Waste Water may be an untapped source of energy by using genetically modified ecoli bacteria to produce electricity.
WUWT reader Wayne Delbeke submits this story:
Sewage treatment plants have used biological processes to produce methane to produce power and reduce some of the energy used in the treatment of waste water. A Vancouver, BC high school student has just won an award for the concept of developing a microbial fuel cell to produce powered by E-coli bacteria in waste water to produce electricity. Perhaps renewable energy from our waste may help to power our cities one day.
Who says young people today aren’t motivated?
He is a good example of the focus and thinking of youth that will be the future using creative thinking:
“Most research around microbial fuel cells is centered around finding some new material that the bacteria like better to generate more electricity, but I kind of flipped it on his head and kind of said, ‘Instead of that why don’t we engineer a better bacteria?’”
As an aside, E-coli bacteria have been modified to produce diesel fuel, hydrogen and other products. A very adaptive little bug.
Link to the International Science and Engineering Fair here:
Read more here, video available:
More here at the Globe and Mail
That’s nothing!
I can create electricity just using a potato and a couple of nails!
Wait for my grant application to study its feasibility…
WHAT THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT TOMATOS!!!!!!!! THIS WILL SHOCK YOU
http://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/pictures/2409/982209943__TomatoBattery.jpg
DON’T EAT ANOTHER TOMATO UNTIL YOU SEE THIS
FREE ENERGY!!!!
🙂
I think you nailed it.
You got fer sur pertn’r. But what happened to the potatoes and dem thar light bulbs?
Hey, next we can think about powering our grid with lemons and potatoes.
Or, we could let the energy experts worry about energy and let the environmentalists worry about mentalism. These organic wastes should be used as fertilizer.
Well alrighty then. Most things are created by nutrients that can be put back into the soil to fertilize new plants. Every time we harvest catfish from my buddy’s pond, the remains head to me compost foot deep hole for about 4 months. Then I dig out my compost box and add it to my garden mixture.
What a coincidence. I’ve developed a concept for an aero-car resembling a flying saucer, with a clear, bubble top. This fuel cell idea might be useful as an energy source for it.
So now when I excuse myself from the table/office/room and somebody asks where I’m going, I can tell them “I’m going to make electricity”.
Electricity flows down hill, er up hill with subsidies.
Not getting into the feasibility, scalability, dangers of engineered bacteria, or many other side (or snide) comments, congratulations to the high school student. The world needs more bright students who will become scientists in the future and are willing to look at problems in a different light and experiment without the baggage of preconceived conclusions. Well done.
The ability to nip completely crackpot ideas in the bud is also a skill to be nurtured in the young aspiring future scientists, before too much money and resources are needlessly wasted.
PJ,
My first thought when reading the article was why try to get electricity out of such a tiny critter as a microbe? Why not try to bio-engineer something a little bigger, such as goldfish, to have the jolt of an electric eel?
Generating electricity directly from sewage via microbes at the scale of a fuel cell means gathering up and distributing a bunch of poop or its fuel cell derivatives and transporting it in useful quantities to useful locations to refuel or replace fuel cells. That’s a whole ‘nother chunk of infrastructure that will need to be financed and installed. (However, rest stops on interstates would regain their importance as people stopped to make a deposit or withdrawal of feed stock for their fuel cells.)
Now I would be highly inclined to applaud that student if the conversion of a gallon of sewage can be shown to do more work than does a gallon of diesel fuel when Super-Sludge-Bug has to only be engineered to produce ______ energy. What is that number? Remember, the objective was to bio-engineer a better bug, not make a better feed stock. What kind of output would the new microbe need to generate to beat the current standard of diesel fuel; more than an electric eel? Frankly, I’d be skeptical if Charles Steinmetz himself had proposed the scheme.
That said, I have the weekend to follow all the links and I’ll issue a mea culpa if I find he has produced some promising, scalable output numbers for his concept which microbes could reasonably be expected to deliver.
Well, got a partial answer without going too far:
[Bold Mine]
Hmm… part of the competitiveness does come from the fact that those bugs can work around the clock, unlike solar. However, it’s not clear if the power generated is Ivanpah solar or pocket calculator solar, so I need to run down a few more links.
