The 660 Gallon Brewery Fuel Cell

An anonymous reader writes "Australia's University of Queensland has secured a $115,000 grant for a 660-gallon fuel cell that should produce 2 kilowatts of power. A prototype has been operating at the university laboratory for three months. This fuel cell type is essentially a battery in which bacteria consume water-soluble brewing waste such as sugar, starch and alcohol, plus in this instance produces clean water."

Comments

Me Homer

[wmwilson01]

Call me Homer Simpson, but all I heard was "beer, beer, beer, Mmmmm beeerrrr".

Re:Me Homer

[__aaclcg7560]

Except that the damn bugs are drinking the beer and pissing clean water.

Re:Me Homer

[sortius_nod]

As an aussie... I assure you that this was just logical progression.

1. make beer
2. drink beer
3. make power with beer
4. ????
5. profit

I just hope they don't use XXXX waste for it... the bacteria will spend more time throwing up than making energy.

Re:Me Homer

[TapeCutter]

It's called XXXX because Queenslanders could not decide wether to call it "beer" or "piss".

I think somebody misunderstood the process.

[BSarp]

Alcohol isn't brewing "waste" -- it's the entire point!

Re:I think somebody misunderstood the process.

[dan828]

It sounds like a bunch of grad students got together and convinced someone to fund a brewery that they had rigged up in the basement of the science building. I can just picture a bunch of guys sitting around drinking beer and trying to write a grant proposal. "Oh hell, just tell them it's a fucking fuel cell...."

Good idea

[JanneM]

So it sits on the campus consuming sugar, starches and alcohol. Just like a graduate student then, except you also get some useful output. Should revolutionize academia; just imagine what this device is capable of once it gets tenure.

Re:Good idea

[daeg]

You could generate even more power by placing treadmills 360 degress around the tanks and paint the tanks to look like free & cheap beer.

Re:Good idea

[SurturZ]

I'm glad they've found another use for vegemite.

For those that aren't from Australia, Vegemite is a foodstuff by-product from brewing. It's chief ingredients are yeast, salt and pain.

Re:Good idea

[goatpunch]

For those of you who are from Australia; Vegemite is a watered down, sweetened copy of the British product Marmite (there's an Australian 'Marmite' too, but it's even worse than Vegemite). Do yourselves a favour and try some Marmite.

Re:Good idea

[magarity]

Do yourselves a favour and try some Marmite.
 
I travelled to the UK for the first time this last January. At the hotel breakfast buffet there were some little containers labelled 'Marmite' in with the usual jams, butter, and such so I picked it up. I put it on some toast as I would some jam and took a bite. It was, bar none, the worst culinary experience of my entire life. Whatever you do, DO NOT eat the Marmite! It's so excruciatingly awful it must exist purely as a hidden camera type trick the Brits play on tourists.

Re:Good idea

[goatpunch]

You made the textbook mistake and tried it after the age of 5. It's a well known fact that if the taste isn't acquired in early childhood you'll never like it. Oh, and don't spread it thick like jam either; there's a reason why most people buy it in very small jars.

Once you have the taste for it, there's nothing like butter and marmite on toast for a hangover.

Re:Good idea

[hal2814]

How come vegemite-on-turkish-toast works? That's nobody's business but the Turks.

Bender

[WFFS]

Am I the only one who immediately thought of Bender from Futurama?

Good to feel again

[kilodelta]

It'll be nice to know that beer is saving the planet!

Re:Good to feel again

[Bad D.N.A.]

Beer has been saving this planet for thousands of years. Can you imagine if people had to actually deal with their problems?

It won't be long now...

[umbrellasd]

before we see a press release claiming a breakthrough in power generation: "By placing horses in a giant wheel that is connected to a turbine and then racing them, scientists have found a way to generate all the power we need on a steady supply of oats and barley. Also generates lots of gambling revenue for the state."

Re:It won't be long now...

[weighn]

"Also generates lots of gambling revenue for the state." I like where you're heading. Perhaps we can tap into those darned gaming machines also. These got to be a heap of excess kinetic energy when you slap those buttons.

Ditto sex. The three BIG EVILS of the Conservative universe - drinking, gambling and prostitution - could just turn out to be the saviors of the world

Re:It won't be long now...

