Bio-diesel Made from Sewage

tito writes "A New Zealand company has successfully turned sewage into modern-day gold. New Zealand Herald is reporting that a Marlborough-based Aquaflow Bionomic yesterday announced it had produced its first sample of bio-diesel fuel from algae in sewage ponds. It is believed to be the world's first commercial production of bio-diesel from 'wild' algae outside the laboratory - and the company expects to be producing at the rate of at least one million litres of the fuel each year from Blenheim by April."

But will it smell like

sewage coming out of the tailpipe or french fries?

You've got to be shitting me.

Finally we are going to be able to use our waste to ease some form of our lives.

I can already think of a slogon- "Waste makes haste"

Re:You've got to be shitting me.

Really adds a new dimension to the term "tail pipe emissions."

This won't do us any good

So... instead of an oil shortage, we'll seen have a waste shortage?

Re:This won't do us any good

So... instead of an oil shortage, we'll seen have a waste shortage?

In this world? With our media and our politicians? Hollywood alone could fuel a small galaxy.

Re:This won't do us any good

You seem to be incorrectly assuming that anyone, anywhere, is suggesting that we entirely switch over to this for our oil needs.

In fact, in terms of oil dependency this is almost entirely useless. If my waste was pure gasoline coming out of my body with th

Re:This won't do us any good

It's just one of many steps towards increasing the efficiency of our society. Long-term, we're going to beat the oil shortage by decreasing our energy usage,

We could reduce our [petroleum based] energy usage to zero - and we still wouldn't have beaten th

one million litres?

How much is that compared to the oil consumption of New Zealand? How many of those factories would be needed to be independent of crude oil and would that be feasible?

Re:one million litres?

How much is that compared to the oil consumption of New Zealand? How many of those factories would be needed to be independent of crude oil and would that be feasible?

NZ consumes around 151,900 blue barrels a day [cia.gov] that's around 8815 million litres a year. So this plant will be able to provide around 0.01% of NZ's fuel.

But, there is going to be no single replacement for fossil fuels, there's going to be many (and this is just the first plant).

I wish Aquaflow Bionomics Corporation's [bio-diesel.co.nz] home page was a little more professional looking, but this is most certainly good news!

Re:one million litres?

Not really significant,

So, lets see; they reduce their waste problem, they lower their oil usage, and even lower their co2 emissions. Well, it appears to be headed in the right direction, rather than in wrong.

Re:Direction

Indeed, this seems to be the mistake most people make regarding nearly all renewable energy generation techniques (which apart from hydro-electric, only make up a tiny fraction of power generation). Most of the plants built up until today have been little

Re:one million litres?

I believe once the percentage of Biofuel in normal fuel goes above ~10% this is when modifications are needed to the vehicle.

The modifications are minimal. Some seals and fuel lines may need to be replaced, and a larger fuel fiter is often required. Any diesel engine can be converted to run 100% unrefinned cooking oil by simply adding a cooking oil fuel tank. The problem with most bio-diesel is that the fuel becomes too thick at lower temperatures. In the artic 2% bio-diesel may be too much. In California you may be able to run 100% all year long. Engines that run on unrefinned cooking oil typically start on dino-diesel and heat the cooking oil with waste heat from the engine.

Re:one million litres?

Just to clarify, biodiesel and veggie oil are NOT the same. Biodiesel is a type of synthetic diesel fuel made from a renewable resource, whereas veggie oil, while it can be run in a diesel engine (with modifications), is somewhat different, and much more v

Lets do a little math shall we?

So, the sewage output of a town of 26,000 people can produce 1 million litres of usable fuel. As it was stated above, NZ consumes around 8.8 billion liters of fuel per year. With a population of 4.1 million, that is ~2150 liters of fuel, per person, per

Hmmmmmmmmmn,

As well as creating diesel from waste products, the process cleans water:

Creating fuel from the algae removes the problem while producing useful clean water, said Mr Leay. The clean water can then be used for stock food, irrigation and, if treated properly, for human consumption.

In spite of this, I'm sure a million slashdotters are going to bleat about this not solving the fuel crisis, giving us their back of napkin calculations that show you'll need to cover the entire surface of the united states with algae ponds to replace fossil fuels, etc.

Remember folks - there is not going to be a single replacement for fossil fuels, but many (and lets not forget the other half of the equation - reducing our energy consumption).

Re:Hmmmmmmmmmn,

Covering the entire surface of the United States with shit eating algae sounds like a step in the right direction... can we start in Washington?

Re:Hmmmmmmmmmn,

shit eating algae ... start in Washington?

Some might say it's already started.

Natural Selection

I believe there will be too much environmental pressure from the "naturally occuring" slime that seems to accumulate and even thrive there.

More Than One Solution Here?

As well as creating diesel from waste products, the process cleans water...

