Wastewater Into Energy 54
fenimor writes "A lot of electric energy could be produced from a city's wastewater, researchers at University of Toronto have discovered. The research revealed that the wastewater contained enough organic material to potentially produce 113 megawatts of electricity - 5 times more than required to operate wastewater treatment plants."
Pretty old news (Score:5, Informative)
Now some places also dewater the sludge and burn it to generate energy. Quite a bit more messy and polluting than just using the methane.
All this technology has been around for about 20 years. It's just complicated and sometimes polluting. There's almost always regulatory issues about who can sell power to who, who can burn what where and so on.
At least it wasn't a repeat (Score:3, Informative)
I don't see any reason why dewatered sludge couldn't be fed through an anything-into-oil plant [changingworldtech.com] and converted to energy more cleanly than by incineration.
Re:sad truth (Score:3, Informative)
Problems with the Process (Score:3, Informative)