UK firm develops jet fuel made from human poo | The starting material is generated in excess and available in plenty. It is a win-win for everyone that the waste is repurposed.::undefined
Do you smell that Randy? It’s chemtrails and they’re brewing up a shit storm right over our heads.
RANDY
Is this another one of these “eco-fuels” that take about ten times the energy they store just to produce them, and no one will tell you where that energy will come from?
I mean if you can get it from actually good sources (solar, geothermal) where that type of energy is in excess then use ships powered by it to transfer it around the world is that a huge problem?
Well, I’ve always wondered what would happen after humanity burns through all fossil fuels on the planet, if flight and space flight would be impossible. So at least it seems like it’s possible with renewable resources.
It’s comforting that future generations will still be able to reach for the stars in doo doo rockets.
Together, the research team developed a process to convert human waste into a thick, black liquid that looks like crude oil and behaves like it. Using fractional distillation, the team can then derive the fuel of interest, much like oil refineries do.
Based on the (almost no) data available here, this does seem likely to be a lot of steps and a lot of energy required just to turn the poop into the substitute for crude oil, and then do all the standard further refining of that into jet fuel. I’d be very dubious about the actual real-world value until some magical further data is shared, because this innovation surely won’t help anyone if the fuel it makes is more expensive than regular jet fuel.
I’d be completely unsurprised to learn they were using thermal depolymerization. The process was patented about 30 years ago and can take just about any organic material and turn it into essentially light oil. When there was a plant testing it with turkey carcasses in the US, way back in 2003, it was competitive with oil production costs, provided that turkey guts cost less than $20/ton and oil cost more than $80/barrel.
I have been saying we should use this for waste treatment plants since they first started testing this. The water we get at the end is more pure; drugs, most chemicals, and germs are broken down; and we get a saleable product at the end. Depending on the cost to build and run, we could get a better result for less money.
Now, let’s talk about the efficacy of converting human remains and the price of cemetery plots…
The energy comes from excess generation in renewables for load balancing, that base load thing people mistakenly say they can’t do.
It’s clever and simple, you put a whole load of potential generation in knowing that to meet your essential and desired demand on low generation days you’ll need excess capacity which will over produce on high generation days. You then plug that in to a system which has tanks of feedstock in this case poo and empty storage capacity so that in peek generation periods it can run at maximum, when it’s only a little over the requested load it runs at limited power and if there’s a time with no excess power it turns off for a bit.
That’s why all the carbon capture and processing facilities are focusing on modular parallel design, it’s very easy then to create scalable production tied to excess load.
Of course this is only one of the many possibilities, the nuclear lovers want to build nuclear powered sequestration and processing facilities, Iceland made one using geothermal, the American one is wind and the proposed Saudi one trailer about being solar thermal.
Oh and actually the efficiency is incredibly impressive now, with some of the active catalyst chemistry they’re developing we’re getting into heat pump style efficiency gains and it’ll looking more likely we’ll be able to go below parity in cost per gallon Vs mined hydrocarbons.
I know it feels like people never explain the complex side of things but that’s because journalists are bad at their jobs, there’s whole organisations out there dedicated to this sort of planning and a lot of the stuff they talk about and work towards ia incredibly well thought out and sensible.
POOP FUEL CAN’T MELT STEEL JETS
Another stupid fuel idea. How many #2s do you need to fly from New York to Los Angeles? Probably a shitload…
But seriously, this is just another idiotic Idea. Yes, you can make fuel from a lot of sources, but neither the quantity is there, nor is this in any way efficient or cost-covering.
I once calculated that we would need to cover each and every square centimeter of agricultural area in my country with rapeseed plants without crop rotation to produce the bio-fuel that the jets in my country burn. And that does not even include the energy needed to plant it, harvest it, and process it.
That’s a lot of Canola oil!
Fun thing about calculations is that if you write them down you can pull them out and show it to people who are skeptic about your claims, like I am being right now of your claims.
I actually would if it had not been on the site that should not be named, and which has the most shitty search engine. Maybe I’ll try Google, if my posts are still there.
Your claimed calculation is very vague, I have to say I don’t believe for a second you actually did that and it’s laughable you’re claiming you did
When someone tells me that they’ve noticed a fundamental flaw that all the leading minds in the field have not it does not lead me to think that the field itself is flawed rather the person I’m speaking to’s understanding of it.
Of course we understand that it’s not all going to come from one source but where there are waste products like stalks and leaves left over from food production, poo, algae, and etc it makes sense to work towards using all of those so we can transition away from the extracting oil and gas.
It is not that I had found a “fundamental flaw”. Those eco-fuel things simply don’t scale up to realistic levels, and the people who are behind it know that their small-scale experimental systems will never power the current level of aviation fuel demands.
Yes, human poo has some energy left. But it is way less than the same amount of fuel, I.e. you need several tons of poo to create a ton of fuel.
OK, lets have a look at this poo idea. Human faeces have an energy density of 8kJ/g. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1793018/#:~:text=As the energy content per,measurements of stool wet weight.
