Bobko D writes in Tips and Notes
Anthony,
One of the more ridiculous schemes how to save the world – a candidate for your “Craziness of the week”, perhaps – is the POO POWER! project from Melbourne, Australia.
I am tempted to believe the guy who dreamed it up, Duncan Chew, must be playing a joke on our environmentalists – yet he is now laughing all the way to the bank, with this $45,000 grant from Australian Government green schemes:
I’m tempted to agree, especially when the guy can’t even get the flowchart sequence right, i.e. which came first, the dog or the poo? 😉
This one’s a real stinker, even by green lunacy standards. Next I envision they’ll try to make catbox powered homes…Read on…
MEDIA RELEASE (see http://www.poopower.com.au/our-story/45000-grant-to-poo-power.html )
Poo Power! is one of … recipients from Inspiring Australia’s ‘Unlocking Australia’s Potential’ program. The $45,000 grant has been awarded to the Yarra Energy Foundation to turn dog poo from parks in the City of Yarra into renewable energy.
There is over 1350 tonnes of dog waste to be disposed of every day in Australia… Using this un-tapped resource, Poo Power! will engage Australians in its science through utilising an anaerobic digester to process dog waste into biogas that can serve as a local renewable energy source.
Within the City of Yarra there are approximately 6078 dogs that generate over 750 tonnes of waste every year… This waste can be diverted into a local an anaerobic digester to generate more than 3800 litres of biogas that can be used for heating, lighting or electricity.
This small but important amount of biogas will be used in a City of Yarra park in an interactive public installation as a community meeting place for use by dog owners and other citizens.
“This project has the potential to be groundbreaking, a whole lot of fun and will deliver value to the citizens in the City of Yarra, which is why YEF is involved.” Alex Fearnside, CEO of the Yarra Energy Foundation.
This project was instigated by Duncan Chew … Project and Science Engagement Manager for the Poo Power! Project…”
Media enquiries:
Poo Power! – Duncan Chew | 0418 513 240 | duncan@greennation.com.au
Yarra Energy Foundation – Alex Fearnside | 0434 990 108 | alex.fearnside@yef.org.au
—–
“What is Poo Power? We’ve found a way to unleash the power in the 1,350 tonnes of dog poo produced each day in Australia….”
and
“…On average, a dog produces 0.34 kilograms (kg) of feces per day. Consequently, there is approximately 1,350.48 tonnes (t) of dog waste to be disposed of every day in Australia; 492,925 tonnes (t) per year.
Therefore we want to build an anaerobic methane digester to process the dog waste … to create a biogas that can serve as renewable energy source…”
(http://www.poopower.com.au/what-is-poo-power.html)
Dogs seem to enjoy exercise such as going up ramps and there is an industry directed at providing equipment for agility training.
http://dogs-and-puppy-training.com/Images/Dog-Agility-Training-Seesaw-Teeter-Totter.jpg
Various items such as the teeter-totter shown in the link above could be fitted with small generators and a large park with many activities could be a ‘power station’ of some magnitude. A variety of animals can be included. Anyone with a pencil, paper, and a slide rule is encouraged to push this idea to its limit. Please send me a 10% consultant’s fee.
Injured animals can also participate. Most of the mechanical parts are already available:
http://le-grove.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/dog-on-wheels.jpg
Cats could even work at it:
http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/cat-exercise.jpg
Goats are good climbers, so pet goats could contribute by jumping onto appropriate equipment.
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/photos/uncategorized/goats.jpg
There was a young mongrel called Lou
Who produced simply masses of poo
We can extract from his stools
A gas (when it cools),
And use it to heat our homes too!
Next thing you know they’ll be collecting human farts and using them for cooking gas. Soylent green, anyone?
Sigh… I live in Melbourne, city of Green Party activism, David Karoly, home to Gergis et al’s flawed hockey stick paper … and now this! Sigh again …
2CH4 + 3O2 = 2CO2 + 2H2O
So we burn the methane and get carbon dioxide and water vapour. I thought electricity generation by burning gas was evil?
grumpyoldmanuk @ur momisugly 5:47 am:
All dogs are supposed to be registered in Victoria.