Once again, this is a high school student working on a science project. It is not a result of some university research project siphoning off funds from government (i.e., taxpayer) or greenie environmental group research grant that is only being provided with the expectation of pre-conceived conclusions. It sounds like he thought outside the box, did some experiments and tests, and won a science prize for doing so. So once again, congratulations to him – well done. I applaud him for his cleverness and creative thinking. It is great to see this level of scientific experimentation being performed at the high school level. I am specifically not commenting on any of the aspects (or probable lack thereof) of applicability for getting energy out of bacteria.
Welcome to Bartertown!
At least our host, WUWT, does not feel this is a crackpot idea. See here:
I think there is room for disagreement on many particulars, and room for a really good discussion about wastewater and also education in general if we stay on topic and offer specific disagreements.
I suppose anything is a good idea if you don’t compare it to coal, gas and hydro. No one is going to smelt any ore or perform any electrolysis with this. I just wondered if the students know this. I also wonder if they know about how deadly microbes have been to humanity throughout history. And to our crops, and our cattle, and our chickens. Discovering this the story of the triumph of science, and so is the story of how these were controlled and eradicated through the use of chemicals.
If WUWT will please excuse the forboding remarks. We are bracing ourselves for having this mandated, even as coal is eliminated. This makes us all very irascible.
Remember that kid, Kristen Byrnes? http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89619306
We need more like her. Good head on her shoulders, and willing to buck authority.
Imagine the methane you could get from graveyards! Run dead and canadian-euthanizable people through digesters to make methane.
Or there’s always Soylent Green as a more direct approach.
Not an original idea. Well, the kid may have come up with it alone, but the concept is at least 100 years old:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_fuel_cell
This however, a microbial battery, is something new:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/september/wired-microbes-electricity-091613.html
Using modern techniques such as synthetic biology and directed evolution, we should be able to ramp (or amp) up these little electron-shedding batteries fairly quickly.
{Delta}G={delta}h + T {delta}S
Until people understand that equation, all these pipe dreams (or poop dreams) remain dreams
Surely.
Yet the “bacteries” might pan out energetically if the positive node problem be solved.
The “pooperies”, not so much.
Skeptics here worry about energy density of sewage. True. Human waste has low energy density ave. 6.9 MJ/kg and sewage is even lower because the waste is diluted in water. Energy demand of sewage treatment plant is higher than energy produced from sewage. Bull shit beats man in energy density (12 MJ/kg)
By the way, the used cooking oil and bacon fat we throw away in the kitchen sink have over 3 times more energy than nitromethane, the fuel used by the 8,000 hp top fuel dragsters
Bacon fat has been used to vaporize solid steel. It replaced acetylene in the acetylene torch. Cooking oil has been used to fly a military jet aircraft. And E. Coli bacteria? Aside from causing a lot of diarrhea, it produced in the lab 0.58 gram of gasoline from a liter of glucose. Gee you get more energy just drinking that glucose.
“Cooking oil has been used to fly a military jet aircraft.”
It works better than pump diesel in my turbo diesel Mercedes Benz, that’s for sure. Cuts injector clatter too.
and this UK company is already using that for power!
http://www.power-technology.com/projects/2ocs-fat-fuelled-power-plant-beckton/
One UK water and sewage company makes a big deal over the “fact” that it produces enough electricity from sewage to power 10,000 homes. That none of the power ever leaves site and that they have had this system in place from when the sites were built has nothing to do with the “green” sheen put on it all.
James Bull
Yes, Thames Water generate part of their own electricity supply from sewage – 12% of what they use from this:
http://www.thameswater.co.uk/cr/Efficientoperations/Sludgemanagement/Disposaltoland/index.html
Also they create (natural) gas:
http://www.thameswater.co.uk/about-us/850_13238.htm
This other UK company generate equivalent power to needs 50,000 homes:
https://www.stwater.co.uk/renewable-energy/energy-from-sewage
Also there are multiple floating solar farms used by UK water companies – e.g
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/29/worlds-biggest-floating-solar-farm-power-up-outside-london
I think we can all agree that this s a crappy solution. Build molten salt nuclear reactors and spend time trying to invent something worthwhile
China was supposed to use sewage tanks to produce methane back in the 1980s. I even have plans for them (not that I wanted to build one).
Generating pooptricity in large central plants is such antiquated, positively fossil fuel age thinking.
Lobby the government to provide subsidies for household poop generators and feedin tariff subsidies for the electricity generated. Sue for equality between poop generation and rooftop solar! Carbon credits for eating high fiber cereal! Better call Saul.