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Crud-to-crude: The global potential of biofuels made from human waste
Creating liquid biofuels from human waste shows promise as a way to meet one of alternative energy’s greatest challenges: reducing the transportation sector’s heavy carbon footprint. The good news is there is a steady supply stream where waste is treated.
Human waste turned into renewable energy at Australia's first biosolids gasification plant
A council in Australia opens the first biosolids gasification plant in the Southern Hemisphere, which turns human waste into renewable energy, at Logan, south of Brisbane.
Potentially toxic algae already being seen in Florida river. And it could get worse
Aphanizomenon flos-aquae, a potentially toxic algae is showing itself earlier than usual in the vast St. Johns River that stretches through 12 Florida counties.
The business turning sewage sludge into fuel.
When anaerobic digestion takes place, organic materials – think food waste – are broken down by microorganisms in an oxygen free environment, producing biogas.
When anaerobic digestion takes place, organic materials – think food waste – are broken down by microorganisms in an oxygen free environment, producing biogas.
Described by the U.S. Department of Energy as a proven energy source both in the U.S. and around the world, biogas can in turn be processed, purified and turned into biomethane.
The DOE describes biomethane as being "pipeline-quality" and "fully interchangeable with conventional natural gas."
In France, one company has been looking to turn biogas into liquefied natural gas (LNG), or bio-LNG. Cryo Pur says its system generates bio-LNG with a high energy efficiency.
Cryo Pur's process works in three steps. The first step involves the removal of hydrogen sulphide, water and pollutants. The second sees the biogas cooled to minus 120 degrees Celsius, with the separation and liquefaction of CO2 taking place.
The resulting biomethane is then compressed to 15 bar and liquefied at minus 120 degrees Celsius, with the bio-LNG then stored in "cryogenic vessels."
"The process developed by Cryo Pur is especially done to convert biogas into biomethane, and the biomethane that we produce today… has exactly the same quality as natural gas, so it's a good result," Pierre Coursan, biomethane market manager at Suez, told CNBC's Sustainable Energy. Suez is one of Cryo Pur's commercial partners.
In a facility on the outskirts of Paris, Cryo Pur has been working with industrial partners to produce a working demonstration of their technology. The system uses several different types of waste material.
"The technology developed here is able to treat every biogas that can be produced from anaerobic digestion, from agricultural feedstock, sewage sludge, organic waste," Coursan added.
Using anaerobic digestion, the organic materials are turned into biogas, which is then purified – separating CO2 from methane – with the resulting biomethane liquefied to make bio-LNG.
"Every day we are able to treat more than two metric tonnes of biogas and we transform it… (into) about one metric tonne of liquid biomethane, which can be used in long haul trucks to make long distances in the range of 1,500 kilometres," Denis Clodic, CEO and founder of Cryo Pur, said.
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An Indian court says glaciers and rivers are 'living entities.' Could the same approach work in the US?
The Gangotri and Yamunotri glaciers have retreated thousands of feet in the past few decades. Indian judges have moved aggressively to protect them.
Just weeks after a high court in the Indian state of Uttarakhand granted legal personhood to the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, the same court recently extended that same standing to the Gangotri and Yamunotri glaciers that feed them.
The finding follows New Zealand’s mid-March passage of a law recognizing the Whanganui River – a feature that the Maori people consider an ancestor – as a living entity. And the Indian court’s effort to protect the vanishing glaciers also carries religious overtones, since both the rivers and glaciers are considered sacred sites to many Hindus.
“The past generations have handed over the ‘Mother Earth’ to us in its pristine glory and we are morally bound to hand over the same Mother Earth to the next generation,” the two ruling justices wrote, according to India’s Hindustan Times.
The ruling and the New Zealand law are variants of “rights of nature” measures with theoretical roots dating back to the 1970s. They appear in the United States, too: More than three dozen US localities have ordinances ascribing varying types of rights to nature, or to specific natural objects. Their rise is in some ways a monument to the global exchange of ideas, with US activists advising national legislatures in Ecuador and Bolivia, whose laws in turn emboldened jurisdictions in the US and elsewhere.
But the India and New Zealand models may not be obvious candidates for US copycats, both because of their religious underpinning and differences in the legal channels by which advocates tend to assert their claims.
