So are you still undecided? What do you think about HTC and poop power? Is it number 1 or still number 2? The first 1,000 people to use the link or my undecidedwithmattferrell will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare: skl.sh/undecidedwithmattferrell04221 If you liked this, check out Solar Panels Plus Farming? Agrivoltaics Explained ua-cam.com/video/lgZBlD-TCFE/v-deo.html
Better than wasting poop, but HTC as fertelizer is the best, bc it is then a sustainable circle, and means less mining to make fertilizer, which is unsustainable. Imagine if the food we grew was in a sustainable circle?
Re poop power this process sounds a lot like thermal depolymerization which function similarly by breaking down organ and inorganic polymers into simpler compounds using high temp steam and pressure. Is there a difference in these two processes? Thanks and regards DaveB
I work in wastewater. We use fluidize bed incinerators to burn sludge. The steam produced spins a turbine and ash is used in concrete. The industry has a lot of potential and there is a big push to net-zero plants 😁
What you do not realise is that natural gas we are all using is just methane (from decomposition of plants and we basicaly poo) we are wasting and paying for it a huge resource. Get the gas then use what remains as fuel win win.
I don't know if you realize how big of an impact you're making Matt, you're giving these revolutionary green technologies a voice and exposure. So thank you for doing the research and sharing all your information. Alot of people probably wouldn't ever hear of these without you.
This would also be a great way of managing pig waste, which currently is collected in huge ponds like the ones in NC that flooded in a hurricane a couple of years ago, contaminating everything around for miles.
I read some years ago about a pig farmer that put the pigs poop in a tight container and piped the methane from it into his home for heat and cooking. He said it doesn't smell bad when it burns. But that releases CO2 I think. Still seemed like a pretty good idea.
In US without regulation it is just cheaper to build waste ponds. When they break or flood they just apologize and maybe get a small fine. Waste ponds for animal stock and coal plants need to be outlawed.
@@danielhanawalt4998 yeah this is what im looking to do when i get my pig farm going. methane production and using the waste liquids to fertilize pig feed crops and a lagoon to grow plant/algea to feed fish. saw it on an old youtube video about pig farming in switzerland i think
Here in Vienna, Austria we also have an impressive sewage treatment plant. There they - first use huge heat pumps to utilize the thermal energy of the waste water and send it to the district heating network - treat the sewage - use the sewage sludge to produce biogas - use the biogas to produce electricity and heat (which, again, goes to the district heating network) - the remaining solids go to a power station where they, again, produce electricity and heat, which, again, ..... This is so cool and makes me feel a little better in these times.
Yes. You could expand the chain even more. It is likely that the process just reached its degree of economic viability. For instance, at step 2, you could add a biodigester with anaerobic bacteria to produce methane AND heat for your city. I see that as your step 3, but you could bump it back with better filters and a little more power. You will also see that with sufficient gas and steam, you can do hydrogen production at a very low cost. If you separate your slurry after your step 3, you can send some off for fertilizers and keep some solids to be desiccated and then incinerated. There are many "feedstocks" produced by humans and with food production that can be used efficiently.
actually the energy to dry the final sewerage mass to something that can be burned pretty much wipes out any actual return, but such an integrated system does minimize use of carbon based fuel to treat sewerage. this technique improves on that somewhat and further refined might generate more energy than it uses. given it's never gotten big gov't support in US, or anywhere, like solar, wind, bio diesel from oil sees, and ethanol from corn and sugar, we will probably never know how good the system is.
@@russell7489 The solids of the wastewater neds to be separated in a centrifuge. After gas is extrakted, the end product is like soil. But here in Denmark it is too “dirty” do use as fertiliser.
I work in the wastewater treatment industry, first as a plant operator and now as an engineer, and I have never heard of this. I knew that coal is made by heat and pressure (that, to my knowledge, has never actually been observed in nature, only theorized) but I'd never heard where that info came from or how practical it could be IRL. I will ask around the office what people think about this.
Can you imagine... all the waste water treatment plants in your country suddenly is making 150 percent of the energy needed to run itself? I have to think the cost of power would take a dip.
Interested to see how this turns out at your office. Were you able to get anyone to look into it? I'm a historian database admin for a major electric utility. I know red tape. Looking forward to hearing back.
I lived in a tiny house for a short while and during that time we decided to compost our waste. It was gross for the first day or two, but then you learn how to deal with it so it’s basically a bucket of dirt. It amazed me how quickly it composted. After only 3 - 4 months, the compost pile had nothing that looked like toilet paper or waste, and smelled like dirt. After that experience, it frustrates me beyond words that we use CLEAN water to dispose of such a valuable, albeit dirty, resource. If not for energy, we could just compost it all. That would save us some money at the very least.
Human waste is not like animal waste. There are many nasty pathogens that have to be killed. Did you see in the video where it said you can only use human waste to grow animal food? That is why. When there are vegetable recalls, it is due to human waste reaching the farm.
This is the only episode of Undecided that I've seen that didn't end with Matt saying "not so fast..." And listing all of the cons of the cool technology he just presented. This one was just like - "There are no disadvantages, let's make poop into coal!" I guess you could say that this episode was pretty much... Decided.
I mean, one disadvantage I thought about was the CO2 from burning the coal or bio fuels but I guess it's probably less than the methane and CO2 released by not doing this type of process
@@walkinmn I'd have to imagine that it'd be somewhat neutral in that respect. Burning that coal would introduce CO2 into the air, but it's CO2 that had already been pulled _out_ of the air in some way, rather than digging up new coal from existing mines. Not a perfect balance, but certainly better than mining new, something like that.
Very enlightening. As a retired engineer, I always found, in 90%+ of the cases, the people issues were greater than the technical issues and it sure seems Government, where people are combined with power, may be the REAL greatest threat to the planet. Government sure seems to be a net negative in this case.
Might it be an idea to gather up all the politicians on a planet.. stick them in a large well insulated room, surround it with heat exchangers and point dummy video cameras at them with the red "live" light on? .. I have a feeling they could provide us with more energy than we could forseeably use..
As an engineer just starting his career i already agree with you. Governments have no idea what they are doing. Only government employees that have engineering experience like the ASTM and ASCE are likely to listen. But even then we have to test everything properly to avoid disasters.
@@garybrown2039 And let’s face it , the longer it takes and more people involved in these regulatory and government agencies, the longer they are employed and some are enriched . As long as all human life depends on the love of money or even a monetary system to stimulate people needing to work instead of treating and caring about all others as brothers and sisters and all of us caring about our planet , we are domed .
Well finally we found a source of energy we are capable of self producing and that will never see an end...and in the end, the mankind crave for energy would find its solution in our own main asset. Jokes aside, it was a very informative video, nicely done!
When i was a kid, i lived in a small town, like a mining town with 5.000 other humans. The mining company kept the town running, the lights, the sewage, etc. The poop was used to generate methane gas, i still remember the big containers and the industrial look of the installation
Can I raise a small issue that adds to your point. I understand that the sewage has a significant amount of phosphorous contaminant and this treatment can recover this for use. Now this substance is going to be in short supply in the future especially for fertilisers so this is another part
I had the same concern. Phosphorus is going to be one of the biggest supply constraint issues of the future. There's just not that much of it on the planet. We must recover it, not turn it into concrete!
I agree, the world has a soil nutrient problem that will become bigger over the coming decades. Sewage seems to be an underrated source of phosphorus among other nutrients. I think anaerobic digestion used to create pasteurised bio-solids as a fertiliser and also natural gas for grid balancing is a better solution. Probably better economically too as soil enhancers will likely soon out rank a new type of coal product.
True. I was just watching Peak Prosperity Channel's video about coming possible famine this next winter the other day, and how NPK fertilizer is becoming expensive.
@@Iquey Polish scientists - if I am not mistaken, from the Polish Academy of Sciences - have developed a natural fertilization method and a highly efficient method for industrial applications. The research confirmed the surprisingly high effectiveness. But the fertilizer lobby is a company worth billions. The method was used for the reclamation of post-industrial areas and in agriculture. The method is based on bacterial vaccines introduced into the soil. I am not a specialist and I write from memory the content of the radio interview from 2019.
Hi Matt, great video. I've worked for a few years in Environmental Engineering (drinking and wastewater treatment). It doesn't really surprise me that this is having so much trouble making headway. In my region (Northern CA), many of the WWTPs are up for total replacement and the smaller ones tend to be from communities with small budgets that often don't get very much funding. Government spending will usually only cover 80% of replacement costs unless the average median income of the area is much less than the state's average. Even turning wastewater into fertilizer is extremely expensive and a city has to have a really big budget to consider it. This is a great idea, but unless the state and federal governments are convinced of the usefulness of this idea and the money that can be saved, this unfortunately will not make much headway. The only loophole I see is if a large city (like Sacramento, SF, or LA) gets wind of this idea and decides to implement it and is successful.
This is the first I've heard of HTC, but I am pretty familiar with anaerobic digestion, which seems to provide most of the same benefits - but perhaps isn't as costly? When I last looked into it, the amortization of the investment in AD was something like 10-15 years (don't quote me on that). On a very small scale, this is what is used in rural areas of developing countries with very basic technology (i.e., essentially two drums, and a tube leading to a cooking stove where the gas can be burned off). It's absurd to me that this isn't common practice in the US... such a missed opportunity.
@@ocaeocae I know it's used for septic tanks in China. I didn't know it was used so commonly in rural areas of developing countries, but it doesn't surprise me. The issue with using only the methane produced by your own sewage is that while it may be a small change in design, it is also an extremely small benefit on an individual scale. It takes the sewage of 2-3 people to make a cup of coffee from the methane.
The thing about HTC (and other carbonization techniques) is that you don't need to use biohazardeous waste, which are difficult to implement because of health concerns. There are a lot of solid waste materials out there that could be used as an intermediary, before you get the license to incorporate hazardeous materials in the process
Very true. Immediately I thought of restaurant waste. It is almost entirely organic based - even the cooking oils, plastic wrappers, and paper products.
plastics. Until we have a realiable and scalable technology for recycling these (we don't) it would be nice to render them harmless while recovering some of the energy used to produce them.
lots of solid wastes already have secondary uses. for example, waste from breweries is sent out as animal feed. Human waste is compelling because it turns a liability into an asset.
I remember writing a project in middle school about this and Everyone laughed, I talked about utilizing and capturing gases at trash dumps, cow farms, chicken farms, pig farms, now look at this. My middle school project is actually not a joke. Lol 👍 nature always finds ways to put things to use, so the better we do too the better we can function
@@nox5555 It buried now, an most of that gas is allowed to vent into the atmosphere, that could be captured and burnt instead. A lot of it could also be recycle.
@@nox5555 hydrogen generates value. its energy storage (or a source) and can be sold. burning cannot, ignoring its effect on air quality and CO2 levels.
35 years ago I worked at the Christchurch drainage board in New Zealand. They were already converting sewage into methane and using the gas to run all our vehicles - and a small a power station running the sewage treatment station.
Hey Matt, you should check out the biogas toilet system. I was looking into it for my tiny house and it goes right along with this video series. Human waste is pumped from the toilet to a thick black bag with weights on it. Methane production builds against the pressure of the weights and there is a low-pressure gas line that feeds to a burner system in the kitchen where you can cook your food from farts. On the backside of the bag, there is a poop chute for adding kitchen scraps and such, as well as a spigot for collecting the nutrient-rich poop juice for feeding plants. It's a win-win for people who want to start small, and not have to dig a septic tank.
This makes me happy, the insanely slow bureaucracy does not. I really hope they get to implement this tech into tons more waste treatment plants. thanks for always dropping HQ content!