[Stickerboy]

>I like where you're heading. Perhaps we can tap into those darned gaming machines also. These got to be a heap of excess kinetic energy when you slap those buttons.

>Ditto sex. The three BIG EVILS of the Conservative universe - drinking, gambling and prostitution - could just turn out to be the saviors of the world

In the bedroom:

"Honey, what's that?!?!"

"They call it Sex@Home. We have to do our part to stop global warming..."

Not entirely clean

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that TFA indicates that this is a method to remove brewer's waste, with the byproduct of producing electricity. As a method for producing electricity in general, it is not a clean method because you'd first have to produce alcohol (which would then we cleaned by the bacteria). Producing alcohol produces *VAST* amounts of CO2.

I have worked as an assistant winemaker at a small vinyard. Our vats are 3000 litres apiece. Even with these small vats, the temperature reached by the yeast cell division is HOT to the touch (but not enough for thermal electricity generation). If you were to walk into the room where the vats are without first ventilating the room, you would pass out because the oxygen in your lungs feels like it is literally sucked out (not sure of the actual physical process involved). If no one were around, you would die from asphyxiation. It is wierd sensation, let me tell you.

Re:Not entirely clean

[malsdavis]

Its funny how these days, any "alternative" form of energy is automatically considered by many to be "clean", "green" or "environmentally friendly".

Just for the record: Biofuels are definitely NOT environmentally friendly and Hydro-electric plants are amongst the construction projects most often protested AGAINST on environmental grounds.

Just thought that need to be said.

Re:Not entirely clean

[evwah]

"If no one were around, you would die from asphyxiation. It is wierd sensation, let me tell you."

you have personal experience dying from asphyxiation? that has to be a first

Re:Not entirely clean

[kkerwin]

"If you were to walk into the room where the vats are without first ventilating the room, you would pass out because the oxygen in your lungs feels like it is literally sucked out (not sure of the actual physical process involved)."

Diffusion of oxygen against a concentration gradient. It's basically the same process that happens when you sprinkle salt on a slug and it dies: the salt lowers the water concentration outside of the slug, and water flows out of the slug to balance the water concentrations in and out of the slug.

Partial pressure of oxygen outside of the lungs (pressure produced only by oxygen molecules, nothing else) is much lower than the partial pressure of oxygen inside the lungs. Oxygen flows out of the lungs to equalize the partial pressures. CO2 flows into the lungs to replace the displaced oxygen.

And, you die, just like the slug. :-)

Re:Not entirely clean

[fractoid]

I'm curious how (sustainable) biofuel isn't environmentally friendly? It's carbon neutral, leverages our existing overproduction of food crops, seems all good all round. The only thing I can think of is that it's smelly and bad for your valve seats... obviously logging old growth forest for biomass doesn't count here, just things like maize and grain crops.

Hydro plants are protested against because they flood large areas of wildlife habitats and peoples' homes. That's an 'environmental' issue but not an emissions one.

I agree, though, that jumping on the 'alternative' bandwagon is far too fashionable and often counterconstructive - take, for example, the fact that the Prius uses more fuel than the Golf TDi[1]. Like any other engineering issue (and conservation is one at heart) you have to look at the data and not just follow the emotive hype. For instance, modern nuclear reactor designs are far safer than the old, cold-war era designs, and potentially very fuel efficient. If it weren't for the "nuclear is bad" mindset of the general public, they would be the perfect mid- to long-term energy solution.

[1] Of course, that's not a fair comparison because the TDi runs diesel fuel which has a higher energy density, but I'm pretty sure the total energy cost of a Prius over its lifetime is higher than that of a TDi.

Re:Not entirely clean

[fractoid]

Integral fast reactors consume any transuranic element.

From Wikipedia:

Compared to current light-water reactors with a once-through fuel cycle that uses less than 1% of the energy in the uranium, the IFR has a very efficient (99.5% usage) fuel cycle. The basic scheme used electrolytic separation to remove transuranics and actinides from the wastes and concentrate them. These concentrated fuels were then reformed, on site, into new fuel elements. Non-trans-uranic (sub-uranic? pre-uranic?) waste products are a short term storage proposal only.

