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Oslo Buses to Run on Sewage
Mike writes "Rather than let their sewage go to waste, the city of Oslo recently announced that it plans to cut carbon emissions by converting 80 public buses to run on biomethane generated from raw sewage. The city plans to adapt two sewage plans with the technology this September, and the new biogas buses will be quieter and will cut 44 tones of C02 per bus per year."
I mean, if you're going to claim that something runs on X because you put Y into it and you get Y from X, then you might as well extend it back as far as possible.
Morons.
How we know is more important than what we know.
... and put the toilet right on the bus!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/jan/27/biomethane-energy
For now on, every time a Slashdot editor posts a link that isn't the original source of the story, I'll be posting the original link.
"the new biogas buses will be quieter and will cut 44 tones of C02 per bus per year."
It's fortunate that methane is odorless, then.
It's always good to see methane captured and burned into carbon dioxide, since CH4 (methane) is a far stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. On top of that, you can do useful work with the energy—like power a bus fleet—which saves even more carbon emissions.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I just can't get why this isn't used more than it is. I don't understand why we need to base the whole worlds economy on a few countries in the middle east with a democratic defecit.
Ethanol isn't bad but it does use land that could be used to produce food to grow fuel instead, which seems like a bit of a waste to me. Also the environmental benefits are questionable, I still believe this is better than oil, just not by much.
But methane is something that we all produce. Humans and animals alike. And methane is a very potent greenhouse gas so setting it on fire is actually a net gain for the environment (according to some), and it can be produced locally.
So it should be used more. It has a lot of benefits and very few drawbacks. Now if we could only get cars that would run on it properly and not those petrol-converted-dont-really-want-to-run-on-biomethane-but-will-do-so-for-20km-on-a-full-tank kind of cars.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Gas-driven (not gasoline) buses has been around for at least a decade. It's just that they use a different type of gas.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
American television has been running on crap since the late 50s.
Exciting times. In my opinion electrical motor is the way to go though. The problem is the potential energy around us is not available as electrical power by itself, the latter needs to be produced and also stored. Which is where photovoltaics come in - given that Earth is radiated with about 50 - 250 watts of energy per square meter of land, our sun will give us all the power for electricity we need, even with our suboptimal solar panels of today. There is also hydrogen, the most abundand stuff in the Universe, and progress is being made there as well. The problem is our economy. Which slowly has to adjust, and that takes time. It takes time before the folks that profit from oil recovery collect enough money for their pension, and leave something for their sons and daughters and finally lay off that "gold mine" which is killing us slowly, and it takes time to collect the guts to start investing in something new and divorce our economy from oil, so that it does not collapse all too fast when oil is finally left alone where it rested for millions of years. It takes time to change the public perception of transport and consumption and the culture associated with it too. Speaking of the whatever non-scientific reasons for the slow change towards cleaner future, George Monbiots book "Heat" is a good read.
And just for some food for thought, Oslo where I happen to live, has bought two THiNK cars last year, the company behind these cars had to loan money from the government to make it to 2009. What I am trying to say is the mass of people is the last element you need to convince, and only after everything else is in place, do they start to think about alternatives to their combustion engine cars. And Oslo folks are really stubborn. They will not give up their family wagons all too easily or hastily.
If this is possible, then why was petrol such an issue in (the rather disappointing) Beyond Thunderdome?
.......just when i thought Oslo couldn't become a shittier place to live (i'm half serious, hate that placE)
this is probably the most boring sig in the world
Both the technology to use sewage for bio-methane and methane burning cars are not new.
The bio-methane production is called anaerobic digestion, check wikipedia for more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_digestion
Although I applaud every initiative, this is not news.
Hope you're near a dairy farm? :o
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Petroleum has to be harvested from the ground in viable locations and then transported (sometimes long distances) to the end-user
Methane-related gas, however, is produced pretty much everywhere, and is pretty damn local.
While it might not be solved by a "porta-pottie at the bus-stop", it's not that far-off to think that individual cities could have a waste reprocessing plant locally, cutting out a lot of the transportation costs. At that point the main cost is the plant, but hopefully one that would pay for itself.
Yes, but oil-drilling rigs and refineries are often located even farther away, yet gas still get in from them...
Man, and I thought it sucked to be stuck behind a bus before! Who could have predicted that all those experiments my Norwegian friends did with lighting farts when they were younger would actually lead to a viable energy source?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
And I thought the bus system here in Fresno was shitty.
The net emissions from a biomethane operated bus are zero, because the carbon originally came from the atmosphere rather than fossil fuels, but electricity is used at the sewage plant to convert the gas from the waste into fuel for the buses. Oslo city council is taking the electricity used to generate the fuel into consideration and calculate that carbon emissions per bus are 18 tonnes per year, a saving of 44 tonnes of C02 per bus per year.
Why not generate electricity from the Biogas? If it's so easy to modify a diesel engine to use the gas, couldn't they just use an ordinary diesel generator?
No, I will not work for your startup