I work as an automotive mechanic, but I have always had an interest in engineering and more recently alternative forms of energy, a method which can handle biowaste and convert it back into useful materials is huge. I live fairly close to Phoenixville and I would now like to take a trip to see this first hand. This looks very promising as long as lobbying doesn't have the chance to shut it down
We have enough technology to save the planet. This is just another way it can be done. Instead of dumping waste in rivers, we need to take a lead from Germany and promote this technology.
@@thegreataynrand7210 Even if you don't care about the environment, it is still better economically which means less government spendings in that part which saves tax payers money for other things so it just need the starting investment for a win win situation.
@@thegreataynrand7210 Mass extinction, loss of biodiversity, loss of a majority of our native forests and rainforests, polluted rivers and oceans, microplastics showing up everywhere, freshwater aquifers being depleted, overfishing... Yeah the planet is totally fine.
I was surprised about all the ways that we already use human waste! Wasn’t aware of them. I’m all for something like this getting implemented. After all, people will always be pooping so it doesn’t feel like the tech will ever become obsolete. I would like to see what the emissions of the different uses for our waste could be just to ensure that we choose the cleanest application possible.
Ecotricity's Gas from Grass is truly the best way to produce Gas. it's Gas from Grass, nearly entirely clean, nearly perpetual energy. Perfect for cooler countries with enough spare grassland. Reduce beef farming in such countries, more grass = national security through energy security, reduce trade deficits, creates jobs, and keeps money in the national economy. Oh and helps save humanity from total disaster!
@@michaelchildish Michael, I personally am a bit skeptical about BIO fuels. This video on poop to fuel is the only option I have seen that seems scalable, is potentially less harmful to the environment and addresses not only the problem of what to do with poop but also where to get fuel. It's unfortunate that we need to burn the product in order to get the energy out of it because that will likely just perpetuate the problems we are currently creating by burning fossil fuels. I checked out a report on ecotricity's grass to gas and noted the following "Harvest naturally occurring grasses from land previously used for grazing livestock and lower quality arable farmland, creating new wildflower meadows in the process, so increasing biodiversity and providing environmental benefits at the same time." So first off they are evicting a food source in order to make energy. That sounds a lot like the highly, highly, subsidized ethanol industry in North America which has displaced significant food growing lands for more profitable fuel agriculture. And while the second part re increasing biodiversity sounds good I am sure that the plants, animal, insects etc that inhabit those new meadows are not overly appreciative of the machines that show up on a semi regular basis to harvest their temporary homes. There is no easy answer but I do think this Poop to gas option is the most promising BIO fuel solution I have ever seen. Finding a way to get energy out of the fuel without having to burn it (or burning without any unpleasant additional outputs - without having to use the majority of the energy to clean up the outputs!) would make this a truly world changing solution.
Turning poop to energy is not a new concept. I was on a tour of a sewage treatment plant in the early 1960's where they had a digester that took the Methane generated by the digesting poop and used it to power the plant. There are already electric generators powered by digesting animal poop supplying power to the grid as well as powering the farms where the poop originated.
I'm from Brazil. We see this in pig farms since 1960's too. They contain the waste, collect the gas and use it in an engine or turbine to generate electricity. Some farms can be self sustainable this way. But now we had a project going on, selected some medium sized cities and we're gonna test the same principle using human waste. It'll be used to provide electricity to the grid, but they'll test the economic viability to produce green hydrogen for future public transportation.
@@rafaelrp07 Do you have text interpretation problems? He is is not talking about generating biogas from waste or other organic materials, but about HTC( HYDROTHERMAL CARBONIZATION) something INFINITELY MORE EFFICIENT.
@@albinnordlander2293 wrong about the smelly part, first it's captured in a sealed dome, then purified thru activated coals and membranes. The result, CH4 is odorless, in fact we even have to inject THT into for user security. That's my day job.
@@michaela7759 I'd like to disagree, HTC requires massive amounts of heat. Biogas on the other hand can produce local heat and electricity, with about 95% left to be purified and injected into the grid. That's for a regular European farm size (very small in comparaison to American farms).
What surprised me is when he said he took a t shirt and it carbonized. We have so much clothing waste we could take that from the landfills as well. This tech is pretty crazy.
You'd be surprised what will turn into charcoal, another UA-camr (Cody's Lab) has been making a lot of charcoal and has a fun series called "will it charcoal" where he puts different items through the retort. If it's carbon based it will probably turn right to char
there is already a recycling process invented recently that turns clothing into tough materials like floor tiles (plus the old process of using it in paper for paper money)
Maybe we can hide the poop in our old clothes and the regulators won't notice? But seriously...what can be mixed in to enhance the process and improve the rationale and economics to get us off the collective pot!
If pretty much everything can be carbonized, it would save sooooooo much landfill and potentially could even clear out current landfills. I'd be willing to have a new 'carbonize' can on my curb.
Thank you for presenting this information with depth of detail while also keeping it comprehensible for non-scientists. I hope the technology keeps moving forward. Turning an endless supply of crap into meaningful solutions to other needs is a win win. I’ve shared this video with my daughter who is earning her bachelors degree in mechanical engineering and has a work study job in the biomass lab. She wants to use her engineering skills in humanitarian work, so I’m sure we’ll have some lively discussions over this. I’ve shared this with other friends & relatives too, who might find it interesting & encouraging from a layman’s perspective like me. Thank you again for covering the topic so well.
I live in Birmingham UK, we have sewage treatment works that is self sufficient, it runs on methane extracted from the poo and the solids are turned into building blocks, the plant has been in operation since the 1960s, it is now exporting gas to the national grid
That's such a good idea, we have alot of it with a constant flow. Why not use it for some good reason! I'm working on a research project in Germany turning number 2 into bioplastics. I think these technologies will put number 2 in place number 1. Thanks for the informative video as always
@@Johnsmith-zi9pu they gonna use it for one way plastics, as its almost made out of the stored sugary content of the bacteria. One way Plastics, aka plastic utensils and grocery bags xD
how about "turning human stupidity into renewal energy"....? we also have a lots of it...and also with constant flow.... may also be 'farmed" if the need arises....
I am willing to bet the biofuel coming from countries with spicier food will have higher octane. Thanks for the video. Your channel is absolutely inspiring Matt!
I've just finished installing biogas digesters at waste water plants here in the UK. All the older schools with oil heating in rural areas are being replaced with methane heating systems. I'm sure the kids will love the idea of schools heated by farts.
where are they based exactly? and what is the scale? what do you think the main hurdle is for getting such systems mainstream? - edit - sorry for the quickfire questions but I'm trying to get local authorities in rural Western Australia to invest is similar biogas systems. very difficult change peoples thinking about waste. they seem almost happy to just spend tax money on storing it, transporting it, burying it, rather than consider any way to turn it into a valuable product.
is there any danger for storage of the gas? or problem when the tank is full? how long and what's the minimum and maximum of waste does it take to create gas and how much will it produce?
@@Snugggg Southern Waters bases in East & West Sussex. There aim is to generated over 74 GWh from CHP plants and 3 GWh from solar photovoltaics for there own use. Spare gas capacity will be sold to local schools. All the issues were resolved at the design and planning stage. UK government investing in replacement resources for natural gas production. The stored gas industry's regulated and with 150 years of experience. I cant think of one accident. They hope to get the first schools up and running by September 2022.
This is the kind of innovation we need, whether we want to talk about it or not. If we want to become carbon neutral we need more than just eliminating fossil fuels, we need ways to produce energy that doesn't technically cost any extra carbon. As disgusting as the thought might be it actually seems like a great way to do just that.
Totally agree! The thing that sparked my curiosity the most was the 'will it carbonize?' question. It makes me think this could be even more useful for other issues besides bio-waste disposal. Our planet has huge garbage/trash problems and this is the first time I've truly felt like we will have workable and profitable solutions.
I work in the industry. We have a treatment plant that burns the methane that is released from the waste solids digesters. The methane is collected and goes through a super cooling system that drops the water vapor out of it and then we burn it through basically diesel electric generators that can run it. About half of the treatment plants systems can be powered when those generators are online. The local military base also uses our effluent line for heating and cooling. Its used in the same manner as geothermal. We are now also producing class A solids that can be used in fertilization for crops for human consumption. The waste is collected and put into giant vacuum chambers. A vacuum is pulled in the chamber then super high pressure steam is injected into the chamber. That drastic change in pressure ruptures the cell walls on any living organisms and It kills absolutely everything in the waste solids.
If while getting rid of something negative you produce something really positive, I think this is an idea that has got to be implemented as soon as possible. Sounds almost too good to be true!
Yeah right, keep in mind that everyone that makes money from the old system will impede the new process to preserve their old process income. When Henry Ford mass produced the model T, the horse poop picker upers, with their shovels and carts started burning down cars. As we advanced in technology that challenge from the old process people has become exponentially more difficult to overcome. Keep in mind we had a civil war because way too many people earned money from slavery
@@silentvoiceinthedark5665 Wish everybody understood that the time to act is now. (actually long ago, but...) Things must change. Thanks for your great reply
If something sounds almost too good to be true it's time to look very very carefully at all of its ramifications prior to its implementation at scale. Is this carbon sequestration and a carbon sink and an elegant solution? . . . . . AS YET UNDECIDED The devil is in the details. This proposed solution requires revisitation and much further scrutiny.
I saw this idea a few weeks ago and started experimenting with cow dung.. all I can say is it's crazy that it's taking so long for solutions like these to become more standardised. It could be a massive help to many countries that don't have infrastructure.
On the contrary, it's usually because private industry doesn't see any profit motive in renewables, so it's time to lobby, lobby, and lobby to make sure new stuff gets snuffed out.
As a wastewater operator myself, I am very interested to see how this develops, the three main concerns that jump to my mind are. 1 Scalability 2 Sustainability 3 Cost effective/ROI Looks awesome in principal. I work at an activated sludge plant (basically natural decay process on steroids). for years we were able to spread our biosolids (which were VERY stable, they literally look like dirt), on our hayfields. It was great, low cost, increased crop yields, very convenient, very safe. then some dope on the local assembly (who knows NOTHING about waste treatment) read some California paper on poor biosolids agricultural applications and convinced our local government to cancel all the spreading permits, So now we have to truck those biosolids 40 miles twice a week to the local landfill, where they buried at a premium hazardous waste charge (at taxpayer expense remember), right along with the domestic trash disposal.
1. Each HTC Train will process between 15,000 and 20,000 wet tons of biosolids per year depending on solids % and flow rate (eq. to the population of 100,000 people.) multiple trains can be set up to run in parallel for scalability. excess capacity can be filled with other wet organic waste sources i.e. food waste, manure, green waste earning additional revenue. 2. HTC reduces GHG emission by over 85% compared to waste activated sludge and land application processes. HTC reduces biosolids volume by 75%, so even if continuing to land apply there would be significant savings.. 3. HTC has a levelized cost of transformation (LCOT) of $32/wet ton. Your ROI would depend on the savings of current disposal cost in excess of $32/ton. Most municipalities see a positive ROI in year 4-8 of operation.
This seems extremely promising! If it's turned into coal at least it wont emit methane, but it can also be turned into pretty much anything made out of carbon! We need more technologies like this
Government have a process to insure that everything is wright , if they don’t do that and things go wrong the government will be held accountable the process is a result of something that went wrong and the government is trying to prevent it .
It's a public health situation. You can't give people the permit to play with massive waste treatment facilities, there's a real danger. 3y is a lot but security is important, and it can matter for thousands of people
When it comes to recycling, people don't realize how far they can go. Stuff as simple as your own body hair or fingernails can be reused within the environment. For humans' hair, it mainly helps out plants by granting the plants a supply of magnesium, which basically acts as a form of "stamina" for the plants to complete certain processes of growth. As for your own pet doggies or cats, their hair is rich with nitrogen that can be extremely valuable for plants because it will capture moisture and help the plants maintain their desired "body-temperature." As for fingernails, they essentially act as a "meal" for the microorganisms within the plants, which will take longer to break down rather than hair but is truly really valued to those plants. I can go on and on with how far recycling can be taken, but it's a matter of how much effort people are willing to put out, pulling their own weight.