Correct you are, I was searching around for that local government's PDF on their sewage ponds. I was wondering what the area of pond was exposed to air and whether or not this

The UNH Study

The UNH Biodiesel Group calculated that algae farms in the Mojave Desert alone could supply enough fuel to replace all the gasoline used in the USA. That was just an example to show the land-area requirements. In practice you would want algae cultivation spread out around the country. (The availability of waste feedstocks around the country is one reason.)

I like biodiesel as a long-term solution for several reasons. . .

Because an air-breathing engine draws much of its "fuel" mass from the air, it starts with a large advantage in energy density, and it will be hard for other energy sources -- batteries, supercapacitors, flywheels -- to ever compete.

Unlike hydrogen, we already have the infrastructure in place to handle, store and distribute biodiesel, and millions of vehicles that can already run off it, and the capacity to economically produce millions more of them.

Producing it from algae mimics the process by which petroleum originally formed, over the eons. It might seem unrealistic to produce enough biofuel on a year-by-year basis to replace the *millions* of years worth of petroleum that we routinely burn without thinking anything of it. . . But the natural processes that created petroleum were haphazard, and hardly what anyone would call efficient.

If you replace haphazard processes with specially selected (maybe genetically engineered) strains of algae kept in controlled conditions, with concentrated feed of nutrients and sunlight, the production capacity could be immense. So yeah, I think it can be done.

We might not ever see dirt-cheap fuel again, but I'm optimistic that we can come up with petroleum alternatives at a level that allows our economy and industry to keep on functioning.

Re:Biodiesel Yield Per Land Area

According to the UNH study and Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], the yield of algae farms is about 5000 to 20,000 gallons per acre of pond per year. This number varies mostly due to the pond conditions, strain of algae used, and oil collection method employed.

However, it is worthwhile to note that even the low end (5000 gallons per acre per year) is over 100 times better than soybeans (50 gallons per acre per year) or rapeseed (about 120 gallons per acre per year)... which are the two dominant crops providing biodiesel in America and Europe today.

To supply the entire US fuel needs would require as little as 0.3% of US land area to be covered by algae ponds. This translates to about 28,000 square kilometers, or about 11,000 square miles. To put this in perspective, that is about 1/8th the size of Kansas... and well less than the area devoted to Soybeans currently.

Re:Biodiesel Yield Per Land Area

Well, filling a 15 gallon tank on two cars weekly for a year = 1560 gallons. So at 5000 gallons per acre per year, if all the open space of a large half-acre suburban lot were devoted to your personal sewage farm, you could just squeak by. Plus you'd save on home security bills, what with the giant moat of fecal slime surrounding your house. And you'd reduce tension with the neighbors, because you'd welcome your neighbor's dog crapping in your yard.

Re:The UNH Study

If you replace haphazard processes with specially selected (maybe genetically engineered) strains of algae kept in controlled conditions, with concentrated feed of nutrients and sunlight, the production capacity could be immense. So yeah, I think it can be done.

In fact, that is what a company called GreenFuel Technologies wants to do. Put up a couple of hundred acres of special vertical tanks (maybe derived from metal tanks used by large commercial breweries) and feed the tanks full of oil-laden algae with the exhaust gases from a coal-fired or natural gas-fired plant. This results in VERY fast growth of the algae and also absorbs 40% of the CO2 gas and 86% of the NOx gases, with the final exhaust gases having way below the Kyoto Protocol mandates for coal-fired powerplant emissions. Just a single 200-acre setup could produce an astonishing 15 million gallons of biodiesel fuel/heating oil per year, and the "waste" from the processing of the algae could be used to make animal feed, plant fertilizer or even make ethanol! :-)

If we set up such "farms" of algae tanks next to every large coal-fired or natural gas-fired plant in the USA we could make enough biodiesel fuel/heating oil to drastically reduce the need for refining diesel fuel or heating oil from crude oil. Given modern catalytic "cracker" technology at most US refineries this means more of the crude oil can be used to make gasoline and/or kerosene motor fuels.

Algae biodiesel

Algae farming actually has the potential of replacing all diesel and gasoline usage in the US using only a tiny fraction of the land area available. There are several cost/benefit analyses of this on the 'net, such as this one [americanen...ndence.com]. Estimates of algae-biodiesel yield range from 10,000 to 20,000 US gal/acre/year. Soy-diesel has a lower yield, but has some other economically beneficial by-products. Biodiesel is the most promising energy technology I have seen to date. Compare biodiesel to ethanol -- the producers of ethanol find it more economical to burn fossil fuels in ethanol production than the ethanol -- DOH! With the current price of dinofuel around $3/gal, biodiesel is also suddenly cost-competitive, and for about $3000, you can buy a home biodiesel production facility [journeytoforever.org] that can manufacture 40 gallons/week at a cost of about 50 cents per gallon plus whatever you have to pay for the oil, and about 2 hours/week in ongoing labor.