“It’s a model that exists in a number of different places, but the laws do look different because they’re taking root in different institutional environments,” says Craig Kauffman, a University of Oregon political scientist who studies global policy responses to climate change.
Nature's day in court
Rights of nature measures in the US trace their origins to a seminal 1972 law review article by University of Southern California professor Christopher Stone, “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.” The arguments laid out by Professor Stone lodged themselves in the consciousness of environmentalists and even influenced then-Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who cited it in a dissenting opinion that same year.
If ships and corporations could be recognized by courts as legal personalities, wrote Justice Douglas in Sierra Club v. Morton, ecosystems under “the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life” ought to be able to sue to preserve themselves. Specifically, a federal rule could be fashioned to permit litigation in the name of everything from rivers and beaches to groves of trees and even air, to preserve those inanimate objects “where injury is the subject of public outrage.”
Legal personhood of the sort granted by the Indian judges doesn’t bestow the same rights afforded to a human. But it does allow representatives of the entity to make claims for harm done to it – and be sued for harm it does to others.
The Indian judges’ decision affects more than just the glaciers. It calls for a considerable array of natural features surrounding the Gangotri and Yamunotri, including rivers, air, lakes, and meadows, to get legal standing to sue for harm, with the help of senior public advocates.
“The overarching idea is, this is personhood in same sense as corporate personhood. But in the Indian case, it seems like this is personhood in the same sense of human personhood. So it kind of depends on what version we’re thinking is going to have longer legs,” says Gwendolyn Gordon, assistant professor of legal studies at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Bringing it back to the US
Years of struggles to pass legislation protecting the Ganges River from pollution had frustrated advocates in India, who ended up turning to public interest litigation – an Indian judicial recourse that allows third parties to bring claims on behalf of others without having to prove harm to themselves, as long as judges find it to be in the public interest.
In the US, public interest litigation doesn’t exist. Nor are natural objects guaranteed the right to acquire legal personhood – though corporations can. That means rights of nature activism usually takes the form of ballot initiatives, which often emerge to contest the power of corporations wherever local natural resources are seen as being placed at risk.
The first such ordinance, for example, came in 2006, when Tamaqua Borough in Pennsylvania sought to protect the town’s drinking water from the dumping of sewage sludge nearby. More recently, municipalities such as Highland and Grant Townships in Pennsylvania have passed new home-rule charters that name specific watersheds to be protected from potential pollution from fracking interests.
“Typically it’s reactive to some kind of degradation or problem. The early ones were sewage sludge, often now it’s fracking,” says Dr. Kauffman of the University of Oregon.
The change envisioned by activists such as the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), the US-based network behind many of the measures in the US and abroad, goes well beyond the protection of natural resources from pollution. Many of them hope that the legal girding that defends against resource degradation will slowly engender a broader transformation, one that assigns inherent value to nature, independent of its utility to humans.
“We say we’re trying to move from a Roman property-based legal structure to a legal structure that gives rights to all living things. It’s a really big paradigm shift in peoples’ minds,” says Mari Margil, the CELDF’s associate director.
It’s also one that can jibe with the worldview of indigenous groups.
In 2008, Ecuador adopted a constitutional amendment that acknowledged nature’s right to “exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles.” Bolivia followed three years later with a similarly worded law.
Both refer to Pachamama, the Quechua and Aymara word for “nature” or “Mother Earth.”
Native American tribes in the US with similarly reverential beliefs about nature might be next to catch on. In Wisconsin, for example, the Ho-Chunk tribe is considering an amendment to its constitution that would ban frac sand mining, fossil fuel extraction, and genetically engineered organisms – an approach some advocates think will catch on with other indigenous groups.
“Other tribes are picking it up,” says Juliee de la Terre, an adjunct professor at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wis., who has worked with the Ho-Chunk on the amendment. “I’m hoping it starts a landslide and tribes all over the country start doing it.”
Not that rights of nature measures are necessarily environmental panaceas. In South America, laws have proved vague enough to allow for the approval of new large-scale extractive projects, like last year’s inaugural drilling of the Yasuní National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Ms. Margil says the protections in the Indian case, including the naming of specific representatives on the Ganges’ behalf, are unusually well-detailed.
“So far in the US, the local laws have been more broadly focused, so not ecosystem-specific,” she says, adding, “We are beginning to see a little bit of a shift in some communities in the US.”
