Wastewater Into Energy

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Posted by michael on Tuesday September 21, 2004 @10:53AM from the stand-upwind dept.

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."

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Splashplop! by contagious_d · 2004-09-21 11:00 · Score: 5, Funny

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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- /home is where the food is.
1. Re:Splashplop! by TykeClone · 2004-09-21 11:37 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  The places with the most economies of scale to take advantage of this are cities (tax credits mean nothing to cities, unless they can sell them) or large livestock farms.
  If you want to talk about poop - visit a hog confinement facility.
  
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  A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Pretty old news by HotNeedleOfInquiry · 2004-09-21 11:02 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Re:sad truth by cpeterso · 2004-09-21 11:14 · Score: 4, Interesting

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! >:(

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cpeterso
Been done for garbage by cft_128 · 2004-09-21 11:35 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

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Underloved Movies and Pub Quiz: donotquestionme.org
Re:sad truth by MarsDefenseMinister · 2004-09-21 12:12 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

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No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
Problems with the Process by EnergyEfficient · 2004-09-21 23:16 · Score: 3, Informative

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.