NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Fuel Cells Turns Waste Into Electricity

Waste not, want not...even when it comes to electricity.

Waste treatment plants may soon have a new way to treat wastewater that will also generate electricity. Oregon State University has developed a method using microbial fuel cells that can generate 10 to 50 times more electricity from waste treatment plants than methods that use similar cells. 

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Currently, waste treatment plants use a process called "activated sludge" to speed up the decomposition process of solids in waste water. This uses microbes to break down organic material. During this process, anaerobic organisms (that don't require oxygen) convert organic materials to methane.

It's effective but has environmental drawbacks because methane is a greenhouse gas.

OSU's microbial fuel cell uses microorganisms to break down the particles directly on an anode, which generates electrons and protons. These transfer from the anode to a cathode (terminals where electricity flows in and out) inside of the fuel cell which creates an electric current. 

Engineers on the project say the method was improved by reducing the space between the anode and cathode and using advanced microbes. This made it possible to produce more than two kilowatts per cubic meter of waste.

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So, why is this important? According to a press release from OSU, 3 percent of electrical energy in the United States and other countries is used to treat waste water. Most of that electricity comes from coal, oil or gas.

A fuel cell process could make it so that waste treatment plants can create their own electricity to power their facilities.

If this process is put into place, treatment plants could even sell the excess electricity. Now we can't just focus on the wonders of sewage, this process can also be used for breweries, animal waste, dairy byproducts and water treatment plants.

A full pilot study will be underway soon in the hopes of moving the concept towards commercial use.

via Engadget

Credit: Oregon State University 

 

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Environmental Efforts Power the Olympics

We’re seeing a lot of gold at this year’s Olympics, but behind the scenes, it’s all green. From environmentally responsible energy to recyclable venues, the London 2012 Olympics could be one of the most eco-friendly games yet. Two areas stand out when talking about sustainability and the Olympics, transportation and architecture, and here’s a few ways London is keeping them green:

Transportation

BMW is providing two-hundred zero-emission electric cars comprised of 160 ActiveE First Drive and 40 Mini Cooper Mini Es (right). GE has placed 120 of their DuraStation EV chargers throughout the Olympic Village to keep the cars juiced and ready to go.

An even cuter “mini-er” Mini Cooper (right) is being used to transport athletic gear. According to Edmunds Inside Line, the radio-controlled electric vehicles are small enough to carry equipment like a single discus or two javelins, which can be accessed through a sunroof. Charging up in about 80 minutes, the cars can carry up to 18 pounds and have a range of around 109 yards.

Architecture

All of the structures built for the London 2012 Olympics were done so with environmental sustainability and energy consumption in mind. Both the Velodrome (above), home of indoor cycling, and the Copperbox, venue for handball and badminton, collect rainwater from their sloped roofs for indoor plumbing usage, which cuts water consumption by 40 percent annually. Using a natural ventilation system, outdoor air is used to keep the more than 6,000 visitors to the Velodrome cool -- no A/C needed.

Two buildings in Olympic Park won’t last long after the closing ceremonies -- and that’s ok. The Water Polo Arena (right) and the Basketball arena will be torn down immediately after the Olympics are over. Both structures were built with PVC fabric that’s highly recyclable and will be reused for other construction projects. The wings of the exterior of the Aquatic Center will also be removed and the main structure will be used for other London community events. 

So, whether you’re watching at home or from the stands, remember that not only are these games making athletic history, they are also making environmental history. 

Credits: Edmund Sumner/View/Corbis (top); BMW North America (middle); London 2012 (bottom)

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'Smart Village' Sets Example for Poverty Relief

A model village in Mayalsia is changing the way communities tackle poverty. Rimbunan Kaseh, a rural village sitting on 30 acres of land near Kuala Lumpur, was built to serve as an example of how to address rural poverty issues by promoting environmental sustainability with technology. The project was detailed at this year's Global Science and Innovation Advisory Council meeting in San Jose, Calif. The GSIAC is made up of international leaders from several countries to find ways to build sustainability and a stronger economy for the Asian country.

