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Biogas from human waste, safely obtained under controlled circumstances using innovative technologies, is a potential fuel source great enough in theory to generate electricity for up to 138 million households - the number of households in Indonesia, Brazil, and Ethiopia combined.
A report today from UN University's Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health estimates that biogas potentially available from human waste worldwide would have a value of up to US$ 9.5 billion in natural gas equivalent. And the residue, dried and charred, could produce 2 million tonnes of charcoal-equivalent fuel, curbing the destruction of trees.
Finally, experts say, the large energy value would prove small relative to that of the global health and environmental benefits that would accrue from the safe treatment of human waste in low-resource settings.
http://phys.org/news/2015-11-vast-energy-human-university.html
[Video]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=807RtubRyF0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @05:14PM
At the Hyperion plant, which treats much of the sewage from the Los Angeles area (and where a scene from Soylent Green was filmed), "about 80% of the power needs for Hyperion are met from methane gas generated on-site from all that poop." [healthebay.org] If I recall correctly, the facility was extensively rebuilt in the 1990s, with new digestion (fermentation) tanks. It also produces dried sludge which, according to the rumor I heard, was being trucked out to Arizona and passed off as fertilizer. If true, the "farmers" were probably being paid to accept the so-called fertilizer, which (as of the 1990s) had notable levels of heavy metals, attributed to the area's light industry such as chrome-plating operations and film developing. Since then, the presence of pharmaceuticals in waste water has come into the public eye. Also, people discharge household cleaners, paint, pesticides and the like into the sewers. Heal the Bay (link above) tells of "compost that is used in Kern County farms and Griffith Park."
Extrapolating from that example, if modern sewage treatment plants were built for the world's other major cities, nearly enough energy could be recovered from biogas to run the plants themselves. If the solids were burnt as the UN proposes, additional energy could be obtained. A reason it's not done in Los Angeles is because of the region's air pollution regulations. Smog is already a problem in some other urban areas too: Mexico City, London and Beijing come to mind.