Well, at least you don’t have to shovel it in…but I wonder…what sort of “new car smell” does this car have when it is fresh from the factory?
Get the poop on this story here. I foresee a future episode of Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe.
And, if this is the license plate of a Prius owner (which I spotted on I-5 in California)…
…what sort of vanity license plate would an owner of a car like this new Bio Bug have?
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Har har har, everyone’s a comedian!!
*ahem* ….I specialize in anaerobic treatment technology, and yes, it’s true that human poop makes some pretty potent fumes…..however, ‘taint nothin’ like making biogas out of Iowa hog manure! THAT stuff is nuclear!
It’s a great process, most US wastewater plants use anaerobic digesters for sludge treatment & the methane-rich biogas saves them quite a bit on electrical costs.
Considering what Obama’s EPA is planning to spring on us for carbon dioxide regulations, I suggest you all start shopping for new septic tanks!
Hmm, no information on the cost of converting current production or changing to methane. I would think it would be similar to natural gas though which would become cheaper with mass production. probably still wouldn’t be as cheap though.
Also no figures on the cost of capturing the methane or of distributing it to stations for sale. I am always gun shy of people touting how wonderful something is without cost estimates.
Wot? No Mr Fusion?
“…what sort of vanity license plate would an owner of a car like this new Bio Bug have?”
When a “c” sounds like an “s” of course!
]:)]
Vanity plates?
After reading this article, my wife and I couldn’t stop thinking about vanity plates:
RUNZ
Richard hammond did this on top gear years ago. sorry I dont have a link
The water company I work for generate large amounts of their electric from methane produced in what are delightfully called” digester’s”. The gas is used to run large engine driven generators, the power is then used to run the treatment of the sewerage.
So if they think they could run cars on the “waste” gas it is already being used the only way they would sell it is if it was profitable (subsidised).
The other source is off gas from land fill sites which is also used to produce electric, so nice idea boys but. You would have to collect and store you own and then process it I’m sure the neighbours would love it.
Some may feel it is a useful alternative to running on bee pee!
What about the acceleration though…like Sh** off a shovel…
This is the thin end of the wedge. Mark my words, thirty years from now we’ll be driving with a gas pipe up our arses. Brussels sprouts and baked beans will be the new bio fuels.
This is really old. In my town our wastewater treatment plant has been using methane to power the facility for years and years. They also had/have a few converted cars that were powered by methane. More MSM repackaging of ancient news…
I’ve got another one. If UPS converted all of their trucks to this technology, it would give new meaning to their slogan “What can brown do for you?”
Kinda’ like “Back to the Future”, they used trash and garbage, and of course they has the Flux Capacitor too.
Here in the UK we are limited to the letter/number combinations in vanity plates. But, with apologies to the Germans for poo-r spelling, we could have SH31 SER.
Ha Its just cleaned biogas in a car we knew how to do that in the 1960’s. Helps to live near a dairy or a piggery. Such farm can make more biogas in a day than a town produces in a week. Its a useless report as far as details are concerned. Biogas is the most efficient biofuel. Almost everything but meat can be digested in the anaerobic digester but there’s a catch. The gas is 30-50% CO2 and 70-50% methane. That makes it incompressible. You can scrub out the CO2 with lime water but that’s not cheap. My guess is that that’s what they have done. Good luck getting a patent on that; the technique is a century old. They may be using a new membrane. Now that would be a breakthrough.
Storing the gas in the car will have the same challenges of LNG. The easy solution there is to mix in a little propane with the gas and chill while stirring. That makes a dense frozen gel at about -20.
Biogas cars will have a niche somewhere but they will need a big farm nearby not a city. A peak oil solution for China they have a lot of biogas plants already.
Most new sewage works built since 1998 have been anaerobic like the Boston Sewage plant on the bay. However these all burn the methane in a co-generator to dry the sludge to fertiliser.
http://www.siemens.com/press/pool/de/pp_cc/2006/09_sep/sc_upload_file_sosep200610_03_72dpi_1402619.jpg
Yes I have a degree in water and sewerage. lol.
