co-founder Mostafa Darsh Hussein while visiting Washington DC on an exchange program. Culhane had previously led a biogas workshop at the school.
The story is an endearing one. One of the students had read an article about Solar CITIES and Culhane in National Geographic. She wrote Culhane an email asking if she and her friends could try and build a digester at their school like the ones Culhane had built in Africa. The email happened to arrive in Culhane’s inbox the night he arrived in DC for an Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) education conference. He immediately wrote back saying he was in DC by chance and had the morning free the following day and would be happy to come by the school if it could be arranged on such short notice.
At 7:30 the following morning, Culhane got a call from Vivienne Forrester, the program coordinator, inviting him to the school to give a presentation. He spent the day at the school presenting to the students and science faculty, among them Carsten Binsner and Mohammed Nouristani, who agreed to build a biodigester with the students. Culhane arranged for an Insinkerator to be sent to the school and Mostafa agreed to spend time each week during the month he was doing his internship in renewable energy in DC helping build the digester.
We received this email a few weeks later from Vivienne:
“Dear Dr. Culhane,
I am happy to report that the Biogas project is going great, we have set up the individual projects for the students and started the big one. Mustafa, the students, Mr. Nouristani, I and a few other teachers met at the school on Saturday and set up the large system, we are using the 3-barrel approach as you suggested. The food will be placed in the barrel on Monday, so the breaking down process can begin!”
These are the gratifying results that we can achieve through the Solar CITIES open source approach. We hope more schools will join in the fun!
January 16, 2010
When local pizza restaurant owner Brian Wildrick and his team Todd Blaisdale and Stan learned from us and the high school students about the technology for turning their kitchen garbage into fertilizer for their fresh tomatoes and fuel to heat the tomato sauce, we and the students built a system with them at Harborside Pizza. This is the first first commercial application of this technology.
January 16, 2010
At the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010, the Culhanes joined Dr. Katey Walter Anthony and her husband Peter Anthony and high school science teacher Adam Low in Alaska. There they built an experimental biogas set up in a 40 ft. conex container in the back of Cordova High School. The digester uses the 3 IBC system that Culhane, Fathy, and Rimoin had designed at Sekem in Egypt to prepare for bringing small-scale biogas to colder climates.
Katey and T.H. had received the first Blackstone Ranch Foundation/National Geographic Innovation Challenge Grant to see if they could harness psychrophilic microbes responsible for climate changing methane release in the permafrost. If their research is successful, they have the chance to improve the prospects for temperate zone and arctic zone biodigesters to offset fossil fuel use.
January 16, 2010
A modified Solar CITIES digester using HDPE reactor with solar heat exchanger as reactor and 55 gallon drum telescoping gas collectors. Starter material is elephant dung and manure from 27 other species of animal from the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle courtesy of horticulturist David Selk and Dan Corum aka “Dr. Doo”.
