Power to the Poop
Posted on: Sep 18, 2008
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Solar power. Wind power. Poop power? Now that’s what we call creative thinking.
As policy wonks and technologists try to figure out the future of clean energy, a few intrepid souls from Europe to Texas to India are giving waste a chance.
The Netherlands just opened the largest-ever factory to convert chicken poop into power for 90,000 homes. The plant will take about 440,000 tons of chicken droppings (about a third of what the country produces every year) and turn it into 270 million KWh of electricity. The cool thing about the project is that it solves a bunch of problems at once: While on the one hand producing a source of renewable energy, it also solves the problem of what to do with the manure, which previously was expensive to dispose of. And it also helps control the amount of greenhouse gases escaping from decomposing manure.
The Dutch aren’t the only ones giving manure-to-energy schemes a shot. China just opened its first chicken manure biogas plant. And in the US, a similar program is underway in Georgia. Meanwhile, various companies and public utilities are looking into how to use methane from cow manure. And some clever college students in Washington state even developed a car that runs entirely on gas from cow poop.
The city of San Antonio, TX, may have taken the most daring step yet when it announced recently it will be the first city in the U.S. to harvest methane from human waste and sell it to a private company, which will then convert the waste into natural gas and sell that to local energy companies. Meanwhile, an Indian company is developing a personal poop converter. The “digester,” as it’s called, can turn the waste produced by a four-person family into enough energy to cook its meals.
Now how about that for Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle?
By E.B. Boyd