After being hit by endless amounts of terrible news/predictions for the enviroment on a daily basis, seeing positive news in developments such as these makes me feel a whole lot better than you'd think. thank you, pretty good video.
I live in Maine, the PFAS issue isn’t just a few farms, it’s vast regional areas of farmland. The farmers were once PAID to use the PFAS containing bio waste, and it was marketed as safe, and a great fertilizer - so it was used very widely in areas of the state where it was available.
I've been thinking of this idea for about 2 years now. Water treatment plants become energy providers, you get useful biproducts. And you can even retrofit the water treatment systems to include algae production, absorbing some of the carbon you'd release from burning the energy from HTC, and creating yet another versatile biproduct. I really just hope that this is something regulators start pushing. It's really a no brainer, and the companies would be onboard once you highlight the longterm economic benefits.
I guess this is a way to speed up humanure transformation, and better suited to city-wide processes, but I'm wondering about the quality of the resulting fertilizers compared to the "old ways". Also, as others mentioned, it'd be great if we could use it to decompose plastics as well.
@@drillerdev4624 Humanure compost toilets make excellent fertilizer for fruit and nut trees. You flush it with carbon like sawdust which gives a good mix of carbon and nitrogen for the composting process to get to hot enough to kill most pathogens. It's not a good idea to use on vegetables because of pathogens that might still be in there though.
@@MayankJairaj Each have their uses. I see it as less a excess of humanure and more a severe lack of productive plants that can utilize it safely. Especially where humanure is being created and excreted. Close the nutrient loop by feeding that which feeds us. We are a part of our ecosystem, no matter how much we want to act like we aren't.
I've been working in wastewater in Cincinnati for a few months now, and one of the things that always gets shown off when at one of our WWTPs is that there is a room with a few old generators, which were decommissioned probably a decade ago. They used to run on natural gas produced as a byproduct of breaking down solid sewage waste, which sounds pretty great, but had some downsides. Namely, when you assume that all of your solid waste is carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, then the chemistry works fine, but sadly people poop other stuff sometimes, and that complicates the natural gas production process, and the resulting natural gas is full of a lot of contaminants. When we ran it in the generators, it was really inefficient and would pretty consistently clog the generators with soot. Eventually we stopped using the generators and went to just incinerating the waste, which from an environmental standpoint is less than ideal, but we have been looking into possibly reusing the ash from the incinerator (which is a really cool rust color) in concrete and bricks.
This process is very similar to a device I've built - A microwave pyrolysis reactor. I use it primarily for plastics, but anything can be put in there (including sewage) and it turns it it o gaseous and liquid fuels, and the left over product is completely carbonized, ready for sequestration, fuel, or building materials! I have detailed videos on my channel.
A swimming pool close to me in a somewhat rural area has been using manure from local farms to heat their water. They've been doing that for years. So yeah, I could say this concept should be used more than it is now.
This has been going on for a very long time. 50+ years ago when I was a kid in Auckland, New Zealand, the sewage treatment plant at Mangere ran it's whole operation on the methane that came from the water it was treating and then fed the excess electricity into the national grid ( we were told). Methane from sewage, hydrogen from pee...none of this is new but someone must pick up the ball and run!
Poop into energy might be old news but this video highlights implications of HTC which is a very recent method! Plus methane is 30x worse than co2 so I there’s no comparison sustainably
this is amazing! I wonder if the process could be miniaturized to smaller scales to substitute septic tanks in rural areas that are not connected to larger sewage systems...
I know some dairy farmers that do something similar with their dairy herds. Scoop the manure into a holding container to let it decompose, use the methane generated to power electric generators to run things (with the waste heat from the generators being pumped back into the storage containers). Then take the remaining waste and using it for fertilizer on their (and other) fields.
@@michiganengineer8621 That is standard biogas generation by biodigestor. This first sterilise and destroy chemicals and carbonice the solids and use the extracted liquid in the biodigestor so you get more useful byproducts, eliminate toxins and diseases and probably speed up the digestion. But needs more infraestrure.
My grandfather was a nuclear physicist and used to tell me that cow farts were a huge contributor to methane emissions. He told me this when I was a child and I used to crack up. I went to university and studied environmental studies and wanted to capture methane from wastewater treatment plants and use it as a fuel. I’m glad someone is thinking along these lines
Definitely a main contender. I have always wondered why such an obvious solution was not so obvious. All that methane going to waste. We all want to save the planet but we never seriously consider poo as an energy alternative. Please keep promoting this alternative energy resource.
I knew a survivalist in the 70s who got his power from a sophisticated septic tank that collected the methane. It is pretty amazing what people can do with a little engineering.
Humility has All possibles from the start with * Imagination * …… * Fruition * will only occur when those in “Money - Monopoly “ wake-uP to long term investing the greater for all .
I've seen someone make an entire small scale treatment for grey water using plants and then Tilapia and crawfish. They say they eat the fish, but I don't think I want to eat fish that have gotten fat off the waste from the home. I have a hard enough time trying to not think about delicious crab and catfish being the scavenger eaters they are.
I visited a rural village in Bangladesh and they used their waste to produce energy there. It wasn't very sophisticated but it was able to power some of their basic electricity needs.
10:40 I think this topic could use its own episode. Cement production is a huge source of CO2 (8% globally), offsetting that with a waste product would be incredible
More than co2 the sand mining is killing rivers here in india. Frequent floods and droughts make our lives miserable every year. 1.4 billion poops per day is going waste tbh.
I worked in wastewater. And one thing we talked about was the difficulty in using our resource laden product by the public. It is a PR campaign that needs to be addressed to move forward. I am so excited to see other forward thinking countries grabbing the reigns and surpassing our restricted abilities to to produce useful energy products. Way to go guys!!! And thanks to this company for taking the risk to challenge big energy.
worm poo is used to grow food - as is bird poo and cow poo. people who never had a garden are disconnected from how food and soil work. maybe you need to remind them
@@wynnhorton1208 - we found people weren’t the problem it was the county regulators who outlawed it. Until then local gardeners were coming and getting the dried sludge to use.
@@catherineprater1485 oh. I don't like the idea of using others' poop for *my* edibles. Most Americans use drugs/pharmaceuticals and that gets eliminated to some degree in pee and poo. That cannot be digested fully by bacteria or heat, I think - it is too often toxic.
@@wynnhorton1208 - that is true. The chemicals and especially the pharmaceuticals are an issue in human waste. When I was working in the industry people were given a form to sign stating they wouldn’t be putting it in direct contact with food crops. It could go under trees or non- contact with food. And a strange fact most wastewater workers know is this - tomato’s are a volunteer plant that survive the travel through the processing at plants. They are often found around the sludge beds.
If this speeds up the process of organic material to coal,. Could it speed up the process of decomposing plastic. So instead of taking hundreds or thousands of years it just takes a couple hours using a machine that does something similar?
Hi Matt and friends. A greenie friend of mine said, "we need to get our s--t together on climate change". I never thought she meant it literally. Here in NZ my local city council has been successfully operating a sewage treatment plant generating its own biogas for decades. It's technically less advanced than the one shown in your video, but we're a small country with small resources, but just enough brains to know we cannot afford to invest ten dollars today to get a miserable return of two cents per year. Our city council have more than enough investments like that already. We have a lot of dairy cows however, and as most of NZ could be described as "the Riviera of the South Pacific", our cows frolic about in the sunshine all year, releasing their methane rich farts into the wide blue yonder. The cows are not the "Gary Larson" breed, and voluntarily return to the milking shed at night, not realizing they're being exploited. After watching your most excellent video, it struck me that we could keep them indoors overnight and capture their farts using cleverly designed roof plumbing. Our farmers are absolute geniuses at knocking up corrugated iron sheds, so collecting even 50% of the farts is not an idea to be sniffed at, agricultural emissions make up half NZ's total. It would be cheap and low-tech, which to accountants means "practical". Is this idea a runner, or should it be flushed down the dunny? Cheers, P.R.
Most of the three waters in NZ are heavily polluted with human poop. NZ can stop cows farting by feeding the cows dried seaweed. A seaweed farm in Bluff NZ makes the seaweed product. Wellington. The capital city in NZ has a sewage system that has been badly damaged by tree roots. Wellington harbour is the most polluted place.
I think it’s soooo important that we have informative videos like this!! There is a certain natural squick factor when we consider using human waste for… anything, really. Most people don’t want to think about it, so good ideas go ignored because people think it’s unpleasant to talk about. But it’s true, everybody poops!!
I just thought of something. Why couldn't households and neighborhoods that have septic tanks have a miniature version of one of these plants? Boiler rooms have been permitted so why not big "pressure cookers"? I know that there would be more to it than that. But it would be worth the time, money and monitoring. It could pay for itself.
Assuming 1 pound per person per day, the absolute minimum number of participating households per HTC unit likely is in the 100s. Its a continuous flow system so storage to even out flow is needed.
We were involved in a project in the 1950's. Beckton sewage station in North London used the gas off the lagoon to fuel the gas Turbines which drove generators. The cost per Gas turbine was calculated to be 6d (sixpence) a day The high quality exhaust heat being used to heat the lagoon. This was at the very beginning of Aero derived Gas turbines for industrial use. Nowadays we would want to fire up a local district heating and cooling/chilling scheme. Something that's happening more often thanks to the very low emissions/noise combined with very high reliability and the ability to follow and make up renewable intermittent power, such as wind.
It's amazing definitely not a waste to implement. I enjoy your videos and because I live in Jamaica it's like seeing the future way before anything we have available now
Thank you for the valuable info you provided. I’m phd student doing my research about the pyrolysis and animal manures that’s why i found your video really helpful.
What If we compress this collected waste and without more treatment put this compressed cubes into our filling material needed to form base of buildings like plinth filling or say where we put soft rocks for filling purpose if we dump that garbage I think we might save those soft rocks.......
Also look into “Hydrothermal Liquification” It produces “bio-crude” instead of bio-coal, so at least IMO works better with existing refineries. GRANTED HTC may be better with WWT processes / biosludge! Mainly i know about it’s usage of Wet Algae (no drying needed!) to make a drop in substitute for crude oil.
I thoroughly enjoy your videos. Being presented with the pro’s and con’s of each technology helps to understand it better. Using human waste does seem to have far more pro’s than con’s and seems to have better viability than others you have addressed. This of course will depend on how well it delivers.
huge supporter. the lack of intermittency is the number 1 thing i believe it has going for it. addtionally, we have to deal with waste. it's non negotiable, meaning going a step forward and using waste for decarbonization is fantastic
I would think large scale biodigesters to produce methane, which would then be burned in generators would be an easy tech to implement. Urea is a byproduct of waste also and can replace salt usage on roads...
@@ironboy3245 This tech is already being used in some landfills. If we can make it to space, I am sure we can figure out the "smell" issue. Many industries say they can't do something just because they can't think outside the box.
I do think it's one of the most promising ways to improve efficiency and diminish our footprint, so it's a win-win. Also this is helping (not solving) the baseload problem of the fully renewable energy society. If this scale well and is safe, this is certainly the way to go.
This video runs through my head a lot. I grew up in one of the largest pork producing area of the United States. As the son of my farmer my dad would say, "anyway the wind blows, smells like money." So you can guess a sizable amount of hog poop being accumulating 24/7. I'm always thinking how beneficial this would be to farmer who are always wondering what to do with the poop. This would solve that problem and literally clear the air. The next problem is corn sweat in August.
This is great! I've been thinking about this for years. Our country needs to invest in the research and development of this technology across the USA ... that would truly make us more energy independent while dealing with a huge waste problem. Come on, America, we can do this, we are smart , we are rich.