Another important benefit of removing the long half-life transuranics from the waste cycle is that the remaining waste becomes a much shorter-term hazard. After the actinides and transuranics are removed from the spent fuel, the remaining waste elements have half lives of a few decades at most. The result is that within 300 years, such wastes are no more radioactive than the ores of natural radioactive elements. In laymans' terms, it can't explode (no high-pressure radioactive coolant), it can't melt down (passive self-limiting design), it doesn't produce long-lived radioactives (any that it does produce it re-burns into short-lived waste). Nuclear looks pretty ideal short-term to me, and with this type of reactor it's good for mid- to long-term too. Solar will be good once solar cells can actually pay for the costs of their own manufacture in less than 20 years.

Re:Not entirely clean

[turing_m]

"Producing alcohol produces *VAST* amounts of CO2."

Which comes from sugar, the carbon dioxide from which is sucked out of the atmosphere. It's essentially carbon neutral (like any other biofuel or crop). If the waste plant material is not burnt, it might even act as a net sink.

Re:Not entirely clean

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm curious how (sustainable) biofuel isn't environmentally friendly? It's carbon neutral, leverages our existing overproduction of food crops, seems all good all round.

That "overproduction" of food crops is made possible by very resource intensive farming practices which are heavily dependent on the chemical industry (fertilizers & pesticides) which use use petroleum as feedstocks. Without it, yields would drop dramatically as the soil is depleted. Alot has been made of the brazilian biofuel efforts - I suspect this will actually have a devastating effect on the already besieged rainforest. They practice slash & burn agriculture for everything else - why would bio-fuel crops be any different?

I'm not sure about the "carbon neutral" either - at least with respect to the atmosphere, which is the primary point. Much of these agricultural products used to produce these biofuels would eventually end up effectively "sequestered" back in the ground via plowing under agricultural waste, disposal of sewage, etc. Instead you are now fermenting & burning it - releasing all of that carbon into the atmosphere.

Hydro plants are not carbon neutral either because the normally free-flowing river now silts up and those materials decay at the bottom of the lake producing more CO2

Re:Not entirely clean

[hal2814]

"As a method for producing electricity in general, it is not a clean method"

No, it's not. But if you were producing alcohol anyways as part of a brewery, it would be a great way to run your operation more efficiently. Given the amount of waste needed, I doubt this system would ever be useful outside a brewery. The cost to transport that much waste water probably outweighs any off-site use of these fuel cells.

Re:Not entirely clean

[GooberToo]

Fuel from corn in America is foolish. Corn is often grown with water taken taken from an underground aquifer. The aquifer is getting so low, most people that are aware of it are starting to become very concerned. The government already has restrictions on who gets the water and what can be done with it. Worse, there are already predictions on when the acquifer will run out, or run low enough to significantly effect crop productions across America. Yet we are now starting down a path which will place additional pressure on this acquifer to grow even more corn we don't need.

Right now, up to 15% of all corn grown in the US is irrigated from this acquifer. Running out of water in this acquifer means loss of massive crops reaching far beyond that of corn. Not to mention, byproducts from crops grown from this acquifer are used to feed large heards of cattle.

Right now, ethanol is one of the largest farces ever thrust on Americans. Inclusion of ethanol in gas is one of the reasons fuel prices have risen. If you include the cost of ethanol, after subsides are accounted for, we are already paying some four to five dollars per gallon. Using corn for ethanol makes zero economic sense and worse, is directly contributing to the depletion of the largest underground acquifers in the US (perhaps in the world). Encouraging yet more corn crops makes even less sense.

Which would you rather have, ethanol which costs more per gallon than gas (and requires more energy to produce than it yields) or food and fresh drinking water? It really is that simple.

Long story short, please don't encourage additional corn crops.

Re:Just for reference

[ez76]

More importantly, Zima has found a market!

Re:Just for reference

[maxume]

How many 20 watt bulbs would it be?

I hope it gets better

[Anonymous Coward]

660 gallons is about fifteen barrels. 2 kW isn't that much so maybe for my house I need 6 kW. That's approx. forty five barrels. That's a lot of barrels in the back yard.