Gosh, to think of where I could have put Shep’s poo, instead of burying it in the garden , as was my wont when living there! In Australia you can buy garden dog-poo recyclers anyway.
The thought of filling a bucket had me LOL as we had a similar system in Gloucestershire for kitchen waste. We had very little as I composted anything suitable, so the rubbish collection people (coming only once per fortnight) ignored my occasional offerings. If I rang up the local council to mention the fact, we would find an entire truck arriving for our one little bin. They then proceeded to empty it straight into the rubbish collection section. I ceased to bother separating it after that.
Unrecyclable rubbish, including old stock bones, went into the bin; vegetable remants into the compost bin…end of story. The council-supplied kitchen bin was used to store grass-seed, etc.
What a subject for a rather cool, dull, wet Yorkshire Synday afternoon! No heatwave around here.
Oh dear! Synday! Sorry…must be post-lunch dopiness. Sunday craziness.
If you’re going to do this,
1) generate power from anaerobically digesting sludge from the local sewage treatment plant
2) throw the dog poo in the toilet and flush
Isn’t that a lot simpler?
Why does it need to be dogs? Must be a lot more human poo than dog poo.
Luther Wu @ur momisugly 7:14 a:
They sound like the early editions of “Earth Garden” and “Grass Roots” in Australia. Even now they have their wacky moments and there are some fairly rabid Manmade Global Warmers/Climate Changers around on the EG website.
“If it was that good an idea the world would be full of powerstations using human and farm animal waste. This kind of electricitty production has been known about for decades. ”
Millions. Do you want a list? Anaerobic digesters (AD) is a standard process in WWTP and many processes in the world. Many combine making electricity very economically.
Manure is an extreme health hazard. The reason you pampered little girls using computers (especially in California) is that you leave your messes for someone else to clean up. My yard seems to be a favorite spot. This is why I do not own a gun. The Sheriff has already told one neighbor I had the right to shot the dog. The problem is not the dog but irresponsible owners.
AD work at temperatures that kill pathogen bacteria. The second reason is odor control. Animal waste processed with AD have little odor if the biogass is destroyed by either flaring or using the gas to heat a boiler or make electricity.
When you smell bad odors from a waste process system, the cause is usually an aerobic process that is overloaded. When that happens you need electricity to pump oxygen into the system.
Yes, it takes energy to treat animal waste. AD produces energy.
Third, the nutrients in animal waste are a major source water and air pollution when it is just allowed to run off or blow away. Even if you are not concerned about nitrous oxide as a ghg, we make nitrogen fertilizer with natural gas. It takes energy to make fertilizer to grow our food. The ratio of N, P, K in the the organic fertilizer is perfect for many food and non-food applications.
Do not try it in California, to many little girls.
Aside from the millions of engineered AD systems, there are millions of simple AD for village scale applications. In fact there is a college professor in Australia, that promotes such uses in Southeast Asia.
As far as cost goes, that is the standard cost to do feasibility study. Men and women with engineering degrees like to get paid for their time.
The bottom line is that AD is a very good idea for reducing environmental impact and even producing electric power. The problem is that is not glamorous like wind and solar. If AD requires a strong stomach, because what goes in is not very nice.
Unlike Alan I am a level 10 CD. The reason is that I am an engineer who has to consider environmental and industrial safety problems. If you have to worry about finding a dead worker face down in a manure pit (it happens), AGW is way down the list.
If every bird can be encouraged to contribute just a tiny twig a day, after a year…
Sigh. This is just like wind power or solar.
They aren’t bad ideas in certain very limited circumstances.
i.e. You could build, and I know of dairy barns that successfully have, a poo / methane digester, that supplies both power and light to the farm. Concept proved, it works.