Mr. Ferrell, I must tell you that I find your humor to be immature and counterproductive, but work here is an invaluable resource for society. For wisdom is good to the wise and societies do not prosper for long if they relish in foolishness. Thank you for doing this video. I have prayed to God for this science to take off and for it to see success. How many times have you imagined your house or your car being powered by your waste? I know I’m not alone in that one. The human race must keep working to use our waste as a renewable resource. Surely so much money can be used in more important places if we do this. I have been amazed how much diluted urine prospers garden plants and I have often wondered if we could devote forests and habitats to the degradation and utilization of our bodily waste, as the plants will convert our sewage into biomass and natural glory. May God bless you, lad. Thank you for what you do
The idea that the high energy consumption of the autoclaving operation can be more than offset through fuel energy production to yield a NET energy source is mind boggling ! I will check out the pros and cons of this at depth for implementation in a project of my own ! Thank you !
I'm from Queensland Australia. Our local cane sugar mills export a massive amount of power during the crush season. All the begasse is burnt to power the mill and excess power sold to the local power grid provider
It would help to have an equation with energy inputs and outputs going into the process, and showing where energy is going and where it can be recovered. Remember, one plot is worth a thousand words, one equation is worth a thousand plots.
I think people genuinely don’t want to do the right thing. I’m from South Africa, we have a lot of underdeveloped rural areas, the engineers still promote pit sanitation. In one of my reports I proposed using human waste to generate electricity. Especially because we are also challenged by loadshedding/power cuts. Will they ever do it? Nope. It’s so frustrating. I love this idea 💯.
It sounds like there are positive aspects to this process but I'm still confused on the Bio-Coal product. Aren't we trying to move away from burning coal because of the Sulfur dioxide and Nitrogen oxides that it releases in the air? Or did I miss some part of the video that explains the absence of these emissions?
As someone who lives near the big coal ash pond spill of a few years ago, I'm also curious about the solid/liquid waste from bio-coal. We've got a lot of lawsuits working their way through the courts concerning radiation exposure from that spill.
This stuff won't contain much sulfur since sulfur isn't a major component of the human (or other critters') diet. Also, I suspect that most of the sulfur in the feedstock will end up in the liquid fraction anyway, although I can't swear to that since I don't know enough about the process. As for the nitrogen oxides, AIUI, those are mostly products of incomplete combustion independent of the fuel source and cars produce a lot more of them than power plants.
I've been doing some reading...I think because it comes from carbon neutral sources (humans!), it doesn't harm the enviroment in the same way as regular coal...,and some industries need something that behaves like coal in order to function.
I'm retired from a large municipal sewage treatment facility. -San Francisco east bay area. The anaerobic digesters at that facility (plaque on wall dated 1952) are mid-20th century (old, in other words) tech. and are still in operation working great. I've forgotten the average daily cubic feet methane produced, but it was logged. About 1/3 of total gas was methane, the other 2/3 gas was mostly CO2 (which could be used for high-lipid algae production). The digester methane, after scrubbing etc., was either tanked for use in generating electricity for onsite use, and for selling back into commercial grid. Total gas production still exceeded the facility's needs and ability to sell back to grid.. So waste gas burners were still used to dispose of excess surplus.
So my opinion, what the future should consider, is matching public anaerobic sewage processes with high-lipid algae production. .My observation was the bigger the process, often the more efficient, and more tolerant/resilient to "upsets." Also noteworthy, the facility where I worked had one of the best (highest rated) water quality labs in the bay area.
We have to imagine a whole country like mine, Brazil,if we did this is all across the sea shore line cities that all waste goes to rivers and sea,polution ALL or most of our sea line. We could use that power for greater purposes.
Bricks were made here in Australia (sometime in the 90's) and sold that contained sewage bi-products, the colours of the bricks were considered better than the manufacturers could otherwise produce, but people did not want "Poo Bricks" I still remember listening to a radio broadcast on this.
This is awesome. I've been looking for ways to reconcile permaculture ideals with modern urban density (a la solarpunk) and this is actually exactly that. Thanks Matt.
Totally onboard with this. Safe, increases energy availability for other uses. Can be used in so many things...because it's CARBON! I get how regulation needs to be somewhat involved, but honestly, it holds up way too many great ideas with plenty of potential. I also think most regulators are simply checking boxes based on what is considered SOP. I think a super regulator that can run things like HTC through a controlled but rapid process to then send those results and hyper green flag these processes at local levels.
We have a problem here in central Idaho where farms fertilizer and farm animals waste or nitrogen is penetrating down to the ground water and ending up in the Snake River causing algae blooms which depletes the oxygen in the water killing the fish . So using this method for the farm animals poop would be a huge plus here for addressing the nitrogen problem.
Yea. It feels like we went through a period where we wanted the world to be sterilized and pristine, but we’re finally getting over that. Now we’re looking at things like waste water and grey water and we’re realizing that we’ve been throwing away something which had tons of potential uses! Stuff like this will be incredibly important in building the closed loop society that we need.
Does it work on plastic? I remember when I was in Maui, driving by the dump was incredible because of all the plastic bags that were everywhere. They were in the trees, and blowing in the wind. This was after the ban too. Since then, I can't help but notice how quickly the plastic bags stack up. Can we put the bags through this process? It works with micro plastics, so is this viable to get rid of some of the plastic waste?
I know Oahu burns trash to produce electricity, I assume Maui does the same. Unfortunately, this relies on plastic shopping bags being disposed of responsibly. That relies on individuals giving a damn.
I'm not sure if this works on plastic, but pyrolysis does. I've built a microwave pyrolysis reactor that carbonizes plastic and produces an energy product of gas, liquid, and solid. You can find these videos on my youtube channel!
There are countless ways to recycle plastics. Unfortunately the first step relies on humans to properly dispose of them and far more people don’t care about our home then those who do. I live in the country in SW MO on 2000 acres. I check my property perimeter fencing once a month to make sure there’s no damaged fencing. This past Sunday I was repairing a section of fence that a tree fell on in remote part of my property. The people who own the land that borders this part of my property have started building a dump site within 100 feet of my property. There is everything from household trash to tires in this dump!!! It’s absolutely disgusting that people do this. I took drone footage and sent it to the EPA but im sure they wont do anything about it.
@@baneverything5580 An end to paper bags? I don't recall that happening. And I'm not advocating for a ban on anything. I'm asking about whether or not this technology could deal with disposing the plastic bags. Even if we reuse the plastic, we still reach an end of life for those plastic products. We still end up with micro plastics in the ocean. Isn't the question of whether this technology could alleviate that issue worth asking?
When living in CR these systems have been used for many years. Its always been an efficient method to not only generate cooking gas but also used as fertilizer for planting. Its strictly used for corralled animal waste and or the waste from the home (bathroom) thus avoiding contaminating the "output" with the forever substances. Any scraps from the kitchen would be composted seperately. Just "shows" how we get charged for a service that we could actually have "for free" ourselves and only have a 1 time expense (the buildout) as opposed to a monthly bill forever which I just found to be ridiculous.
I would love to know about all of that, esp trash. I am volunteering with my county on waste reduction ideas. They have taken it only as far as recycling!
I cant believe that boiling waste (autoclave) is truly energy balanced; I opine there is not enough energy in the waste to be able to boil itself pound for pound.
Well, that’s was a great video! I love learning about alternative renewable energies, wind and solar are great, but the other stuff, like solar thermal, bio mass, geothermal and this are so interesting with different pros and cons and interest side things. I always thought human waste could be used/processed in useful way, but just as fertiliser or a fuel, didn’t realise it could be so useful as a product as well
Brought up just after the war in the UK countryside. No electricity, mains water or communal sewage disposal. Toilets were at the bottom of the garden and 'bucket and chuckit'. Dug into the large garden it fertilised a massive crop yield. We were never short of healthy veg and the waste went to feed the pigs and chicken.
Honestly one of the more exciting and promising sources of renewable energy I've heard of so far. Seems like there are zero downsides once implemented.
So are you still undecided? What do you think about HTC and poop power? Is it number 1 or still number 2? The first 1,000 people to use the link or my undecidedwithmattferrell will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare: skl.sh/undecidedwithmattferrell04221
If you liked this, check out Solar Panels Plus Farming? Agrivoltaics Explained ua-cam.com/video/lgZBlD-TCFE/v-deo.html
I am really happy to see this video.
Good alternative for crematoriums. Where do I sign up. I am happy to update my Will.
Better than wasting poop, but HTC as fertelizer is the best, bc it is then a sustainable circle, and means less mining to make fertilizer, which is unsustainable. Imagine if the food we grew was in a sustainable circle?
I predict China will be unbeatable in Bio Solids Energy production. lol
Re poop power this process sounds a lot like thermal depolymerization which function similarly by breaking down organ and inorganic polymers into simpler compounds using high temp steam and pressure. Is there a difference in these two processes?
Thanks and regards
DaveB
I work in wastewater. We use fluidize bed incinerators to burn sludge. The steam produced spins a turbine and ash is used in concrete. The industry has a lot of potential and there is a big push to net-zero plants 😁
What you do not realise is that natural gas we are all using is just methane (from decomposition of plants and we basicaly poo) we are wasting and paying for it a huge resource. Get the gas then use what remains as fuel win win.
Brilliant 🎉
Brilliant 🎉
Brilliant, could I know the place,? I would really appreciate if you could give more detail
Net-zero is a myth. It is literally impossible.
I don't know if you realize how big of an impact you're making Matt, you're giving these revolutionary green technologies a voice and exposure. So thank you for doing the research and sharing all your information. Alot of people probably wouldn't ever hear of these without you.
Well said for this channel
This would also be a great way of managing pig waste, which currently is collected in huge ponds like the ones in NC that flooded in a hurricane a couple of years ago, contaminating everything around for miles.
In Austria we do that since the 1990‘s.
I read some years ago about a pig farmer that put the pigs poop in a tight container and piped the methane from it into his home for heat and cooking. He said it doesn't smell bad when it burns. But that releases CO2 I think. Still seemed like a pretty good idea.
In US without regulation it is just cheaper to build waste ponds. When they break or flood they just apologize and maybe get a small fine. Waste ponds for animal stock and coal plants need to be outlawed.
@@danielhanawalt4998 yeah this is what im looking to do when i get my pig farm going. methane production and using the waste liquids to fertilize pig feed crops and a lagoon to grow plant/algea to feed fish. saw it on an old youtube video about pig farming in switzerland i think
A better way is get rid of pigs.
Here in Vienna, Austria we also have an impressive sewage treatment plant.
There they
- first use huge heat pumps to utilize the thermal energy of the waste water and send it to the district heating network
- treat the sewage
- use the sewage sludge to produce biogas
- use the biogas to produce electricity and heat (which, again, goes to the district heating network)
- the remaining solids go to a power station where they, again, produce electricity and heat, which, again, .....
This is so cool and makes me feel a little better in these times.
sounds logical, communities in india do this also, if poorer countries can do it, all can do it.
Yes. You could expand the chain even more. It is likely that the process just reached its degree of economic viability. For instance, at step 2, you could add a biodigester with anaerobic bacteria to produce methane AND heat for your city. I see that as your step 3, but you could bump it back with better filters and a little more power. You will also see that with sufficient gas and steam, you can do hydrogen production at a very low cost. If you separate your slurry after your step 3, you can send some off for fertilizers and keep some solids to be desiccated and then incinerated.
There are many "feedstocks" produced by humans and with food production that can be used efficiently.
actually the energy to dry the final sewerage mass to something that can be burned pretty much wipes out any actual return, but such an integrated system does minimize use of carbon based fuel to treat sewerage. this technique improves on that somewhat and further refined might generate more energy than it uses. given it's never gotten big gov't support in US, or anywhere, like solar, wind, bio diesel from oil sees, and ethanol from corn and sugar, we will probably never know how good the system is.