“People come at it from a spiritual place, a moral place and sometimes a practical place – that existing environmental laws don’t protect the environment, and we need to do something different.”
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Northwest scientists turn sewage into jet fuel.
Using a technique called hydrothermal liquefaction, researchers based in Richland, Washington, have figured out how to transform sewage sludge into a biocrude that can be processed at conventional petroleum refining plants and turned into gasoline, diesel or jet fuel.
There are a lot of reasons to feel crappy about America right now — the fact that we just took a yuuge step back on climate action among them. But here’s a bright spot: Soon, we may be able to turn America’s crap into fuel for cars, trucks and even airplanes.
Using a technique called hydrothermal liquefaction, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), based in Richland, Washington, have figured out how to transform sewage sludge into a biocrude that can be processed at conventional petroleum refining plants and turned into gasoline, diesel or jet fuel.
Burning this fuel still produces greenhouse gases, but transforming our waste back into energy results in lower net carbon emissions than using fossil fuels pumped or mined from the earth. And sewage fuel is most promising as a replacement for things like jets, which can’t run on electricity or batteries.
In a nutshell, hydrothermal liquefaction mimics, and greatly speeds up, the natural process that takes place under the earth over millions of years that turns ancient phytoplankton into oil. It entails putting the poop into a tube, and then pressurizing it to over 200 atmospheres and heating it to over 650 degrees Fahrenheit. This breaks the sewage goop’s carbon chains down, finally resulting in an aqueous liquid and a biocrude similar to the petroleum that’s pumped out of the ground— “something that could be refined at the existing petroleum infrastructure,” PNNL spokeswoman Susan Bauer explains.
The technology was first developed in the 1970s and ’80s, primarily with algae in mind. But, it turns out, most of the U.S. doesn’t have a great climate for algae farms. Over the past few years, companies developing algal biofuels have struggled to figure out how to grow algae at scale in an economically feasible way, and many of them are dropping out of the game.
Enter, sewage.
“We had this idea because [sewage sludge] has the same biochemical profile as algae, the same ratio of lipids, carbohydrates and proteins,” explains Justin Billing, a chemical and biological process development engineer with PNNL.
Billings and his team began experimenting with fecal fuel in 2015, and found the first few runs to be “surprisingly successful.”
Because this type of biocrude doesn’t rely on growing anything — only on collecting stuff we can’t help but produce — it could end up being way less expensive than other biofuels. While algal diesel costs $12-15 per gallon to produce, sewage sludge starts around $5 a gallon, Billings says. (Under certain scenarios, both fuel types could supposedly get down to $3 a gallon).
“The capital, the infrastructure is already there,” Billings says. “Sewage is already centrally located, and already collected into a useful slurry.” Yum.
The actual burning of fuel made from wastewater sludge doesn’t result in fewer carbon emissions than burning conventional fossil fuels, but biofuels are renewable and take less energy to produce. Over the whole life cycle, wastewater biofuel results in 55 to 70 percent less greenhouse gas emissions compared to petroleum. In part, that’s because the way it stands, a lot of our sewage solids eventually end up being transported from wastewater treatment plants to landfills, where its decomposition produces carbon dioxide and methane.
Of course, Canada is beating us to actually using the technology: Metro Vancouver, of British Columbia, wants to have the first wastewater treatment plant to start using PNNL’s methods to turn its sludge into fuel. They are developing an $8-9 million (Canadian) pilot project, which they hope to start building in 2018.
According to PNNL, the U.S. treats about 34 billion gallons of sewage every day, which could be turned into up to 30 million barrels of oil a year. Every single one of us could generate up to two or three gallons of biocrude a year. Which is to say, the U.S. is pretty deep in shit right now. So we might as well make use of it.
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This series is made possible with support from Comcast. The views and opinions expressed in the media, articles, or comments on this article are those of the authors and do not reflect or represent the views and opinions held by Comcast.
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Toyota is using sewage sludge to power its new electric car.
For unlimited clean energy, Toyota’s turning to one of the dirtiest places there is: the toilet.
Highest of tech; powered by human waste. (Reuters/Gary Cameron)
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Written by
Taylor Wofford
Obsession
Batteries
59 mins ago
Hydrogen fuel cell cars could help solve the global warming crisis, but nobody wants to buy them. Yoshikazu Tanaka, chief engineer of the Toyota Mirai, Toyota’s hydrogen fuel cell car, calls it a “chicken or the egg” problem: no one wants to purchase hydrogen cars because there are no hydrogen fuel stations, and nobody wants to build hydrogen fuel stations because there are no hydrogen cars.