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The community offers education, training and recreational facilities, as well as 100 affordable post- consumer material built homes, selling from $16,000 to $20,000. A closed-loop agriculture system is a big part of the community, providing food and income for its residents. ‘Closed loop’ means that everything in the community is inter-connected, for example: An aqua-culture system raises fish for a protein-rich food supply, waste from the fishtanks is then used to irrigate plants to grow fresh produce. The produce is grown in hydroponic pots that can detect soil moisture, which makes it easer to water plants accurately without wasting water. All of these processes come together to provide reliable food supply and augment resident’s income by $400 to $650 a month. Sustainability is also supported with the communities solar power capabilities, biomass energy and mini-hydro electricity.

Ribunan Kaseh offers everything typical communities do like schools, playgrounds and places of worship, with a high-tech twist. Educational facilities are equipped with 4G Internet service that supports e-learning and e-health services. Ellis Rubenstein, President and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences, said at the GSIAC meeting, “Integrated smart communities could transform services available to Malaysia's citizenry while creating thousands of jobs, complementing GSIAC's unprecedented alliance to improve education in that country at every level from cradle to career.”

More “smart villages” are planned for the area, with up to 12 sites in the near future. While it’s centralized to Malaysia for now, this example could set a new precedent in creating change for people experiencing poverty all over the world.

Credit: MiGHT

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Blanket Is CO2 Absorber, Fertilizer and Kiln

Hikers in some areas know them well, and so does anyone with intense yard work experience: the slash pile. A new high-tech blanket developed promises to transform these awkward plant scrap mountains into several useful green products.

Since the piles contain stumps and other woody chunks, sawmills and paper mills have little use for them. Hauling the material offsite to be processed into fuel would be cost-prohibitive. Usually the slash piles that are especially common in the Pacific Northwest are either left to rot or subject to controlled burning in order to prevent forest fires. Can you say "excess CO2 emissions?"

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To prevent that, University of Washington chemical engineering professor Daniel Schwartz, along with students that included forestry resources PhD candidate Jenny Knoth, looked for a way to make fuel from slash piles without having to move them. They came up with what they're calling a "pyrolysis blanket" that wraps around the pile, causing the waste to smolder into a charcoal-like substance.

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The blanket is made from a heat-resistant laminate that's also impermeable to air. Adjustable vents in the material allow for the airflow to be controlled depending on the desired effect, according to Mara Grunbaum of Ecomagination.com. When a slash pile is burned under the blanket, the lack of oxygen creates a form of solid carbon known as "biochar."

Knoth, along with fellow students Ken Faires, Derek Churchill, Nate Dorin and John Tovey III, created a startup now known as Carbon Cultures to further develop the blanket. Last year they received a $50,000 National Science Foundation grant for support.

Readers familiar with biochar know the stuff as a potential geoengineering approach because making it prevents CO2 formation. When added to soil, biochar boosts agricultural yields so farmers, landscapers and gardeners love and value it. Biochar can also be burned as a greener alternative to mined coal.

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The Carbon Cultures team says its blanket can process small slash piles into biochar within a day, and they call the low-cost technology easy for forestry crews to use. This summer the students plan to test their blanket on large slash piles and make adjustments to reduce soot and emissions further from the process, Grunbaum reported. Just in time for outdoor grilling season.

Photo: Slash piles like this one at Taylor Mountain in Washington could be transformed into fuel with a new blanket in development. Credit: Monty VanderBilt

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Meet The Fuel of the Future: Bugs

Archaean bacterium Credit: Corbis

In talking to ARPAe chief Arun Majumdar last week, I asked him about the future of transportation fuels.

Even with more hybrids and electric vehicles on the road, the U.S. Energy Information Administration says the American driver will rely on liquid fuels for the next 20 years. Corn-based ethanol needs big subsidies and is of dubious environmental benefit.