@@russell7489 The plant produces more electricity and heat it needs itself.
@@russell7489 The solids of the wastewater neds to be separated in a centrifuge.
After gas is extrakted, the end product is like soil. But here in Denmark it is too “dirty” do use as fertiliser.
I work in the wastewater treatment industry, first as a plant operator and now as an engineer, and I have never heard of this.
I knew that coal is made by heat and pressure (that, to my knowledge, has never actually been observed in nature, only theorized) but I'd never heard where that info came from or how practical it could be IRL. I will ask around the office what people think about this.
Keep us updated!!
Can you imagine... all the waste water treatment plants in your country suddenly is making 150 percent of the energy needed to run itself? I have to think the cost of power would take a dip.
They've been doing this in Europe for a long time, though mostly on larger sites.
Interested to see how this turns out at your office. Were you able to get anyone to look into it?
I'm a historian database admin for a major electric utility. I know red tape.
Looking forward to hearing back.
I'm subbed to this thread so I get notified when you respond Rocky 👍🏾
I lived in a tiny house for a short while and during that time we decided to compost our waste. It was gross for the first day or two, but then you learn how to deal with it so it’s basically a bucket of dirt. It amazed me how quickly it composted. After only 3 - 4 months, the compost pile had nothing that looked like toilet paper or waste, and smelled like dirt.
After that experience, it frustrates me beyond words that we use CLEAN water to dispose of such a valuable, albeit dirty, resource. If not for energy, we could just compost it all. That would save us some money at the very least.
Human waste is not like animal waste. There are many nasty pathogens that have to be killed. Did you see in the video where it said you can only use human waste to grow animal food? That is why. When there are vegetable recalls, it is due to human waste reaching the farm.
This is the only episode of Undecided that I've seen that didn't end with Matt saying "not so fast..." And listing all of the cons of the cool technology he just presented. This one was just like - "There are no disadvantages, let's make poop into coal!"
I guess you could say that this episode was pretty much... Decided.
I mean, one disadvantage I thought about was the CO2 from burning the coal or bio fuels but I guess it's probably less than the methane and CO2 released by not doing this type of process
@@walkinmn yeah, I'd like to have heard about that too.
@@walkinmn I'd have to imagine that it'd be somewhat neutral in that respect. Burning that coal would introduce CO2 into the air, but it's CO2 that had already been pulled _out_ of the air in some way, rather than digging up new coal from existing mines. Not a perfect balance, but certainly better than mining new, something like that.
@@Cellidor
Your undocumented assertions(idle speculations) have no intellectual rigor.
@@nicholasgardiner9601 Well yeah, that's why it was an idle speculation.
Very enlightening. As a retired engineer, I always found, in 90%+ of the cases, the people issues were greater than the technical issues and it sure seems Government, where people are combined with power, may be the REAL greatest threat to the planet. Government sure seems to be a net negative in this case.
Might it be an idea to gather up all the politicians on a planet.. stick them in a large well insulated room, surround it with heat exchangers and point dummy video cameras at them with the red "live" light on? .. I have a feeling they could provide us with more energy than we could forseeably use..
As an engineer just starting his career i already agree with you.
Governments have no idea what they are doing. Only government employees that have engineering experience like the ASTM and ASCE are likely to listen. But even then we have to test everything properly to avoid disasters.
If anything goes wrong it would be the responsibility of politicians , so they have to be cerfal and follow the proses which can take some time .
Always has been
@@garybrown2039 And let’s face it , the longer it takes and more people involved in these regulatory and government agencies, the longer they are employed and some are enriched .
As long as all human life depends on the love of money or even a monetary system to stimulate people needing to work instead of treating and caring about all others as brothers and sisters and all of us caring about our planet , we are domed .
Well finally we found a source of energy we are capable of self producing and that will never see an end...and in the end, the mankind crave for energy would find its solution in our own main asset. Jokes aside, it was a very informative video, nicely done!
Brown ends for the win
shit just got real
*Your full of crap,,,, so your the solution,,, interesting,,*
@@greasybumpkin1661 Winning comment
When i was a kid, i lived in a small town, like a mining town with 5.000 other humans. The mining company kept the town running, the lights, the sewage, etc. The poop was used to generate methane gas, i still remember the big containers and the industrial look of the installation
Can I raise a small issue that adds to your point.
I understand that the sewage has a significant amount of phosphorous contaminant and this treatment can recover this for use. Now this substance is going to be in short supply in the future especially for fertilisers so this is another part
These guys have apparently found a way to recovery phosphorus from the process. htcycle.ag/en/phosphorus-recovery_18
I had the same concern. Phosphorus is going to be one of the biggest supply constraint issues of the future.
There's just not that much of it on the planet.
We must recover it, not turn it into concrete!
I agree, the world has a soil nutrient problem that will become bigger over the coming decades. Sewage seems to be an underrated source of phosphorus among other nutrients.
I think anaerobic digestion used to create pasteurised bio-solids as a fertiliser and also natural gas for grid balancing is a better solution. Probably better economically too as soil enhancers will likely soon out rank a new type of coal product.
True. I was just watching Peak Prosperity Channel's video about coming possible famine this next winter the other day, and how NPK fertilizer is becoming expensive.
@@Iquey Polish scientists - if I am not mistaken, from the Polish Academy of Sciences - have developed a natural fertilization method and a highly efficient method for industrial applications. The research confirmed the surprisingly high effectiveness. But the fertilizer lobby is a company worth billions. The method was used for the reclamation of post-industrial areas and in agriculture. The method is based on bacterial vaccines introduced into the soil. I am not a specialist and I write from memory the content of the radio interview from 2019.
Hi Matt, great video. I've worked for a few years in Environmental Engineering (drinking and wastewater treatment). It doesn't really surprise me that this is having so much trouble making headway. In my region (Northern CA), many of the WWTPs are up for total replacement and the smaller ones tend to be from communities with small budgets that often don't get very much funding. Government spending will usually only cover 80% of replacement costs unless the average median income of the area is much less than the state's average.
Even turning wastewater into fertilizer is extremely expensive and a city has to have a really big budget to consider it. This is a great idea, but unless the state and federal governments are convinced of the usefulness of this idea and the money that can be saved, this unfortunately will not make much headway. The only loophole I see is if a large city (like Sacramento, SF, or LA) gets wind of this idea and decides to implement it and is successful.
This is the first I've heard of HTC, but I am pretty familiar with anaerobic digestion, which seems to provide most of the same benefits - but perhaps isn't as costly? When I last looked into it, the amortization of the investment in AD was something like 10-15 years (don't quote me on that). On a very small scale, this is what is used in rural areas of developing countries with very basic technology (i.e., essentially two drums, and a tube leading to a cooking stove where the gas can be burned off). It's absurd to me that this isn't common practice in the US... such a missed opportunity.
@@ocaeocae I know it's used for septic tanks in China. I didn't know it was used so commonly in rural areas of developing countries, but it doesn't surprise me. The issue with using only the methane produced by your own sewage is that while it may be a small change in design, it is also an extremely small benefit on an individual scale. It takes the sewage of 2-3 people to make a cup of coffee from the methane.
The thing about HTC (and other carbonization techniques) is that you don't need to use biohazardeous waste, which are difficult to implement because of health concerns.
There are a lot of solid waste materials out there that could be used as an intermediary, before you get the license to incorporate hazardeous materials in the process
Very true. Immediately I thought of restaurant waste. It is almost entirely organic based - even the cooking oils, plastic wrappers, and paper products.
I am thinking of food waste, plant based agricultural waste, organic landfill (plants), etc.
plastics. Until we have a realiable and scalable technology for recycling these (we don't) it would be nice to render them harmless while recovering some of the energy used to produce them.
lots of solid wastes already have secondary uses. for example, waste from breweries is sent out as animal feed. Human waste is compelling because it turns a liability into an asset.
He did say they carbonize anything on Wednesdays for fun
I remember writing a project in middle school about this and Everyone laughed, I talked about utilizing and capturing gases at trash dumps, cow farms, chicken farms, pig farms, now look at this. My middle school project is actually not a joke. Lol 👍 nature always finds ways to put things to use, so the better we do too the better we can function
I just completed a graduate-level research paper (including financial analyses) about converting landfill gas to hydrogen.
@@suunraze just burn the waste instead of using landfills....
@@nox5555 It buried now, an most of that gas is allowed to vent into the atmosphere, that could be captured and burnt instead. A lot of it could also be recycle.
@@nox5555 hydrogen generates value. its energy storage (or a source) and can be sold. burning cannot, ignoring its effect on air quality and CO2 levels.
@@jonathanodude6660 burning waste is super clean if done right. it also generates baseload enegery and heat for industry or local heating.
35 years ago I worked at the Christchurch drainage board in New Zealand. They were already converting sewage into methane and using the gas to run all our vehicles - and a small a power station running the sewage treatment station.
That's really interesting New Zealand and church heat resources To why Britain is not even Trying the energy resources..
Hey Matt, you should check out the biogas toilet system. I was looking into it for my tiny house and it goes right along with this video series. Human waste is pumped from the toilet to a thick black bag with weights on it. Methane production builds against the pressure of the weights and there is a low-pressure gas line that feeds to a burner system in the kitchen where you can cook your food from farts. On the backside of the bag, there is a poop chute for adding kitchen scraps and such, as well as a spigot for collecting the nutrient-rich poop juice for feeding plants. It's a win-win for people who want to start small, and not have to dig a septic tank.
This makes me happy, the insanely slow bureaucracy does not. I really hope they get to implement this tech into tons more waste treatment plants. thanks for always dropping HQ content!
I work as an automotive mechanic, but I have always had an interest in engineering and more recently alternative forms of energy, a method which can handle biowaste and convert it back into useful materials is huge.
I live fairly close to Phoenixville and I would now like to take a trip to see this first hand. This looks very promising as long as lobbying doesn't have the chance to shut it down
We have enough technology to save the planet. This is just another way it can be done. Instead of dumping waste in rivers, we need to take a lead from Germany and promote this technology.
The planet is fine. Stop listening to the doom sayers. They are always wrong.
@@thegreataynrand7210 Even if you don't care about the environment, it is still better economically which means less government spendings in that part which saves tax payers money for other things so it just need the starting investment for a win win situation.
@@NoName-lx5fo Lol, when did I say I don't care about the environment?
@@thegreataynrand7210 maybe in your neck of the woods.
@@thegreataynrand7210 Mass extinction, loss of biodiversity, loss of a majority of our native forests and rainforests, polluted rivers and oceans, microplastics showing up everywhere, freshwater aquifers being depleted, overfishing... Yeah the planet is totally fine.
I was surprised about all the ways that we already use human waste! Wasn’t aware of them.
I’m all for something like this getting implemented. After all, people will always be pooping so it doesn’t feel like the tech will ever become obsolete. I would like to see what the emissions of the different uses for our waste could be just to ensure that we choose the cleanest application possible.
Ecotricity's Gas from Grass is truly the best way to produce Gas. it's Gas from Grass, nearly entirely clean, nearly perpetual energy. Perfect for cooler countries with enough spare grassland. Reduce beef farming in such countries, more grass = national security through energy security, reduce trade deficits, creates jobs, and keeps money in the national economy. Oh and helps save humanity from total disaster!
@@michaelchildish interesting. This is the first I’ve heard of it. Might we to do some more research on it later!
