Poop Pellets to Produce Hydrogen
Wow - this has definitely been our worst week since the Christmas break! Very sorry about that. Busy schedules combined with a wee bit o’ winter blues (we got hit yet again this week) certainly hasn’t helped inspire us!
Anyway, this morning I decided that I needed to get something up before we completely fall into a rut here, so I started digging through recent green headlines (btw, I’ll post our next ‘Green News’ installment tomorrow). It took some time, but I did manage to find an interesting story in the Toronto Star.
Apparently a couple of researchers have found a way to efficiently produce hydrogen gas via the fermentation of dehydrated wastewater-sludge pellets.
Here is an exerpt:
The idea of producing hydrogen from municipal waste water isn’t new, but controlling the amount of hydrogen produced has proven tricky. One problem is that sludge contains bacteria that produce hydrogen and bacteria that consume it, so the net yield tends to be much lower than its potential.
“In order to maximize production you need to kill all micro-organisms that consume hydrogen,” said Youssouf Kalogo, a researcher at Hamilton-based environmental consulting firm Hydromantis Inc. Doing this, however, means boiling the sludge – an energy-intensive process that proves uneconomic.
Kalogo, along with former University of Toronto professor David Bagley, who now teaches civil engineering at the University of Wyoming, realized that another option was to spike the primary sludge with dried sludge pellets. It turns out that the process of making the sludge pellets kills off the bad microbes and preserves the good ones.
The two scientists conducted an experiment, the results of which will soon be published in the peer-reviewed journal Bioresource Technology, which showed that pellets obtained from Ashbridges Bay were an inexpensive, practical, and renewable source of microbes for generating hydrogen from sludge.
“This is general research that can be applied to any waste-water treatment plant, and it’s a totally new approach,” Kalogo told the Toronto Star. “We know that the pellets already exist in plants, so why can’t we use the pellets directly as a source of micro-organisms?”
The hydrogen that’s produced could be used in a fuel cell to produce electricity and heat for the treatment facility, with any surplus power being sold back into the grid.
You can read the full article here: Researchers make hydrogen from waste
Sounds quite interesting! I actually have access to Bioresource Technology (journal) online so I will definitely keep my eyes peeled for this study and will report back if I find anything worthy of mention.
Technorati Tags: wastewater, sludge, poop, hydrogen, fuel cells, fermentation, anaerobic digestion, alternative energy, green power, sewage
Written by Bentley on February 15th, 2007 with
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