Re:Hmmmmmmmmmn,

As Australia consumes 50 billion [cia.gov] litres of oil yearly, and this plant produces 1 million litres of oil yearly, I'd say you're going to need a lot of waterways clogged with algae!

On a side note - I believe the Australian waterways are clogged with blue-green algaes? [sfwmd.gov] (The same neon-blue blooms you see in many US waterways). It's a big problem - but I'm not sure blue green algaes are suitable for this method of biodiesel production.

Nothing new

You can produce bio-diesel from a vast diversity of lifeforms as long as they contain lipids. The real question is to know if a source can be economically viable.

Don't tell me

You can produce bio-diesel from a vast diversity of lifeforms as long as they contain lipids

Humans contain lipids.

Solving the Obesity and Energy Crises

You can produce bio-diesel from a vast diversity of lifeforms as long as they contain lipids

Humans contain lipids.

So they'll start putting liposuction centers next to a biodiesel refinery?

This could solve the obesity crisis and energy crisis at the same time! Instead of driving around on your fat ass, you'll be driving around on your ass fat! So how much of this untapped resource is there? Let's see:

• How many obese people are there in America?
• What is the average weight of extra fat that people have?
• Multipy the two numbers together we get the number of pounds of fat.
• How many pounds of fat can we safely extract via liposuction per person per year?
• Then we get the number of convertable pounds of fat per year.
• How many pounds of fat does it take to produce one gallon of biodiesel?
• Multiply that gallons per pound with the number of pounds available and we get the number of gallons of lipodiesel per year.

Should Middle East cut off the tap, it will become the patriotic duty of every overweight person to donate their fat for biodiesel production. We'll no longer have an obesity crisis. We'll have a Strategic Lipid Reserve.

Re:Nothing new

Then fill up the tank with premium, because I want to associate with only quality people.

Re:Nothing new

On a serious note, I usually fill my Jetta up with a premium diesel that I have been told is 50 cetane (opposite of octane, and with diesel, the higher, the better - 40 cetane is normal), and is one of the better premium diesels in the country.

(I've been t

Re:Nothing new

Biodiesel that has been properly produced (that means drying it after washing it) does NOT contain water.

It IS hygroscopic (attracts water), but an additive will take care of that - and, so is regular petroleum diesel, for that matter. Using it quickly, or

1 million litres?

1 Million litres may be a decent start, but it sure isn't much. There's a corn-fuled ethanol producing plant in Kansas that produces 26 million gal of ethanol a year, and that hardly makes a dent (src: popular mechanics). (and yeah I know bio-diesel has a higher BTU then corn-based ethanol, but it still wouldn't reach even close to the output of another alt fuel plant).

If we were smart we would pull a brazil and start producing more corn to use as ethanol. They will be oil-independent by next year. Sugar-based ethanol is something like 8 times more efficient then corn-based. Shows what we know right?

Re:1 million litres?

I think you mean switch to sugar cane since it's 8x more efficient than corn. Corn is what we already have, and sugar is what Brazil is using right now.

Re:1 million litres?

There's a corn-fuled ethanol producing plant in Kansas that produces 26 million gal of ethanol a year

That's a small one. I live less than 20 miles from one that is currently making 100 million gallons per year - and it will be doubled in capacity withi

Re:1 million litres?

The thing about this is that it doesn't take up any extra land. We already have sewage outfalls and treatment plants, so stick this algae on top and farm them off. As long as you generate more fuel than you use in the farvesting process, that's free fuel w

Re:1 million litres?

If we were smart we would pull a brazil and start producing more corn to use as ethanol. They will be oil-independent by next year. Sugar-based ethanol is something like 8 times more efficient then corn-based. Shows what we know right?

To "pull a Brazil,

Re:1 million litres?

1 Million litres may be a decent start, but it sure isn't much. There's a corn-fuled ethanol producing plant in Kansas that produces 26 million gal of ethanol a year, and that hardly makes a dent

I'm not sure I see your point. You're saying we'd need to find 26 municipalities with wastewater treatment plants to convert to algae farms, which would be part of the requisite wastewater treatment solution as well as producing fuel, in order to match one plant which requires farmers to go out and actively produce feedstock for at added expense? That's more than just 'decent' in my book. And imagine what your municipality would say if you told them they could offset the costs of fuel and wastewater treatment at the same time - ka-ching!

If we were smart we would pull a brazil and start producing more corn to use as ethanol. They will be oil-independent by next year. Sugar-based ethanol is something like 8 times more efficient then corn-based. Shows what we know right?

Taking advantage of existing feedstock (read: waste) beats growing feedstock for most efficiencies. And if you want to look for more viable biodiesel feedstocks, there's a wide number - rapeseed, mustard, jatropha, and palm oil. See the table at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. Note that algae wins hands down over crops.