Seems like a great technology for leapfrogging fossil fuels. Would be great to get this in emerging African/Asian Economies
@@michaelchildish Michael, I personally am a bit skeptical about BIO fuels. This video on poop to fuel is the only option I have seen that seems scalable, is potentially less harmful to the environment and addresses not only the problem of what to do with poop but also where to get fuel. It's unfortunate that we need to burn the product in order to get the energy out of it because that will likely just perpetuate the problems we are currently creating by burning fossil fuels. I checked out a report on ecotricity's grass to gas and noted the following "Harvest naturally occurring grasses from land previously used for grazing livestock and lower quality arable farmland, creating new wildflower meadows in the process, so increasing biodiversity and providing environmental benefits at the same time." So first off they are evicting a food source in order to make energy. That sounds a lot like the highly, highly, subsidized ethanol industry in North America which has displaced significant food growing lands for more profitable fuel agriculture. And while the second part re increasing biodiversity sounds good I am sure that the plants, animal, insects etc that inhabit those new meadows are not overly appreciative of the machines that show up on a semi regular basis to harvest their temporary homes. There is no easy answer but I do think this Poop to gas option is the most promising BIO fuel solution I have ever seen. Finding a way to get energy out of the fuel without having to burn it (or burning without any unpleasant additional outputs - without having to use the majority of the energy to clean up the outputs!) would make this a truly world changing solution.
Please see DC. Water, with the Cambi THP process, making biogas from Washington DC wast water.
Turning poop to energy is not a new concept. I was on a tour of a sewage treatment plant in the early 1960's where they had a digester that took the Methane generated by the digesting poop and used it to power the plant. There are already electric generators powered by digesting animal poop supplying power to the grid as well as powering the farms where the poop originated.
Which he also talked about in the video. It's called anaerobic digestion. But it's nowhere near as efficient as HTC, and it's very smelly.
I'm from Brazil. We see this in pig farms since 1960's too. They contain the waste, collect the gas and use it in an engine or turbine to generate electricity. Some farms can be self sustainable this way. But now we had a project going on, selected some medium sized cities and we're gonna test the same principle using human waste. It'll be used to provide electricity to the grid, but they'll test the economic viability to produce green hydrogen for future public transportation.
@@rafaelrp07 Do you have text interpretation problems? He is is not talking about generating biogas from waste or other organic materials, but about HTC( HYDROTHERMAL CARBONIZATION) something INFINITELY MORE EFFICIENT.
@@albinnordlander2293 wrong about the smelly part, first it's captured in a sealed dome, then purified thru activated coals and membranes. The result, CH4 is odorless, in fact we even have to inject THT into for user security. That's my day job.
@@michaela7759 I'd like to disagree, HTC requires massive amounts of heat. Biogas on the other hand can produce local heat and electricity, with about 95% left to be purified and injected into the grid. That's for a regular European farm size (very small in comparaison to American farms).
What surprised me is when he said he took a t shirt and it carbonized. We have so much clothing waste we could take that from the landfills as well. This tech is pretty crazy.
You'd be surprised what will turn into charcoal, another UA-camr (Cody's Lab) has been making a lot of charcoal and has a fun series called "will it charcoal" where he puts different items through the retort.
If it's carbon based it will probably turn right to char
there is already a recycling process invented recently that turns clothing into tough materials like floor tiles (plus the old process of using it in paper for paper money)
Maybe we can hide the poop in our old clothes and the regulators won't notice? But seriously...what can be mixed in to enhance the process and improve the rationale and economics to get us off the collective pot!
@@faffinaboot5865 even plastics?
If pretty much everything can be carbonized, it would save sooooooo much landfill and potentially could even clear out current landfills. I'd be willing to have a new 'carbonize' can on my curb.
Thank you for presenting this information with depth of detail while also keeping it comprehensible for non-scientists. I hope the technology keeps moving forward. Turning an endless supply of crap into meaningful solutions to other needs is a win win. I’ve shared this video with my daughter who is earning her bachelors degree in mechanical engineering and has a work study job in the biomass lab. She wants to use her engineering skills in humanitarian work, so I’m sure we’ll have some lively discussions over this. I’ve shared this with other friends & relatives too, who might find it interesting & encouraging from a layman’s perspective like me. Thank you again for covering the topic so well.
I live in Birmingham UK, we have sewage treatment works that is self sufficient, it runs on methane extracted from the poo and the solids are turned into building blocks, the plant has been in operation since the 1960s, it is now exporting gas to the national grid
It's the logical step towards a clean civilization, glad to see it happening already, keep it up ! Thanks.
That's such a good idea, we have alot of it with a constant flow. Why not use it for some good reason!
I'm working on a research project in Germany turning number 2 into bioplastics. I think these technologies will put number 2 in place number 1.
Thanks for the informative video as always
Just don't use it to wrap your lunch.
@@Johnsmith-zi9pu they gonna use it for one way plastics, as its almost made out of the stored sugary content of the bacteria. One way Plastics, aka plastic utensils and grocery bags xD
how about "turning human stupidity into renewal energy"....? we also have a lots of it...and also with constant flow....
may also be 'farmed" if the need arises....
@Yippee Skippy
Typo
@@theburninator33
Will these one-way Plastics, bioplastics also biodegrade rapidly to something harmless?
I am willing to bet the biofuel coming from countries with spicier food will have higher octane. Thanks for the video. Your channel is absolutely inspiring Matt!
I think you meant lower octane rating right, since octane rating is related to the fuels stability with higher octane fuel being harder to ignite.
If this is true, your car will break speed records with biofuels from my country!
lol
Mexico has a lot of beans, right?
@@omkr0122 mate just to know which country would be that.
I've just finished installing biogas digesters at waste water plants here in the UK. All the older schools with oil heating in rural areas are being replaced with methane heating systems. I'm sure the kids will love the idea of schools heated by farts.
where are they based exactly? and what is the scale?
what do you think the main hurdle is for getting such systems mainstream?
- edit - sorry for the quickfire questions but I'm trying to get local authorities in rural Western Australia to invest is similar biogas systems. very difficult change peoples thinking about waste. they seem almost happy to just spend tax money on storing it, transporting it, burying it, rather than consider any way to turn it into a valuable product.
is there any danger for storage of the gas? or problem when the tank is full? how long and what's the minimum and maximum of waste does it take to create gas and how much will it produce?
@@Snugggg Southern Waters bases in East & West Sussex. There aim is to generated over 74 GWh from CHP plants and 3 GWh from solar photovoltaics for there own use. Spare gas capacity will be sold to local schools. All the issues were resolved at the design and planning stage.
UK government investing in replacement resources for natural gas production. The stored gas industry's regulated and with 150 years of experience. I cant think of one accident.
They hope to get the first schools up and running by September 2022.
This is the kind of innovation we need, whether we want to talk about it or not. If we want to become carbon neutral we need more than just eliminating fossil fuels, we need ways to produce energy that doesn't technically cost any extra carbon. As disgusting as the thought might be it actually seems like a great way to do just that.
Totally agree! The thing that sparked my curiosity the most was the 'will it carbonize?' question. It makes me think this could be even more useful for other issues besides bio-waste disposal. Our planet has huge garbage/trash problems and this is the first time I've truly felt like we will have workable and profitable solutions.
@@Jonathanwebb100 they even tested it on carcasses. Just turned to dust. Imagine if morgues didn't need an incinerator to make ashes.
You are the carbon they want to reduce.
Yeah, I'm sure CO2 is just terrible. It's not like it was on Earth before life in any form appeared. Or that it literally sustained said life.
@@TheDandyMann Remove the carbon footprint. Literally.
I work in the industry. We have a treatment plant that burns the methane that is released from the waste solids digesters. The methane is collected and goes through a super cooling system that drops the water vapor out of it and then we burn it through basically diesel electric generators that can run it. About half of the treatment plants systems can be powered when those generators are online. The local military base also uses our effluent line for heating and cooling. Its used in the same manner as geothermal. We are now also producing class A solids that can be used in fertilization for crops for human consumption. The waste is collected and put into giant vacuum chambers. A vacuum is pulled in the chamber then super high pressure steam is injected into the chamber. That drastic change in pressure ruptures the cell walls on any living organisms and It kills absolutely everything in the waste solids.
Hello Sir🙂 , I'm very happy while reading your comments . I need whole knowledge about this process from you sir , How to contact you sir
If while getting rid of something negative you produce something really positive, I think this is an idea that has got to be implemented as soon as possible. Sounds almost too good to be true!
Yeah right, keep in mind that everyone that makes money from the old system will impede the new process to preserve their old process income. When Henry Ford mass produced the model T, the horse poop picker upers, with their shovels and carts started burning down cars. As we advanced in technology that challenge from the old process people has become exponentially more difficult to overcome. Keep in mind we had a civil war because way too many people earned money from slavery
@@silentvoiceinthedark5665 Wish everybody understood that the time to act is now. (actually long ago, but...) Things must change. Thanks for your great reply
If something sounds almost too good to be true it's time to look very very carefully at all of its ramifications prior to its implementation at scale. Is this carbon sequestration and a carbon sink and an elegant solution? . . . . .
AS YET UNDECIDED
The devil is in the details. This proposed solution requires revisitation and much further scrutiny.
I saw this idea a few weeks ago and started experimenting with cow dung.. all I can say is it's crazy that it's taking so long for solutions like these to become more standardised. It could be a massive help to many countries that don't have infrastructure.
Horse before the carriage
@@lukesutton4135 As long as the carriage is collecting poop along the way
@@lukesutton4135
We have so much 'protective' regulation that often hinders more than it helps..
On the contrary, it's usually because private industry doesn't see any profit motive in renewables, so it's time to lobby, lobby, and lobby to make sure new stuff gets snuffed out.
@@user-nd7rg5er5g this is why socialism will always be around.
As a wastewater operator myself, I am very interested to see how this develops, the three main concerns that jump to my mind are.
1 Scalability
2 Sustainability
3 Cost effective/ROI
Looks awesome in principal.
I work at an activated sludge plant (basically natural decay process on steroids). for years we were able to spread our biosolids (which were VERY stable, they literally look like dirt), on our hayfields. It was great, low cost, increased crop yields, very convenient, very safe. then some dope on the local assembly (who knows NOTHING about waste treatment) read some California paper on poor biosolids agricultural applications and convinced our local government to cancel all the spreading permits, So now we have to truck those biosolids 40 miles twice a week to the local landfill, where they buried at a premium hazardous waste charge (at taxpayer expense remember), right along with the domestic trash disposal.
1. Each HTC Train will process between 15,000 and 20,000 wet tons of biosolids per year depending on solids % and flow rate (eq. to the population of 100,000 people.) multiple trains can be set up to run in parallel for scalability. excess capacity can be filled with other wet organic waste sources i.e. food waste, manure, green waste earning additional revenue.
2. HTC reduces GHG emission by over 85% compared to waste activated sludge and land application processes. HTC reduces biosolids volume by 75%, so even if continuing to land apply there would be significant savings..
3. HTC has a levelized cost of transformation (LCOT) of $32/wet ton. Your ROI would depend on the savings of current disposal cost in excess of $32/ton. Most municipalities see a positive ROI in year 4-8 of operation.
This seems extremely promising! If it's turned into coal at least it wont emit methane, but it can also be turned into pretty much anything made out of carbon! We need more technologies like this
Poo diamonds for EVERYONE!!!!
Lol
Took 3 years to get permits, government seems to slow down and add expenses to go forward with innovative ideas.
@@billmoody1362 That seems to be what government bureaucrats try to do.
Government have a process to insure that everything is wright , if they don’t do that and things go wrong the government will be held accountable the process is a result of something that went wrong and the government is trying to prevent it .
It's a public health situation.
You can't give people the permit to play with massive waste treatment facilities, there's a real danger.
3y is a lot but security is important, and it can matter for thousands of people
When it comes to recycling, people don't realize how far they can go. Stuff as simple as your own body hair or fingernails can be reused within the environment. For humans' hair, it mainly helps out plants by granting the plants a supply of magnesium, which basically acts as a form of "stamina" for the plants to complete certain processes of growth. As for your own pet doggies or cats, their hair is rich with nitrogen that can be extremely valuable for plants because it will capture moisture and help the plants maintain their desired "body-temperature." As for fingernails, they essentially act as a "meal" for the microorganisms within the plants, which will take longer to break down rather than hair but is truly really valued to those plants. I can go on and on with how far recycling can be taken, but it's a matter of how much effort people are willing to put out, pulling their own weight.
