Congratulations to Katrin Pütz! She is the winner of the NatureLife Sustainability award of the Tropenzentrum [11.07.11]
The award endowed by NatureLife International (Foundation for the environment, education and sustainability) is awarded for the first time this year to promote young scientists in the field of sustainable land use systems as a basis for conservation of biodiversity in the tropics and subtropics. Katrin Pütz is awarded for her work on “Biogas transport and logistics to commercialise biogas in developing countries”.
Katrin Pütz and her supervisor Prof. Dr. Joachim Müller
Biogas is an affordable source of energy for rural areas in many parts of the world. However, the distribution of this promising and needed technology is still very difficult. In order to make biogas accessible for more people and more sustainable in its use, an alternative biogas dissemination concept is needed. Thus, the objective of her master's thesis was to elaborate a concept that allows biogas to be transported from a central biogas installation by a container that can be filled without any technical support and transported on foot to rural households. The second aspect Katrin Pütz researched on was the production of injera, the Ethiopian staple food, which takes up to 60% of a household’s energy requirement. To make biogas technology successful and accepted by the people it is crucial to facilitate injera baking with biogas. Several attempts of designing a biogas injera stove failed due to insufficient heat distribution throughout the mitad, a 60 cm diameter clay griddle, or due to very high gas consumption rates. Katrin Pütz managed to develop the first prototype of biogas of Mitads, a boiler unit for the conventional biogas stoves on which now injera may be baked using only a fraction of the energy originally needed. Her master thesis has the potential to influence people's lives and their way of dealing with natural resources. If the results are put into practice they can have a great impact on future resource consumption many parts of the world.
The prize committee particularly noted, that Katrin Pütz has taken into account technical, socio-economic as well as cultural factors during the implementation of the project (problems of collective action in community-based biogas distribution, eating habits as a factor of adoption for the stoves and economic viability) and her work offers realistic options for the future acceptance and thus distribution of biogas technology.
In 2008 Katrin Pütz completed her Bachelor studies BSc. (Ecological Impact Assessment) at the University of Koblenz-Landau, focusing on the areas of environmental analysis, bio- and geo-ecology. Her bachelor work has been awarded with the Koblenz Hochschulpreis. In this context, she worked for eight months in the Project for Agroforestry and Resource Management (PARES) in Rwanda and experienced the devastating effects of deforestation for the production of energy. From 2008 - October 2010 she joined the master studies of agricultural engineering at the University of Hohenheim. Since the beginning of 2011 she has been working as a research fellow in the Institute of Agricultural Engineering, Tropics and Subtropics Group (440e) in the further development of Injera Mitads and she is supporting the Ethiopian Ministry of Water and Energy in testing the “Biogas as Business”- concept on pilot level.
The Tropenzentrum is particularly grateful to Nature Life-International, and its president Ehrensenator Dr. h.c. H. P. Hutter for endowing the prize. More about the award