Re:I hope it gets better

[fyngyrz]

2 kW isn't that much so maybe for my house I need 6 kW

Do you need 6 kw while you sleep? Do you need 6kw while you're at work? If not, that same system might serve to give you 6kw for 8 hours by storing the other 4 kw generated during the 16 or so hours of low duty time periods. Storage makes all the difference in the world. Some people might actually consume 6kw all the time, but that seems like an awful lot. I don't, and I live in a pretty big home with a whole slew of electronic gear.

Re:I hope it gets better

[TooMuchToDo]

Well put. With regards to storage, your water heater at home is a thermal battery. If everyone switched to more efficient tankless hot water heaters (simple heat exchanges), huge amounts of energy would be saved (since energy is used only when water is flowing) but since more energy is drawn down to heat water from 50 degrees F to 115 degrees F, utilities would have a higher peak demand to plan for. With water heaters, more energy is lost to standby heat but the water heater buffers demand for the utilities.

Imagine

[WED Fan]

Imagine a beo...(hic)...a be...(hic)...imagine a...(hic)...imagine...what was I saying?...(hic)...Imagine...John Lennon was the best Beatle.

Re:Just for reference

[fyngyrz]

that's 20 100 watt bulbs

Or 200 10 watt compact florescent bulbs, which is all we use. Not 200 of them, of course. But in a 5000 square foot home, we do have quite a few.

More importantly, that's an average rate, so storage during off hours could yield considerably more output. If you sleep 8 hours of a 24 hour day and aren't home for another 8 while you work, that leaves 8 hours at 6 kilowatts if you control your inactive power consumption decently, and even if you don't, you could still end up with a great deal more than 2KW available to you. Storage also allows for short peak usage (startup of furnace blowers, refrigerator motors, air conditioners and so on... takes a lot more to start most motors than it does to keep them turning, even under load.

I would definitely be willing to make room for a 700 gallon or so tank; I wonder what the feeding, cleaning, and environmental requirements for a production version will be. I've been seriously considering solar, but the high installation cost and the relatively short lifetime of silicon cells (20 years or less) doesn't work out very well. If this thing can run long term and isn't a maintenance nightmare, I'd jump on that puppy instantly.

New Belgium Brewery

[tooyoung]

New Belgium Brewery, most famous for Fat Tire and Sunshine, produce 10% of their electricity using the methane that is produced from bacteria feeding off of their waste water.

Re:New Belgium Brewery

[Hepneck]

Here is the link for New Belgium Brewery's site about how they process their wastewater. The energy that they use at the brewery that is not generated in-house is provided from wind farms in Wyoming (a half hours drive north of Ft. Collins. This makes them the only brewery in the US that is powered not only by renewable energy, but energy that is also sustainable. So enjoy that Fat Tire or Sunshine Wheat guilt-free (well, other than the excuses you make for why you got home from work so late).

Link:
http://www.newbelgium.com/innovation_waste.php

I can see the Guinness advertisement already

[the_tsi]

"Six bottles in one hand? That's nothing, those lads at Guinness are powering the entirety of Dublin with their brewery!"

"Electrical power from beer effluvia?! BRILLIANT!"

Waste?

[Mr. Flibble]

in which bacteria consume water-soluble brewing waste such as sugar, starch and alcohol

Waste? Waste?! Methinks they have not thought this "brewing process" through.

That's being done already

[EmbeddedJanitor]

http://www.ccc.govt.nz/WasteWater/TreatmentPlant/F lowDiagram.asp

The digester in this small (330k population) plant generates methane which fires converted gasoline engines to generate electricity. The waste heat goes to warming the digester. There's still solid waste though.

Burning methane is a GoodTHing. Methane has approx 27 times the greenhouse effect of CO2, so burning it produces power and reduces greenhouse gases.

Which is not that great for the space..

[plasmacutter]

660 gallons is a LOT of fluid. for reference the average 100 gallon tank will be 2 yards by 1.5 feet by 1.5 feet.

so this thing would be about the size of a king sized bed at the least, and it's only generating enough to power 20 100 watt bulbs. From the energy ratings i remember on our appliances it wouldn't even power a single family home.

Re:Which is not that great for the space..

[M. Baranczak]

The electricity isn't the main point. From the article:

"It's not going to make an enormous amount of power -- its primarily a waste water treatment that has the added benefit of creating electricity,"

Re:Which is not that great for the space..