After being hit by endless amounts of terrible news/predictions for the enviroment on a daily basis, seeing positive news in developments such as these makes me feel a whole lot better than you'd think. thank you, pretty good video.
Home bio gas does something simular for people living off grid. Recycling human waste and food scraps while providing free cooking gas(methane)
I live in Maine, the PFAS issue isn’t just a few farms, it’s vast regional areas of farmland. The farmers were once PAID to use the PFAS containing bio waste, and it was marketed as safe, and a great fertilizer - so it was used very widely in areas of the state where it was available.
I've been thinking of this idea for about 2 years now. Water treatment plants become energy providers, you get useful biproducts. And you can even retrofit the water treatment systems to include algae production, absorbing some of the carbon you'd release from burning the energy from HTC, and creating yet another versatile biproduct. I really just hope that this is something regulators start pushing. It's really a no brainer, and the companies would be onboard once you highlight the longterm economic benefits.
Humanure is such an important resource. We need to close the loop and return those nutrients back to the ground.
I guess this is a way to speed up humanure transformation, and better suited to city-wide processes, but I'm wondering about the quality of the resulting fertilizers compared to the "old ways".
Also, as others mentioned, it'd be great if we could use it to decompose plastics as well.
@@drillerdev4624 Humanure compost toilets make excellent fertilizer for fruit and nut trees. You flush it with carbon like sawdust which gives a good mix of carbon and nitrogen for the composting process to get to hot enough to kill most pathogens. It's not a good idea to use on vegetables because of pathogens that might still be in there though.
@@PaleGhost69 yepp, human manure is unfit for a lot of fertilizer usage. Cattle fertilizer is a bit more preferred to it.
@@MayankJairaj Each have their uses. I see it as less a excess of humanure and more a severe lack of productive plants that can utilize it safely. Especially where humanure is being created and excreted. Close the nutrient loop by feeding that which feeds us. We are a part of our ecosystem, no matter how much we want to act like we aren't.
@@PaleGhost69 I know, but a bit of a hassle when you live in a flat in the big city :)
I've been working in wastewater in Cincinnati for a few months now, and one of the things that always gets shown off when at one of our WWTPs is that there is a room with a few old generators, which were decommissioned probably a decade ago. They used to run on natural gas produced as a byproduct of breaking down solid sewage waste, which sounds pretty great, but had some downsides. Namely, when you assume that all of your solid waste is carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, then the chemistry works fine, but sadly people poop other stuff sometimes, and that complicates the natural gas production process, and the resulting natural gas is full of a lot of contaminants. When we ran it in the generators, it was really inefficient and would pretty consistently clog the generators with soot. Eventually we stopped using the generators and went to just incinerating the waste, which from an environmental standpoint is less than ideal, but we have been looking into possibly reusing the ash from the incinerator (which is a really cool rust color) in concrete and bricks.
Does the sewage sludge incinerator have a boiler and steam turbine?
This process is very similar to a device I've built - A microwave pyrolysis reactor.
I use it primarily for plastics, but anything can be put in there (including sewage) and it turns it it o gaseous and liquid fuels, and the left over product is completely carbonized, ready for sequestration, fuel, or building materials!
I have detailed videos on my channel.
A swimming pool close to me in a somewhat rural area has been using manure from local farms to heat their water. They've been doing that for years. So yeah, I could say this concept should be used more than it is now.
This has been going on for a very long time. 50+ years ago when I was a kid in Auckland, New Zealand, the sewage treatment plant at Mangere ran it's whole operation on the methane that came from the water it was treating and then fed the excess electricity into the national grid ( we were told). Methane from sewage, hydrogen from pee...none of this is new but someone must pick up the ball and run!
Poop into energy might be old news but this video highlights implications of HTC which is a very recent method! Plus methane is 30x worse than co2 so I there’s no comparison sustainably
this is amazing! I wonder if the process could be miniaturized to smaller scales to substitute septic tanks in rural areas that are not connected to larger sewage systems...
Yes.
I know some dairy farmers that do something similar with their dairy herds. Scoop the manure into a holding container to let it decompose, use the methane generated to power electric generators to run things (with the waste heat from the generators being pumped back into the storage containers). Then take the remaining waste and using it for fertilizer on their (and other) fields.
yep, just imagine how your car exhaust will smell
@@michiganengineer8621 That is standard biogas generation by biodigestor. This first sterilise and destroy chemicals and carbonice the solids and use the extracted liquid in the biodigestor so you get more useful byproducts, eliminate toxins and diseases and probably speed up the digestion. But needs more infraestrure.
Or services that regularly pick it up. I never have liked septic systems with leech fields. This would be a good substitute
My grandfather was a nuclear physicist and used to tell me that cow farts were a huge contributor to methane emissions. He told me this when I was a child and I used to crack up. I went to university and studied environmental studies and wanted to capture methane from wastewater treatment plants and use it as a fuel. I’m glad someone is thinking along these lines
Definitely a main contender. I have always wondered why such an obvious solution was not so obvious. All that methane going to waste. We all want to save the planet but we never seriously consider poo as an energy alternative.
Please keep promoting this alternative energy resource.
I knew a survivalist in the 70s who got his power from a sophisticated septic tank that collected the methane. It is pretty amazing what people can do with a little engineering.
@Ra Kunta not my toilet. Have not seen the guy in almost 40 years.
Humility has All possibles from the start with * Imagination * …… * Fruition * will only occur when those in “Money - Monopoly “ wake-uP to long term investing the greater for all .
I've seen someone make an entire small scale treatment for grey water using plants and then Tilapia and crawfish. They say they eat the fish, but I don't think I want to eat fish that have gotten fat off the waste from the home. I have a hard enough time trying to not think about delicious crab and catfish being the scavenger eaters they are.
This brings a whole new meaning to rolling coal.
I visited a rural village in Bangladesh and they used their waste to produce energy there. It wasn't very sophisticated but it was able to power some of their basic electricity needs.
This is a great idea, I didn't know about this process, I knew of producing biogas from sewage but this takes that to a whole new level.
10:40 I think this topic could use its own episode. Cement production is a huge source of CO2 (8% globally), offsetting that with a waste product would be incredible
More than co2 the sand mining is killing rivers here in india. Frequent floods and droughts make our lives miserable every year. 1.4 billion poops per day is going waste tbh.
@@jayeshmonlbs I cannot imagine how much a country with India's population could benefit from this tech at large scale!
I worked in wastewater. And one thing we talked about was the difficulty in using our resource laden product by the public. It is a PR campaign that needs to be addressed to move forward. I am so excited to see other forward thinking countries grabbing the reigns and surpassing our restricted abilities to to produce useful energy products. Way to go guys!!! And thanks to this company for taking the risk to challenge big energy.
worm poo is used to grow food - as is bird poo and cow poo. people who never had a garden are disconnected from how food and soil work. maybe you need to remind them
@@wynnhorton1208 - we found people weren’t the problem it was the county regulators who outlawed it. Until then local gardeners were coming and getting the dried sludge to use.
@@catherineprater1485 oh. I don't like the idea of using others' poop for *my* edibles. Most Americans use drugs/pharmaceuticals and that gets eliminated to some degree in pee and poo. That cannot be digested fully by bacteria or heat, I think - it is too often toxic.
@@wynnhorton1208 - that is true. The chemicals and especially the pharmaceuticals are an issue in human waste. When I was working in the industry people were given a form to sign stating they wouldn’t be putting it in direct contact with food crops. It could go under trees or non- contact with food. And a strange fact most wastewater workers know is this - tomato’s are a volunteer plant that survive the travel through the processing at plants. They are often found around the sludge beds.
@@catherineprater1485 there is a rare southern phrase called "shit-house tomatoes". maybe that is the real reason those tomatoes came into being.
If this speeds up the process of organic material to coal,. Could it speed up the process of decomposing plastic. So instead of taking hundreds or thousands of years it just takes a couple hours using a machine that does something similar?
10:20 this gives whole new meaning to the phrase "shitting bricks"
Sounds like a change in diet & exercise is in order 🤔💥🫨🫨🫨🫨
Hi Matt and friends. A greenie friend of mine said, "we need to get our s--t together on climate change". I never thought she meant it literally. Here in NZ my local city council has been successfully operating a sewage treatment plant generating its own biogas for decades. It's technically less advanced than the one shown in your video, but we're a small country with small resources, but just enough brains to know we cannot afford to invest ten dollars today to get a miserable return of two cents per year. Our city council have more than enough investments like that already.
We have a lot of dairy cows however, and as most of NZ could be described as "the Riviera of the South Pacific", our cows frolic about in the sunshine all year, releasing their methane rich farts into the wide blue yonder. The cows are not the "Gary Larson" breed, and voluntarily return to the milking shed at night, not realizing they're being exploited. After watching your most excellent video, it struck me that we could keep them indoors overnight and capture their farts using cleverly designed roof plumbing. Our farmers are absolute geniuses at knocking up corrugated iron sheds, so collecting even 50% of the farts is not an idea to be sniffed at, agricultural emissions make up half NZ's total. It would be cheap and low-tech, which to accountants means "practical". Is this idea a runner, or should it be flushed down the dunny? Cheers, P.R.
Most of the three waters in NZ are heavily polluted with human poop. NZ can stop cows farting by feeding the cows dried seaweed. A seaweed farm in Bluff NZ makes the seaweed product. Wellington. The capital city in NZ has a sewage system that has been badly damaged by tree roots. Wellington harbour is the most polluted place.
@@Theonefreenet Hi Martin. Great little collection of factoids there. What's your point? Cheers, P.R.
I think it’s soooo important that we have informative videos like this!! There is a certain natural squick factor when we consider using human waste for… anything, really. Most people don’t want to think about it, so good ideas go ignored because people think it’s unpleasant to talk about. But it’s true, everybody poops!!
I just thought of something. Why couldn't households and neighborhoods that have septic tanks have a miniature version of one of these plants? Boiler rooms have been permitted so why not big "pressure cookers"? I know that there would be more to it than that. But it would be worth the time, money and monitoring. It could pay for itself.
Assuming 1 pound per person per day, the absolute minimum number of participating households per HTC unit likely is in the 100s. Its a continuous flow system so storage to even out flow is needed.
I think if they did this the people who would have the neighbourhood septic tank located next door to them may object as is often the case.
We were involved in a project in the 1950's. Beckton sewage station in North London used the gas off the lagoon to fuel the gas Turbines which drove generators. The cost per Gas turbine was calculated to be 6d (sixpence) a day The high quality exhaust heat being used to heat the lagoon. This was at the very beginning of Aero derived Gas turbines for industrial use. Nowadays we would want to fire up a local district heating and cooling/chilling scheme. Something that's happening more often thanks to the very low emissions/noise combined with very high reliability and the ability to follow and make up renewable intermittent power, such as wind.
Your presentations are so well done. I love the research and the information shared! I always learn many things! Great stuff! Keep it up!
It's amazing definitely not a waste to implement. I enjoy your videos and because I live in Jamaica it's like seeing the future way before anything we have available now
Thank you for the valuable info you provided. I’m phd student doing my research about the pyrolysis and animal manures that’s why i found your video really helpful.
What If we compress this collected waste and without more treatment put this compressed cubes into our filling material needed to form base of buildings like plinth filling or say where we put soft rocks for filling purpose if we dump that garbage I think we might save those soft rocks.......
Also look into “Hydrothermal Liquification”
It produces “bio-crude” instead of bio-coal, so at least IMO works better with existing refineries. GRANTED HTC may be better with WWT processes / biosludge!
Mainly i know about it’s usage of Wet Algae (no drying needed!) to make a drop in substitute for crude oil.