But Toyota thinks it may have found a solution. For unlimited clean energy, it’s turning to one of the dirtiest places there is: the toilet.
In Fukuoka, Japan, the automaker is converting human waste into hydrogen to fuel the Mirai. The process is pretty simple. At a wastewater treatment plant, like the Fukuoka City Central Water Processing Plant, sewage is separated into liquid and solid waste. The solid waste, called sewage sludge, is exactly what it sounds like: a foul-smelling, brown lump. Most sewage sludge is thrown in landfills.
But in Fukuoka, microorganisms are added to the mix. These microorganisms break down the solid waste, creating biogas, about 60% methane and 40% carbon dioxide. Then, workers filter out the CO₂ and add water vapor, which creates hydrogen and more CO₂. They extract the CO₂ again, and voila: pure hydrogen.
“It’s not a new or advanced technology,” says Marc Melaina, a senior engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Denver. “In India, they have loads of biogas plants in villages and such that are just part of their energy infrastructure.”
If Tanaka has his way, Japan and the U.S. will soon follow suit. Currently, the Fukuoka plant produces 300 kilograms of hydrogen per day, enough to fuel 65 Mirai vehicles, Tanaka says. If all the biogas produced by the plant were converted to hydrogen, that number would jump to 600 cars per day. It’s a far cry from enough to achieve his goal of a “hydrogen society” that has no need whatsoever for fossil fuels, but it’s a good first step. Ideally, the process would be implemented in a scaled-up fashion at the wastewater processing plants of the world’s biggest cities.
Using wastewater is arguably the greenest way to make hydrogen, especially for big cities, where there are a lot of people who produce a lot of sewage, and most of that sewage, after it’s been treated, is discarded. In the case of sewage sludge, it’s usually dumped in landfills, and in the case of biogas it’s most often burnt. In other words, there’s no downside to using it to produce hydrogen instead. “They have to treat the water, and biogas is a natural byproduct of that process,” Melaina says. “You can burn it, you can turn it into electricity or you can turn it into hydrogen.”
Making hydrogen from sewage is “probably one of the most economical ways down the line because you’re producing so much from a waste product,” says Bill Elrick, executive director of the California Fuel Cell Partnership.
Biogas, which is renewable, is also a better source of hydrogen than natural gas, which is where we get most of our hydrogen today. “Biogas itself is really chemically almost identical to natural gas. If you clean it up and take out the impurities it’s basically methane,” Melaina says.
Compared to other zero-emissions vehicles, like electric battery cars, hydrogen vehicles also stand the best chance at convincing consumers to give up their gas-guzzlers, says Joan Ogden, co-director of Hydrogen Pathways Program at UC Davis. That’s because, behaviorally, they’re a lot like the gasoline cars we’re used to. ”Fuel cell cars do offer you things that battery cars can’t in terms of the ease of use, in terms of fast refueling time, and in terms of a longer range and a bigger car,” she says. And, she says, hydrogen vehicles should be “within a few thousand dollars of gasoline cars within the next 10 years.”
Biogas could help solve hydrogen’s “chicken or the egg” problem. “There’s only some few hundred Mirais in the state of California right now,” Elrick says. “That’s not enough to turn it into a full business from Toyota’s perspective or the energy producers’ perspectives.”
Japanese and American consumers are accustomed to being able to go to any gas station and buy fuel to power their cars. Outside of a few major cities in Japan, hydrogen car drivers can’t do that. In California, there are around 20 hydrogen refueling stations, but almost all of them are in or around Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay area. Currently, there’s exactly one hydrogen refueling station between those two cities, in Harris Ranch, California. Given that the Mirai has a range of about 312 miles, long road trips are currently out of the question.
But where there’s poop there’s people, which is what makes a plant like the one in Fukuoka so attractive. If every town with a sewage treatment plant also had a hydrogen production facility, supplying hydrogen to far-flung locales would become trivially easy.
For now, though, it’s still a waiting game: waiting on more stations to be built, and waiting for consumer demand for zero-emissions vehicles to take off. But Toyota is hoping that its toilet-to-tank scheme might reduce those wait times, just a bit.
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