So to break the stranglehold of foreign oil, scientists and engineers are developing something called electro-fuels. The alternative fuel comes from running a charge of electricity through a solution containing strange microorganisms that feed on harmful ammonia or hydrogen sulfides. The charge induces to the organisms to convert carbon dioxide into the same kind of fuels we use to run our cars.

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These bugs make the conversion without petroleum, biomass or sunlight –- all in an enclosed cell. The DOE is funding 15 labs across the country to find the best electro-fuel solution, and of course at a reasonable cost. Vice President Biden recently gave a nod to Boulder, Colo.-based OPX Biotechnologies, which claims it will produce its first renewable chemical product, BioAcrylic, at lower cost than petro-acrylic with a 75 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. The company's second product is diesel fuel bio-processed from carbon dioxide and hydrogen, according to its website.

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A team at North Carolina State University is combining enzymes from one microbe that grows at 75 degrees Celsius (167 F) with a second one that feeds off hydrogen. This genetic marriage produces precursors to biofuels like ethanol and butanol.

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Majumdar told me only biofuels capture 1 percent of the energy from sunlight, while these new electro-fuels are approaching 100 percent efficiency.

The DOE has been under the gun with a Congressional and Federal investigation into the failure of solar tech Solyndra, as well as planned budget cuts to the very research program that Majumdar is so ecstatic about. It would be too bad if promising research -- even high-risk research -- gets scuttled by the S.S. Solyndra.

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Poo-fueled Motorcycle Passes on Gas

Travel to a developing country and you may encounter hog toilets: outhouses built over pig pens, where hungry swine anxiously consume what's dropped down the hole and essentially use it as fuel. More or less, a similar idea has recently been digested in Japan, only the toilet sits over a different kind of hog.

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The country's leading toilet maker, Toto, has created Toilet Bike Neo, a talking hybrid toilet-motorcycle that runs entirely on -- you guessed it -- human waste. The turd trike is part of Toto's Green Challenge campaign to reduce half of all bathroom carbon dioxide emissions by the year 2017.

Starting this week from Toto's headquarters in Kitakyushu, the biogas-fueled motorcycle embarked upon its multicity tour of Japan, during which it hopes not only to stir dialogue about conservation, but likely move a few bowels along the way. The tour even includes a pit stop at a butt-shaped boulder in Nakatsu.

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As it motors its way to Tokyo, Toilet Bike Neo will also be wowing spectators with other bells and whistles. Besides talking and playing music, the bike also uses residual light imagery to write messages in the air as it drives by.

No word yet on whether that message is "Light a match."

For updates on Toilet Bike Neo and a chance to brush up on your Japanese, open the lid and check out Toto's blog devoted to the project.

 

[Via Inhabitat]

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Nanotech-Enhanced Fuel Cells to Provide Cleaner Coal

The idea of clean energy may conjure up images of vast fields filled with windmills slowly churning away or an entire cityscape covered with solar panels. But this idyllic vision must cede to a more realistic one where we accept that fossil fuels -- at least for the short term -- will continue to play a major role in energy production.

In this spirit, there has been much research to increase the dismal efficiency and the environmental cleanliness of coal power plants. One major innovation to this end has been the solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC). Instead of just burning lumps of coal to heat water and drive turbines, the fuels cells oxidize the coal in a more controlled way, resulting in a much higher efficiencies and lower emissions.

By the anodes are typically constructed of a material that eventually gets gunked up with carbon buildup, causing the anodes to degrade over time.

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A solution to the problem has been proposed by a team of scientists led by Meilin Liu at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The team has found a way to embed the material with barium oxide nanostructures that prevents the carbon from building up and deactivating the anode. According to Nanowerk, the structures oxidize "the carbon as it forms, keeping the nickel electrode surfaces clean even when carbon-containing fuels are used at low temperatures."