I am working on a project that is aiming at using wastewater sludge to turn into bio crude oil using HTL technology
@@zenocchio Awesome! Is this personal or with a university or what? (Mainly wondering so i can follow the project!)
@@ericlotze7724 we are building a demonstration facility at Annacis wastewater treatment plant in vancouver Canada
@@zenocchio I work on that island and I think you order some stuff from us from time to time. Anti corrosion wax tape?
I thoroughly enjoy your videos. Being presented with the pro’s and con’s of each technology helps to understand it better.
Using human waste does seem to have far more pro’s than con’s and seems to have better viability than others you have addressed. This of course will depend on how well it delivers.
huge supporter. the lack of intermittency is the number 1 thing i believe it has going for it. addtionally, we have to deal with waste. it's non negotiable, meaning going a step forward and using waste for decarbonization is fantastic
I would think large scale biodigesters to produce methane, which would then be burned in generators would be an easy tech to implement. Urea is a byproduct of waste also and can replace salt usage on roads...
The concern there would be methane leaks and smell respectively
@@ironboy3245 This tech is already being used in some landfills. If we can make it to space, I am sure we can figure out the "smell" issue. Many industries say they can't do something just because they can't think outside the box.
@@northwoodsdad7506 in singapore we just burn it and use the heat to generate power. the ash is what we landfill
I do think it's one of the most promising ways to improve efficiency and diminish our footprint, so it's a win-win. Also this is helping (not solving) the baseload problem of the fully renewable energy society. If this scale well and is safe, this is certainly the way to go.
Exactly. I keep coming back to the thought of “well we have to do SOMETHING with waste water. So it might as well help reduce our emissions!“
This video runs through my head a lot. I grew up in one of the largest pork producing area of the United States. As the son of my farmer my dad would say, "anyway the wind blows, smells like money." So you can guess a sizable amount of hog poop being accumulating 24/7. I'm always thinking how beneficial this would be to farmer who are always wondering what to do with the poop. This would solve that problem and literally clear the air. The next problem is corn sweat in August.
This is great! I've been thinking about this for years. Our country needs to invest in the research and development of this technology across the USA ... that would truly make us more energy independent while dealing with a huge waste problem. Come on, America, we can do this, we are smart , we are rich.
Ah, yes. America; Smart, rich and shits a lot
America is smart and rich, but it doesn't have the political willpower to go against ExxonMobil and Conoco.
this is amazing and yet so unfortunate that most Developed country hasn't really look into it. Glad Somax is pioneering it big.
The most developed country? Denmark? Norway?
Mr. Ferrell, I must tell you that I find your humor to be immature and counterproductive, but work here is an invaluable resource for society. For wisdom is good to the wise and societies do not prosper for long if they relish in foolishness.
Thank you for doing this video. I have prayed to God for this science to take off and for it to see success. How many times have you imagined your house or your car being powered by your waste? I know I’m not alone in that one.
The human race must keep working to use our waste as a renewable resource. Surely so much money can be used in more important places if we do this.
I have been amazed how much diluted urine prospers garden plants and I have often wondered if we could devote forests and habitats to the degradation and utilization of our bodily waste, as the plants will convert our sewage into biomass and natural glory.
May God bless you, lad. Thank you for what you do
The idea that the high energy consumption of the autoclaving operation can be more than offset through fuel energy production to yield a NET energy source is mind boggling !
I will check out the pros and cons of this at depth for implementation in a project of my own ! Thank you !
I'm from Queensland Australia. Our local cane sugar mills export a massive amount of power during the crush season. All the begasse is burnt to power the mill and excess power sold to the local power grid provider
It would help to have an equation with energy inputs and outputs going into the process, and showing where energy is going and where it can be recovered. Remember, one plot is worth a thousand words, one equation is worth a thousand plots.
I agree.
I think people genuinely don’t want to do the right thing. I’m from South Africa, we have a lot of underdeveloped rural areas, the engineers still promote pit sanitation. In one of my reports I proposed using human waste to generate electricity. Especially because we are also challenged by loadshedding/power cuts. Will they ever do it? Nope. It’s so frustrating. I love this idea 💯.
I think my favorite bit is the fact that, in a roundabout way, you literally crap bricks.
It sounds like there are positive aspects to this process but I'm still confused on the Bio-Coal product. Aren't we trying to move away from burning coal because of the Sulfur dioxide and Nitrogen oxides that it releases in the air? Or did I miss some part of the video that explains the absence of these emissions?
As someone who lives near the big coal ash pond spill of a few years ago, I'm also curious about the solid/liquid waste from bio-coal. We've got a lot of lawsuits working their way through the courts concerning radiation exposure from that spill.
@@HarryLovesRuth well, this would have much less radiation, but I'm not sure about the other stuff.
This stuff won't contain much sulfur since sulfur isn't a major component of the human (or other critters') diet. Also, I suspect that most of the sulfur in the feedstock will end up in the liquid fraction anyway, although I can't swear to that since I don't know enough about the process. As for the nitrogen oxides, AIUI, those are mostly products of incomplete combustion independent of the fuel source and cars produce a lot more of them than power plants.
I've been doing some reading...I think because it comes from carbon neutral sources (humans!), it doesn't harm the enviroment in the same way as regular coal...,and some industries need something that behaves like coal in order to function.
I'm retired from a large municipal sewage treatment facility. -San Francisco east bay area. The anaerobic digesters at that facility (plaque on wall dated 1952) are mid-20th century (old, in other words) tech. and are still in operation working great. I've forgotten the average daily cubic feet methane produced, but it was logged. About 1/3 of total gas was methane, the other 2/3 gas was mostly CO2 (which could be used for high-lipid algae production). The digester methane, after scrubbing etc., was either tanked for use in generating electricity for onsite use, and for selling back into commercial grid. Total gas production still exceeded the facility's needs and ability to sell back to grid.. So waste gas burners were still used to dispose of excess surplus.
So my opinion, what the future should consider, is matching public anaerobic sewage processes with high-lipid algae production. .My observation was the bigger the process, often the more efficient, and more tolerant/resilient to "upsets." Also noteworthy, the facility where I worked had one of the best (highest rated) water quality labs in the bay area.
I always thought HTC made horrendous mobile phones that broke 36 seconds after the warranty expired....
Heyooo!
I vote this the best pun!🤣🤣😂😂
😂😂
We have to imagine a whole country like mine, Brazil,if we did this is all across the sea shore line cities that all waste goes to rivers and sea,polution ALL or most of our sea line. We could use that power for greater purposes.
Bricks were made here in Australia (sometime in the 90's) and sold that contained sewage bi-products, the colours of the bricks were considered better than the manufacturers could otherwise produce, but people did not want "Poo Bricks" I still remember listening to a radio broadcast on this.
This is awesome. I've been looking for ways to reconcile permaculture ideals with modern urban density (a la solarpunk) and this is actually exactly that. Thanks Matt.
So many great jokes in this thoroughly detailed vid, but “Diamonds in the roughage”… Phenomenal.
I feel like you can tell that he had more fun than normal with this one haha
Matt this is your most thought provoking video yet. Love this channel.
Totally onboard with this. Safe, increases energy availability for other uses. Can be used in so many things...because it's CARBON! I get how regulation needs to be somewhat involved, but honestly, it holds up way too many great ideas with plenty of potential. I also think most regulators are simply checking boxes based on what is considered SOP. I think a super regulator that can run things like HTC through a controlled but rapid process to then send those results and hyper green flag these processes at local levels.
Another really excellent video Matt. I'm impressed by the professional format and your own script.
I work in a wastewater treatment plant and we burn some of the methane to warm the plant.
Maybe this could pair well with the solar dome idea proposed for water desalination, to make it a "clean" energy source
Thank you for this insightful and intelligent presentation. HTC sounds like a true win-win solution.
We have a problem here in central Idaho where farms fertilizer and farm animals waste or nitrogen is penetrating down to the ground water and ending up in the Snake River causing algae blooms which depletes the oxygen in the water killing the fish .
So using this method for the farm animals poop would be a huge plus here for addressing the nitrogen problem.
This is the kind of technology that gives me hope for a better future.
Yea. It feels like we went through a period where we wanted the world to be sterilized and pristine, but we’re finally getting over that. Now we’re looking at things like waste water and grey water and we’re realizing that we’ve been throwing away something which had tons of potential uses!
Stuff like this will be incredibly important in building the closed loop society that we need.
Does it work on plastic? I remember when I was in Maui, driving by the dump was incredible because of all the plastic bags that were everywhere. They were in the trees, and blowing in the wind. This was after the ban too.
Since then, I can't help but notice how quickly the plastic bags stack up. Can we put the bags through this process? It works with micro plastics, so is this viable to get rid of some of the plastic waste?
I know Oahu burns trash to produce electricity, I assume Maui does the same. Unfortunately, this relies on plastic shopping bags being disposed of responsibly. That relies on individuals giving a damn.
I'm not sure if this works on plastic, but pyrolysis does. I've built a microwave pyrolysis reactor that carbonizes plastic and produces an energy product of gas, liquid, and solid. You can find these videos on my youtube channel!
There are countless ways to recycle plastics. Unfortunately the first step relies on humans to properly dispose of them and far more people don’t care about our home then those who do.
I live in the country in SW MO on 2000 acres. I check my property perimeter fencing once a month to make sure there’s no damaged fencing. This past Sunday I was repairing a section of fence that a tree fell on in remote part of my property. The people who own the land that borders this part of my property have started building a dump site within 100 feet of my property. There is everything from household trash to tires in this dump!!! It’s absolutely disgusting that people do this. I took drone footage and sent it to the EPA but im sure they wont do anything about it.
Well, you leftists DEMANDED an end to paper bags. What next? Are you psychos gonna force me to remove my septic system?
@@baneverything5580 An end to paper bags? I don't recall that happening. And I'm not advocating for a ban on anything. I'm asking about whether or not this technology could deal with disposing the plastic bags. Even if we reuse the plastic, we still reach an end of life for those plastic products. We still end up with micro plastics in the ocean.
Isn't the question of whether this technology could alleviate that issue worth asking?
When living in CR these systems have been used for many years. Its always been an efficient method to not only generate cooking gas but also used as fertilizer for planting. Its strictly used for corralled animal waste and or the waste from the home (bathroom) thus avoiding contaminating the "output" with the forever substances. Any scraps from the kitchen would be composted seperately. Just "shows" how we get charged for a service that we could actually have "for free" ourselves and only have a 1 time expense (the buildout) as opposed to a monthly bill forever which I just found to be ridiculous.
This is amazing! Could we use this with consumer waste as well? Solve the trash problem too?
I would love to know about all of that, esp trash. I am volunteering with my county on waste reduction ideas. They have taken it only as far as recycling!
A fascinating doco and view into new products... that have always been around us all these many years (and didn't know it) Thank you Matt from Mat
I cant believe that boiling waste (autoclave) is truly energy balanced; I opine there is not enough energy in the waste to be able to boil itself pound for pound.
Well, that’s was a great video! I love learning about alternative renewable energies, wind and solar are great, but the other stuff, like solar thermal, bio mass, geothermal and this are so interesting with different pros and cons and interest side things. I always thought human waste could be used/processed in useful way, but just as fertiliser or a fuel, didn’t realise it could be so useful as a product as well
Would love to see a follow-up video explaining DIY techniques for turning poop into energy. Thanks for the video.
@R D Wouldn't everyone with these current
gas prices?! 🤣
Brought up just after the war in the UK countryside. No electricity, mains water or communal sewage disposal. Toilets were at the bottom of the garden and 'bucket and chuckit'. Dug into the large garden it fertilised a massive crop yield. We were never short of healthy veg and the waste went to feed the pigs and chicken.
Honestly one of the more exciting and promising sources of renewable energy I've heard of so far. Seems like there are zero downsides once implemented.