City Plans to Convert Poop into Energy
By NunoXEI • Sep 12th, 2008 • Category: Blog
San Antonio unveiled a deal on Tuesday that will make it the first U.S. city to harvest methane gas from human waste on a commercial scale and turn it into clean-burning fuel. (Reuters.com)
How exactly? Well, you create a way to gather a city population’s feces–and ANY city has an abundance of this potty-matter the industry calls “biosolids”–then you harvest the methane gas it produces, then you convert it into a natural gas which can then be reused in fuel furnaces, power plants, and other combustion-based generators!
Massachusetts-based Ameresco Inc will convert this poop to generate about 1.5 million cubic feet of natural gas per day. The process isn’t entirely unique though. Smaller smaller facilities like sewage treatment plants have used this process, but San Antonio is the first to see large-scale conversion of methane gas from sewage into fuel for power generation.
Following the agreement, more than 90 percent of materials flushed down the toilets and sinks of San Antonio will be recycled, he said. Liquid is now used for irrigation, many of the solids are made into compost, and now the methane gas will be recycled for power generation.
Is this not the coolest alternative energy possibility you’ve heard about in years? It’s a mess job for sure but MORE cities should definitely be considering this option! Consider where the heck all out crap is going as our populations continue to increase and our sewer systems continue to get over-taxed? Poop needs to flow people! Might as well be flowing as energy to power our homes, no?
Creative Commons Attribution: “Sewers of Brussels, Belgium“, Flickr, JOE M500
Related Posts
NunoXEI is Co-Founder of TheGreenRocket.com and self proclaimed internet-surfing-guru. You can find his personal blog at NunoXEI.com, the home of his podcast, The Lowdown, his comic-related properties and his webcomic, Republic Domain.
Email this author | All posts by NunoXEI
I’d be curious to find out more about the process… burning it would create carbon too, no? I wonder if the creator of this idea thought it up while sitting on the can. Will this create jobs too? How many watts can I power by taking a nice satisfying crap? Things to look up…
What a cool idea indeed… crap is definitely a renewable resource!
[...] week I posted news concerning an alternative energy source derived from human waste–and more particularly our “biosolids”. This has lead, quite randomly and [...]