The team hopes that because the solution builds on previous technology, it will be easily integrated into existing systems. Liu has high hopes for the technology and tells Nanowerk "This could ultimately be the cleanest, most efficient and cost-effective way of converting coal into electricity."

Credit: Creativ Studio Heinemann/Westend61/Corbis

 

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Whiskey Biofuel? Only in Scotland

Scientists in Scotland announced this week that they figured out a way to produce biofuel from whiskey. At first, this dram fan was horrified: Why would anyone want to waste good whiskey to make biofuel? But the process turns out to be rather brilliant.

A team of researchers at Edinburgh Napier University's Biofuel Research Center led by the center's director, biology professor Martin Tangney, have spent the last two years experimenting with two byproducts of the whiskey-making process.

They took the byproducts, a liquid from copper stills called "pot ale" and spent grains, wonderfully named "draff," and turned it into a butanol "superfuel." The butanol could then be blended with regular gasoline or diesel, similar to the way small amounts of ethanol are blended now, meaning engines wouldn't need any alterations.

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The scientists used draff and pot ale from the Glenkinchie Distillery in Pencaitland, Scotland, but they're staying mum on exactly how they made the biofuel. I can only imagine there were some heady smells involved.

The potential market for transforming this organic waste into fuel is actually sizable. According to the university, the $6.25 billion whiskey industry produces more than 400 million gallons of pot ale and 187,000 tons of draff every year. So far, the scientists have filed a patent on the biofuel and plan to start a company that will develop it commercially.

I think the appropriate thing to say now is something along the lines of "cheers!" or "bottoms up!" but I'm going to go with "whiskey-biofuel!" Neat.

Photo: A whiskey library. Credit: Ethan Prater.

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Churning Butter into Biodiesel

In what the butter-loving among us might call a scandalous waste, scientists have figured out a way to turn this creamy milk product into biodiesel fuel.

Although butter failed final quality tests for a totally perfect biodiesel fuel, the scientists say that it's possible to mix their purified butter with other vegetable or animal fats to make a workable fuel.

Their paper is published online in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry.

Around the world, interest in finding alternative fuel sources has skyrocketed, spurred by the recent Gulf oil spill disaster.

But is butter really a viable alternative?

According to the scientists, who are working for the United States Department of Agriculture, our country would be wise to explore every option.

The United States produces about one billion pounds of butter annually, the USDA reports.

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In 2007, the United States committed to producing at least 35 billion gallons of biofuel by 2022 when the Energy Independence and Security Act was signed into law. And although the National Biodiesel Board estimated that the United States produced about 700 million gallons of the fuel in 2008, the country still lags behind the European Union, who produced more than 700 million metric tons of the stuff in the same year.

The facts have triggered concerns about America's ability to meet the 2022 goal. A conventional source for biodiesel is refined edible oils. Most of that has come from ethanol, the USDA said in a press release.

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But because that cost is relatively high and the supply for biodiesel raw materials is relatively low, the resulting fuel is expensive. That's why we should be looking at every alternative, the scientists say, such as animal fats, inedible vegetable fats and even algae.

"It is pertinent to consider any material rich in acylglycerols as a potential biodiesel feedstock," their paper states.

Image courtesy of Flickr/Robert S. Donovan.

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Bill Nye the Science Guy Visits the Friday News Feedbag

Bill Nye... yes... THE Bill Nye the Science Guy is on this week's show, talking about everything from the Large Hadron Collider to his "green-off" with Planet Green's Ed Begley, Jr. Listen to him on this week's Friday News Feedbag!! (Yes, I'm excited.)

If this is your first exposure to the Friday News Feedbag... we're glad to have you in the club. Welcome to Feedbag Nation, which stems from our weekly science news podcast that you can subscribe to here on iTunes and chat with fellow Feedbaggers on Facebook.

Once you listen to the show, please vote below for your favorite story.