Aviation fuel has an energy density of 43.5kJ/g. Source: https://s2.smu.edu/propulsion/Pages/energyex.htm#:~:text=The energy density of aviation,about 820 kg%2Fm3.
So if it was possible to get a lossless conversion of human poo to aviation fuel, you would need more than five tons of poo to create one ton of fuel.
A 747 from NY to LA burns about 60 tons of fuel. Source: https://www.quora.com/How-much-fuel-is-needed-to-fly-a-Boeing-747-from-New-York-City-to-Los-Angeles#:~:text=New York to LA would,be 16%2C716 gallons of fuel.
So you would need over 300 tons of shit to power that flight - if the conversion was lossless. It most likely is way worse.
Now a human produces between 125 and 500g of faeces per day. Source: https://www.healthline.com/health/do-you-lose-weight-when-you-poop#how-much-does-it-weigh
So you would have to collect the days worth of shit of way over half a million people to power this flight. And all this - again - with a lossless conversion. The reality is probably more like a 10% conversion productivity, meaning you would need ten times the poo.
I leave the question if this technology is actually sustainable to the reader.
And yes, my calculation of rapeseed oil based fuel was similarly funded in facts.
Yeah, screw every effort to get us away from dependency on fossil fuels, am I right?
No. I just expose that aviation at the current level simply is not sustainable in any way.
You get a 10% discount if you use the lavatory during the flight
if I eat the fiber heavy in flight meal, will that be knocked up to 15%?
No because the meal is also made of 40% human poo
I’ve always thought about how cool it would be to find a use for cat shit.
Imagine if every time your cats used the litter box, it made you money.
Have you tried grinding it into a powder and mixing it with your coffee?
I don’t drink coffee.
You drink your cat shit straight, like god intended.
That’s why they call me Mr. Mistopoolees.
A civet cat isn’t a true cat, it got the name because it remotely looks like s vast
Don’t go anywhere near the exhaust pipe.
This is a fantastic idea, here in the UK we’ve just been dumping raw sewage in the rivers and poisoning the coast because it’d cut into water companies record profits to treat it (also Brexit chemical shortages or something)- if we can turn the poop into something useful that can sell then the won’t let a drop off that precious filth go to waste.
well shit
shitter will never be full again
Na kilo hoven, kilo cukru…
Will it still pollute the atmosphere?
Yes. But the waste is likely to still produce methane that has a bigger climate warming effect that the equivalent co2 of burned but for a shorter period. The general consensus suggests it’s better to burn methane than release it into the environment.
The better solution is to fly less, or wait till flying truly green. The big issue is the incredible amount of subsidy we allow for airlines. Tax or fuel for aircraft is very low. If we cut these subsidies and starting taxing aircraft fuel at similar rates to cars electric/hydrogen aircraft would come about much sooner.
Also, if its in human poo it’s already in the carbon cycle and so really less of an issue. The problem is bringing up carbon that’s been removed from the cycle (subterranean oil or gas pockets) and putting that back into circulation. Granted it would be better to pull carbon out of the atmosphere (somehow), but at least using poo wouldn’t be adding NEW carbon. That’s my understanding anyway.
Carbon can exist in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, (CH4), or as a lot of bigger organic molecules like ethane. Over years, methane you release will eventually decay into CO2. But until that happens, the methane has 20 times the greenhouse effect that CO2 does. So processes like this can take CO2 from the air and turn it into methane, which is bad.
We need less flying, but if we’re going to have flying, it should use technologies like this which have 1/10th the lifecycle emissions of fossil jet fuel.
As if flying wasnt a shitty enough experience as is.
What happens when the sh!t hits the turboprop?
The environment would be saved if I could turn all the shit I experience at work into fuel.
Even if it works … Human waste is so heavily contaminated by medications I don’t think this is a good idea
Read about thermal depolymerization. Not only will there be no medication, there won’t be anything more complicated than some moderately long carbon chain oils. That system can even break down the prions from mad cow disease, so it’s safer than most methods for getting rid of biological waste.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Thermal depolymerization (TDP) is the process of converting a polymer into a monomer or a mixture of monomers, by predominantly thermal means. It may be catalysed or un-catalysed and is distinct from other forms of depolymerisation which may rely on the use of chemicals or biological action. This process is associated with an increase in entropy. For most polymers thermal depolymerisation is chaotic process, giving a mixture of volatile compounds. Materials may be depolymerised in this way during waste management, with the volatile components produced being burnt as a form of synthetic fuel in a waste-to-energy process. For other polymers thermal depolymerisation is an ordered process giving a single product, or limited range of products, these transformations are usually more valuable and form the basis of some plastic recycling technologies.I think you’re arguing “there’s so much heat it won’t be medication anymore.” I’m unconvinced that, that means it’s less dangerous … consider cases like the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_pit](burn pits).
Cool, you go be unconvinced. That has no bearing on reality. If you can’t tell the difference between open fire burning and closed vessel pyrolisis (or more advanced methods of chemical decomposition), nothing I have time to present will correct that misconception.
