Sewage Power

Two recent stories caught my attention yesterday. Both are about use of sewage for power generation.

A new $2.4 million biogas and energy efficiency project at a sewage treatment plant in Washington State will capture methane gas from the treatment process and recycle it as fuel to run equipment at the plant, saving the sewage agency more than $228,000 yearly in utility costs. That's a pretty decent payback, especially since $1.7 million of the total was chipped in by Puget Sound Energy, the local utility company. Along with the efficiency upgrade, the biogas project will greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the treatment plant and save about 2.8 million kilowatt hours yearly (enough to power about 210 homes), relieving pressure on the local grid and helping to obviate the need for new fossil fuel burning power plants in the region.

Source: Clean Technica

With the mass amounts of sewage being dumped into the oceans or just left out in open to evaporate and contaminate the air, using it for power generation is an ideal solution.

And here's the second story:

The Toronto Zoo, the largest zoo in Canada and third-largest in the world, put out a request for proposals yesterday to build a large anaerobic digestion facility that will convert manure from elephants, giraffes and hundreds of other animals under its care into biogas. The plan is to burn the biogas to generate electricity — up to 5 megawatts — and use the waste heat from both the digester and the generation plant to heat zoo exhibits (offsetting more than $1 million of natural gas used by the zoo). This is just the latest biogas project to emerge in Toronto, which also plans to take methane from a large landfill, a major wastewater treatment plant, and two organic waste processing facilities to generate electricity, or alternatively, to fuel city transportation fleets. In all, biogas projects recently approved by the Ontario Power Authority under the province's feed-in-tariff program, as well as projects in the pipeline, total well over 100 megawatts.

Source: Toronto Star

We have huge amounts of animal sewage in third world countries. It is either thrown away, or used as a burning fuel (for cooking and heating).

The potential for creating energy from these sustainable sources is huge, let's hope the business model is good enough for entrepreneurs to push it through quickly.