We can now officially declare that the British bio-fueled auto industry is in the toilet.
Wesley Bruce says:August 7, 2010 at 8:27 am : “Biogas cars will have a niche somewhere but they will need a big farm nearby not a city.”
Wesley, soon you won’t need to live near a farm OR a city; as long as you’re prepared to take a dump in your fuel tank.
I think I have seen everything now and I can die a happy man!!! A car that runs on poop? At what point did society fall apart and some genius decide that we need a “Poop Car” ? With so much talk about “going green”, someone decided to “go brown”! HAHAHAHA. When will they have Dildo cars? That is the only natural step!
How strange, we have people who complain (loudly) about using °F instead of °C or K (Use METRIC for Science!), yet I have noticed nothing but silence over a
BritishUK article where they freely mixed miles and “litres.” Is it normal forBritsUK-ers to talk about “miles per litre”?http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-10884539
Methane powered car runs on human excrement
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
August 7, 2010 at 4:49 pm
British newspapers have the most ridiculous mixture in their style guides. Not only do they mix units as you’ve highlighted, the Telegraph (for one) has a preference for Fahrenheit and other olde worlde units. Furthermore, and to get really pedantic, *every* Brit newspaper that I’ve read online and other online mags, and the BBC, don’t follow the SI standard when quoting temperatures – they omit the degrees symbol. Thus, they write 10C or 10 C instead of 10 °C.
For some, that’s just too anal to bother with. Fair enough, but for those with a science or engineering background, international standards, accuracy, correctness, honesty, etc., can make the difference between being a scientist and an AGWist.
PJB says:
August 6, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Manufacturer’s motto: From your tailpipe to my tailpipe…..
Vanity plate could be
URANUS
power
Thanks!!! You’ve given me the best laugh I’ve had in a month. Now if you’ll just send me the money for a new monitor.
I never thought I’d live to see the day when the expression: You’re full of sh** would be a compliment.
There is a new diesel tech that uses urea to make it burn clean, we know where urea comes from it seems that transport is in the toilet!!
Did’nt the UK farmers use this in WW2 when gas was rationed?
I have a great idea, unbolt the cat, introduce tetra-ethel lead instead of alcahol and up the compression ratio and hugely improve the fuel consumption .
Logistics is always the failure factor. The equivalent of “light, sweet crude” oil is rather easily obtainable from any vegetative (carbohydrate) source, and that was discovered by a scientist and published in a 1941 edition of Life magazine. I possess a copy of that issue, but don’t have it at hand right this instant. I have it stored away as of now.
There have been 2 fully functional pilot plants constructed and successfully operated in the US for a good while now using that principal, and as of about 6 years ago, the cost of the “oil” produced, with the amortized cost of the physical plant included, was estimated to be about $15 per barrel. A dependable and steady source of the input feed was one hold back. Of course, that would not be a difficult problem to be overcome. But had a large investment have been made to build such plants, the large oil companies could have undercut the price of their crude to put the new company out of business.
In one of the popularized science magazines I subscribed to when I was a young lad in high school, there was an article, with photos of the apparatus used, about a high school chem teacher in Texas who was making gasoline, lubricating oil and lubricating grease in his garage, about 10 or 11 gallons of gasoline per week (which he made for personal use in a “Detroit piece of iron” he drove).
He used his own yard waste for an input source of material, and newspaper for a heat source. It was constructed from the tank of a residential water heater, and common chem lab glass and rubber tubing (for a fractional distillation unit). I can only guess that he had discovered a new catalyst that eliminated the pressurization and lowered the temperature needed to separate molecules of H2O from the carbohydrate molecules in the material input feed as opposed to the process described in the Life magazine article.
We are often the source of our own problems. There is no economical or technological problem in obtaining all the fuel we need as oil and diesel (including coal fuel) from what is a renewable source; waste vegetative matter and vegetative matter which has been processed into paper, cardboard and the like, which we are presently paying high costs to dispose of in landfills.