Slashdot Mirror
Wastewater Into Energy
fenimor writes "A lot of electric energy could be produced from a city's wastewater, researchers at University of Toronto have discovered. The research revealed that the wastewater contained enough organic material to potentially produce 113 megawatts of electricity - 5 times more than required to operate wastewater treatment plants."
According to the article, "Any recovery of potential energy above that can be returned to the grid.". I wonder if there is any way you could set this up so that you get credits on your power bill when you exceed a certain amount of waste. That would be awesome! Like getting paid for your hard work in the bathroom! Oh yeah, another thing... this is a story about poop. That is also awesome.
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Man I'm dense, I'm wondering how they turned shit into power, had to RTFA to find out its methane gas from microbe processed organic material. 1 More line on the Slashdot topic and I wouldnt have had to read the article, the article was that small....
About 10 years ago I was elected to the board of directors of a wastewater district. We captured the methane from the digesters and used it to drive the aereation (sp) blowers. Saved about $30k/month in electricity. Most of the time surplus methane had to be flared off.
Now some places also dewater the sludge and burn it to generate energy. Quite a bit more messy and polluting than just using the methane.
All this technology has been around for about 20 years. It's just complicated and sometimes polluting. There's almost always regulatory issues about who can sell power to who, who can burn what where and so on.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
if it doesn't turn out to make (or save) money, it will go nowhere. Capitalism (and consumism) is ruining the planet.
Actually, capitalism will SAVE our planet. If people value living on a nice, clean planet, they will pay for such benefits. The problem is not capitalism. The problem is the environment is a market externality. It's the classic tragedy of the commons: everyone uses (up) the environment, but no one PAYS for it. This is usually because governments disallow or dismiss environmental class action lawsuits.
The Soviet Union was on of the world's worst polluters. Today, the US government is the worst polluter in the country. Why are they allowed to pollute? When you write the rules, they don't have to apply to you. For some reason, most environmental and endangered species protection laws DO NOT apply to the US government or military! >:(
cpeterso
I don't see any reason why dewatered sludge couldn't be fed through an anything-into-oil plant and converted to energy more cleanly than by incineration.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
...take on a whole new meaning.
"Citizens are advised to buy and eat more beans to ensure continuity of supply in coming weeks. Authorities are considering airing an updated version of War of the Worlds during the first season of peak demand."
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
When I went to the local water treatment plant, they had a set of turbines to burn the gas which they could extract from the wastewater. They weren't using them. It was cheaper for them to just buy electricity as they needed.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
They are already doing this for dumps. They have been doing this in Michigan using Toronto's imported garbage, and it looks like another one is being developed near Montreal. It looks like the Montreal facility will power a paper plant, and if memory serves me correctly -- I can't actually find a link now -- the Michigan dump(s) are selling the power to the grid.
Underloved Movies and Pub Quiz: donotquestionme.org
You're damn right that's capitalism. We all started out living on a nice clean planet. Then the capitalists got ahold of it and polluted parts of it up. And now, if we want to live on a clean planet, here's a capitalist right on schedule, promising to sell us one. And you know he's right, because the commies were terrible polluters. So what's wrong with this picture?
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
I know what he's saying, but I'm offering another way to look at it. Every time someone asks us to cough up some money to clean up the environment, we have to ask ourselves who polluted it in the first place. We had a clean environment, and it was polluted because someone decided that the future could suffer so that a profit could be made today. This is a crime, and now to say that it's the natural order of things that we have to pay money to clean our environment is putting things backwards.
It's extortion. I'll stop polluting your environment and/or beating you up if you pay me some money. We shouldn't have to take it. You know who should have to pay for pollution? The capitalists. If they want to pollute, they should have to pay for it, not us.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
> If people value living on a nice, clean planet, they will pay for such benefits.
If they can afford to. The problem is, those people who don't care have more money to profit from, hence have an economical advantage, hence are more likely to decide, wether there will be a nice, clean planet.
Companies, which exploit land and its resources in an long term unsustainable way have a faster growth than companies, which don't.
This economical advantage will drive the latter companies into a fringe market, where only few idealist buy to a premium. Any criticism will be ignored by ostracising those people as tree-huggers, and the criticism as dooms-day prophecy. Sounds familiar?
Maybe because we already have a similar situation.
Are people buying from Fair Trade companies? How many people are building an enviromentally friendly home? How about clothes? Energy production?
Why? Why should I pay the premium, when others don't. Tragedy of the common indeed.
What is the difference between a "free market", and Manchester capitalism? Do you think, the then working people in the cities, which were coughing due to the exhausts from the factories, didn't wished for cleaner air, streets and water?
The point is, their voice counted nothing until they got the vote. Guess where the enviromental regulations come from.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Anerobic decomposition makes things beyond A carbon and some hydrogen. You get a few Nitrogen/Hydrogens and more Sulfur/Hydrogens. Both of these gasses when oxidized will make acids that will eat up the equipment. You can ruin an internal combustion engine in less than a day, and a boiler in a week if you don't have the boiler lined. Alot of energy is imbedded in our sewage, from the machines in the field that prep and harvest the food we eat, to the trucks that move that food to the pumps that move the water then the sewage to be processed. With good engineering, some of that energy can be reclaimed, but the researchers make it sound like the process is 'simple' when it is not.