But that works because all the cows are in one place, and there is an automated poo handling system. (from the cow’s posterior to the digested poo’s placement in the (composted) manure spreader trailer it’s basically fully automated with minimal operator intervention)
Once you spread the cows/dogs/whatever poo over 1000’s of acres it’s utterly pointless. What are you going to do, force people to A. Pick up ALL the poo B. Package it correctly C. (most importantly) bring it ( at what cost) to a central location…really?
What morons fund these studies? 30 secs of thought and the back of envelope and I can tell you with very high degree of confidence it’s a stupid idea, and the amount I know about this can literally be summarized on the back of an envelope.
@ur momisugly Andi Cockroft: The hamster idea has merit. Extensive research in the U.S. indicates you will need at least one Bud Lite. Best of luck with the grant.
Not sure what the fuss is about, this seems pretty reasonable, and not unlike what this guy (who has a reputation for making rational decisions) has been supporting – http://news.yahoo.com/bill-gates-reinvent-toilet-193330648.html
CAGW has become a delusional obsession. Much as Cass Sunstein surmised. It is a shame Cass Sunstein himself has succumbed to group-think on virtually every issue.
It’s a simple, logical thing (much like having a compost bin in your garden rather then putting your biodegradable stuff in the rubbish bag and then buying compost …..) It won’t save the world. But nor will putting your litter in a bin. Does that mean we drop our litter on the streets?
Of course, those who want us in thrall of big oil and coal don’t like it. Can’t think why.
As has been mentioned previously, this is an established method of treating solids in a municipal wastewater treatment plant. So the suggestion of putting the stuff in the sewer is not a bad one, Such methane generation usually provides on the order of what it takes to power the wastewater plant, but not usually much surplus if any.
In some large landfills, the methane is collected from the rotting garbage and used to generate electricity.
So the best place to put the stuff is into one of the existing waste streams and not create a new process.
Black soldier fly larva biologically convert manure (even canine) without odor & are a fowl’s favorite food. Do-it-yourself rigs can be set up for one home or a neighborhood group project.
The larvae crawl a little bit away instinctively for separation. They, unlike the manure, are no bio-hazard if want to send to a central site for end use.
Government central planners can mandate chickens eat x% black soldier fly larvae. This will free up more corn for subsidized ethanol production so the family farm will be saved from itself. The mobsters will happily move into the hauling business and it will be a business you did not build, but “it would be a shame if something happened to it.”
Well, one can be a doggy do-do deputy to make sure doggies to their doggy do-do duty down under dutifully.
Forget “poo” power energy from dogs!
America could corner the World’s energy market using the powerful “poo” coming out of our Politicians.
“They aren’t bad ideas in certain very limited circumstances. ”
So you are saying that it is a good idea under the right circumstances. Nobody would ever pay Fred to do ‘back of an envelope calculation’. I have done such calculations after a fifteen minute conversation with a customer. This led to a $50k contract for feasibility study. My back of the envelope was correct to two significant figures.
“Once you spread the cows/dogs/whatever poo over 1000′s of acres it’s utterly pointless ”
How irresponsible is that? Maybe Fred thinks we spread spread coal ash or spent nuclear fuel around. I can do a back of the ‘back of an envelope calculation’ showing it is safer than manure.
Fred thinks it is okay to spread dog sh** where children play. Just because everybody does something does not make it a stupid idea.
“yet he is now laughing all the way to the bank, with this $45,000 grant from Australian Government green schemes:”
And here I thought, Aussies were smarter than us Yanks… 😉
To Aussies credit, their not funding a $18 Billion per year national space program that is concentrating on non-space political activism.
Luther Wu says:
August 19, 2012 at 7:14 am
Reading about the endless schemes reported in WUWT gives me a funny feeling as if I’ve been transported back in time to 1970, reading the first issues of The Mother Earth News and The Whole Earth Catalog.
Luther,
I had the same sense of deja poo…. all over again!
MtK
sounds like a reasonable thing to me. $45,000 will pay a researcher about 3 months (at full economic cost) to spend some time investigating what to do with a load of dog excrement. if it produces some methane on the side then bonus.