Inventor contributes 1st SewageBio-Diesel Car Seat

An inventor, Mr. Simpson from Springfield, has invented a new car seat [google.com]to be used in conjunction with the vehicles that will run on sewage bio-diesel.
Simpson said, "It's just a prototype right now, but it has been my lifelong dream to contribute something truly my own to this bio-movement."

Hooray!

My car already runs LIKE shit, now it can run ON shit as well.

What about thermal depolymerization?

TDP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerizat ion [wikipedia.org] produces light crude, not biodiesel. It'd work just fine on sewage, in addition to pretty much anything else that contains any lipids, plastics, gums, rubbers, etc. Long carbon chains, basically. I keep my eye on the company and technology, and am extremely disapointed that the only commercial plant up and running so far is only pumping out approximately 800,000 gallons per year from waste (turkey offal) that's not actually waste because the US government hasn't outlawed using animal products as animal feed.

The Bright Side of the Bright Side.

Okay, so we all know a million liters of fuel isn't much in the grand scheme of things. Worldwide, many billions of gallons and tons of assorted fossil fuels are consumed, which means that a million gallons a year from one facility is pretty small potatoes when stacked up against the fuel demands of the world.

I think we're forgetting that the fuel need not leave town, though. Locally produced bio-fuels could supply limited geographic areas with at least some quantity of cheap fuel, which at least helps whoever lives there. It doesn't have to travel, meaning it retains much more of its value since less energy and effort has to be spent to move it from point 'A' to point 'B', and since a township produces it, a township reaps the benefits, immediately benefitting the local economy. It's like the farmer's market for gas, yaknow?

I have to wonder if anyone here has ever heard the phrase, "Think global, act local." I also have to wonder if anyone here considers that it's pretty stupid to rely on just one source of fuel. Let me lay it out for you, here - we already have an absolutely massive bio-fuel 'portfolio', detailing dozens of ways that businesses and communities can produce useful quantities of bio-deisel and ehtanol, but using just one or two of them probably isn't going to be enough to take oil out of the picture, especially if only a few people give it a shot. Right now, we need to take what we can get, and the ability to produce fuel in the process of purifying wastewater is something nobody should overlook. If nothing else, the cost of water purification could be offset by fuel sales, potentially reducing utility costs.

A US company already started this around 2000

The following national geographic article describes a company that started this type of thing years ago. They built a plant next to a turkey farm to convert byproducts to oil. My understand is it worked, but was not as efficient as they hoped.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/11/11 25_031125_turkeyoil.html [nationalgeographic.com]

What some people on slashdot should be interesting to know is Bush proposed some tax credits for this company in 2004 to help with R&D. It got shot down by the Democrates who literally made fun of Bush and called them "Turkey Credits".

HEMP for bio-diesel

I still think that HEMP is the way to go.

From 1 acre of hemp you can produce

1300 gal of bio diesel
The equivalent amount of paper as 10 acre's of trees
The equivalent of 5 acres of cotton in cloth.
Hemp Seed flower (For cake, bread, etc)
and
Pulp products that can replace cardboard and many plastic products.

This is from the different parts of the plant. That means that you get ALL of them at the same time. Not just growing corn for fuel and throw away the rest.

Pig Diesel is much better.

Can't beleive this got accepted when my submission yesterday got rejected. here it is Note: 3.5/gal/day of Diesel from 1 Pig!
 
Once it is rejected you can't recall it, that is not good. But here is the link: UI researcher makes crude oil from pig manure [belleville.com]

Re:E85 costs more than regular gas!

E85 != Biodiesel.

E85 is ethanol.
Biodiesel is ... well... biologically produced diesel fuel.

Re:E85 costs more than regular gas!

Only reason E-85 costs more in the US is because we make it with corn instead of sugar cane. Brazil based theirs on cane and produce it for about half what it costs for gasoline.

Re:E85 costs more than regular gas!

Another reason is that gasprices in the US are incredibly low from a european point of view, mostly due to taxes. Biofuel would be less likely te be as heavily taxed over here, making it cheaper at the gas station.

Re:E85 costs more than regular gas!

Biofuel would be less likely te be as heavily taxed over here

Not heavily taxed? Obviously you don't live in Belgium.

Re:E85 costs more than regular gas!

Another is that the crops we produce are net-energy negative. When you use petrolium-based fertalizer, you're putting more stored energy into the crop than you can hope to get out of it, nevermind the energy used in extraction.

Ethanol might be a stop-gap

Re:E85 won't save money

How much money can we save by forgetting that the middle east exists? Even if E85 were no cheaper per mile than gasoline, the savings from not counting on a bunch of psychopaths to support our economy should be impressive.