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posted by CoolHand on Friday November 04 2016, @12:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the super-sh1t dept.

It may sound like science fiction, but wastewater treatment plants across the United States may one day turn ordinary sewage into biocrude oil, thanks to new research at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The technology, hydrothermal liquefaction, mimics the geological conditions the Earth uses to create crude oil, using high pressure and temperature to achieve in minutes something that takes Mother Nature millions of years. The resulting material is similar to petroleum pumped out of the ground, with a small amount of water and oxygen mixed in. This biocrude can then be refined using conventional petroleum refining operations.

Wastewater treatment plants across the U.S. treat approximately 34 billion gallons of sewage every day. That amount could produce the equivalent of up to approximately 30 million barrels of oil per year. PNNL estimates that a single person could generate two to three gallons of biocrude per year.

"...a single person could generate two to three gallons of biocrude per year." Some people can manage that in a day if they eat Mexican food the night before.


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  • (Score: 2) by t-3 on Friday November 04 2016, @04:57AM

    by t-3 (4907) on Friday November 04 2016, @04:57AM (#422376)

    Yeah, harvesting the methane produced using one of the digesters mentioned above and turning the rest into compost is probably much more efficient, especially on municipal sewage scales. Use the resulting compost and liquid waste to grow algae and crops to process into biofuels and you're probably getting orders of magnitude more energy.

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  • (Score: 1) by Kenny Blankenship on Friday November 04 2016, @07:28PM

    by Kenny Blankenship (5712) on Friday November 04 2016, @07:28PM (#422572)

    Fertilizing crops with sewage is a *bad* idea, because then people eat the crops (or livestock eats the crops, then people eat the livestock). Then people turn it into sewage, and the cycle repeats. There are compounds which are not removed by treatment, or worse, toxified by treatments that were aimed at other problems.

    --
    Someday, even Killer Meteors must fail.
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by t-3 on Friday November 04 2016, @08:50PM

      by t-3 (4907) on Friday November 04 2016, @08:50PM (#422622)

      That's why you turn the crops into biodiesel. Also processing compost with worms has been shown to eliminate lingering pharmaceutical compounds.

    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday November 04 2016, @09:46PM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday November 04 2016, @09:46PM (#422640) Journal

      Chinese have been using night soil [agroecology.org] for thousands of years.

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      Washington DC delenda est.
      • (Score: 1) by Kenny Blankenship on Saturday November 05 2016, @07:18PM

        by Kenny Blankenship (5712) on Saturday November 05 2016, @07:18PM (#422899)

        I'm mostly concerned with contaminants invented in the last hundred (or so) years, such as pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and various industrial byproducts.

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        Someday, even Killer Meteors must fail.
    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 07 2016, @06:28PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 07 2016, @06:28PM (#423665) Journal

      Fertilizing crops with sewage is a *bad* idea, because then people eat the crops (or livestock eats the crops, then people eat the livestock). Then people turn it into sewage, and the cycle repeats.

      Well, that is the point of doing so. Food energy is very expensive energy. Turning sewage back into food is a pretty straightforward way of saving a lot more energy than you would save with biofuels or straight burning for electricity or heat.

      There are compounds which are not removed by treatment, or worse, toxified by treatments that were aimed at other problems.

      Then expand treatment to include those chemicals. It's just not that hard. Let us keep in mind that recycling of nutrients in the presence of toxins has already been successfully done by natural ecosystems for billions of years. It's a completely solved problem else we would have all sorts of toxic buildups happening naturally.