Building Egypt’s biogas market

Startups offering biogas or waste treatment solutions are slowly gearing up in the Middle East, but only Taqa Solutions had a reality television show as a launchpad.

Tina Boules was the winner of Egypt’s inaugural series of El Mashrou3 (The Project), a TV show styling itself as The Apprentice crossed with Dragon’s Den.

Using the almost $45,000 cash prize, Boules and her business partner George Armanious are trying to develop a market for biogas and pick the low-hanging fruit, among the country’s poultry farmers, processed food producers and hotels, before rival startups such as Hany Khodary’s Biogas People do.
I’m selling an idea,” Boules told Wamda. “I’m finding customers and I’m making [them] know that they need this. I’m creating the need, first.”

The concept they are selling is an industrial biogas system: waste, such as chicken droppings or hotel food scraps, is filtered, perhaps treated, and fed into a digester. Over the course of a day bacteria already present in the waste breaks it down into a potent fertilizer and methane, which is then filtered to remove water vapour and dangerous sulphur, and burned to create electricity.