[plasmacutter]

then why the heck is the article titled 660 gallon fuel cell! DAMN YOU EDITORRRS!

Fosters *ugh*

[Bester]

Finally someone found a good use for Fosters beer. It's certainly not good for drinking.

Although we do manage to sell it to the Americans and claim that it is beer, they seem to buy it.

Charles
--
Violence is the first refuge of the idiot.

Thus the profit spake,

[HackingYodel]

Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. --Benjamin Franklin.


A man who knew a bit about both beer and electricity. Think he's smiling down from heaven about this, or puzzled it took us so long?

It would give a new meaing to

[Mogster]

the phrase 'drunk with power'

Re:Just for reference

[cptgrudge]

I would definitely be willing to make room for a 700 gallon or so tank; I wonder what the feeding, cleaning, and environmental requirements for a production version will be.

Me too. And I'm pretty sure I don't only speak for myself when I say that I want details, not a stupid Yahoo article.

Waste material???

[simm1701]

Ok so what waste material are they talking about?

In making beer (and I do this at home so I feel I know atleast a little about it) you have several stages with "waste" product - but I wouldn't exactly describe them as starch, sugar and alcahol - to be honest its mostly fibre... or atleast so I thought...

First you malt the barley (basically a slow roast though thats an oversimplification).... can't really see any waste coming from here.

Then you mash the grains, ie keep in water at about 60-65C for a couple of hours, this causes the enzymes in the grain to convert the stored starch in the grain into sugar that yeast can later consume.
You then sparge the grain (think pouring a watering can with a fine spray) over the grain the gentle extract this sugar. How you throw whats left of the grain away (waste product 1 - mashed grain)
Now you boil the water you collected along with hops to add flavour, strain off the water and you are left with hops (waste product 2, hops that have been boiled in high sugar content water)
Then you leave the beer to ferment and for a commerical brewery parsturising, carbonate and can/bottle the beer (a terrible and evil process, but then not everyone has the taste for real ale) there will be sediment left in the fermenter than is the final waste product, this will also have some beer in it... waste product 3.

So we have the malted barely that has been mashed and sparged, mashing should have converted as much of the starch to sugar as possible. Spraying should has washed off as much of that sugar as possible, the remains? the non starch part of the grain

The hops will have soaked up some of the wort (effectively sugared water) and then you have the material the hops are made of, some starch and mostly fibre like any seed.

The sediment should not contain and sugar, but it will hard the same or close) alacohol content as the final beer... it probably also contains plenty of yeast (dead and still viable)

Actually I think writing this out I may have convinced myself.... its stuff that they would be throwing out anyway and it is fairly well concentrated (atleast compared to raw harvesting of bio matter) as long as the alcohol is not too toxic to the baterial breaking it down I start to see how this would work...

Interesting idea... not worth trying myself - making 5 gallons of beer I wouldn't have enough waste product to fill a 1 gallon bucket, but scaled up it would be interesting to see!!

Re:Don't forget the waste : Co2 (carbon dioxide)

[Cheerio Boy]

Don't forget the waste : Co2 (carbon dioxide, aka, greenhouse gas)

Easy! CO2 powered keg tappers!

The symmetry of the solution appeals to me for some reason.

*wanders off in search of a breakfast beer*

Re:Don't forget the waste : Co2 (carbon dioxide)

[lordmatthias215]

Well I realize that the process would be carbon neutral once you're growing plants to process, I was mainly thinking of the fact that since we're producing CO2 in high concentration, we may as well use it in high concentration to boost plant growth. The next step would be just making sure the CO2 isn't able to hit the atmosphere at large before the plants have a chance to use it. Other than that, you're right- it doesn't really matter if the CO2 gets out there as long as there are plenty of plants to compensate.

Re:Just for reference

[jandrese]

Uh, your report talks about installing skylights, not lightbulbs that produce the full spectrum. I'd be willing to wager that people perform better with a skylight for psychological reasons. Using it as a reason to scoff CFLs seems like a huge stretch to me. I will buy the argument that you need an incandescent (even full spectrum) bulb if you're doing something that requires you to match colors or design something for outdoor viewing (like a billboard), but 99% of the time people don't care about their color purity that much. The eye is very forgiving for color imbalance so as a tradeoff for using CFLs I don't think it has much pull.