This is a fantastic idea, here in the UK we’ve just been dumping raw sewage in the rivers and poisoning the coast because it’d cut into water companies record profits to treat it (also Brexit chemical shortages or something)- if we can turn the poop into something useful that can sell then the won’t let a drop off that precious filth go to waste.
You’re not going to stop people living their lives, visiting friends, family, and having meaningful life experiences. If we can make flying more ecologically sustainable than rail and boats then it would be a hugely positive thing in the fight against climate change.
You certainly can, with proper carbon emissions taxation. But you can’t stop said people from voting for parties that advocate unrealistic pipe-dream technological solutions like poop jets and full-scale CCS, rather than parties who make them take the red pill and face reality and the consequences of their actions.
Yes I know that’s what you want to happen but it’s not very likely, we’re not really short of anything that we don’t have a dozen other options for.
We’ll have oceanic floating factories harvesting sunlight and turning sea water into jet fuel and carbon fibre Christmas toys before consumerism gets close to admitting defeat.
If you want to change society I’m afraid you have to do the hard thing of coming up with a better idea and convincing people to try it.
I hope we do pull off a 90th minute 720 backflip into futurist utopia, that would be mega. But until people start doing basic stuff like voting in their interest, I’m going to prepare for the worst.
A lot of the time it’s just processed in open air tanks to break it down (amoung a lot of other steps before returning it to water ways or used as fertilizer/burnt).
You need a pretty low pop density to have septics work for most people.
When poo is returned to the earth, it’s digested by insects and microbes which use it for energy, and then emit CO2. Poo in the dirt puts carbon in the air the same as poo in a jet
Read about thermal depolymerization. Not only will there be no medication, there won’t be anything more complicated than some moderately long carbon chain oils. That system can even break down the prions from mad cow disease, so it’s safer than most methods for getting rid of biological waste.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Thermal depolymerization (TDP) is the process of converting a polymer into a monomer or a mixture of monomers, by predominantly thermal means. It may be catalysed or un-catalysed and is distinct from other forms of depolymerisation which may rely on the use of chemicals or biological action. This process is associated with an increase in entropy. For most polymers thermal depolymerisation is chaotic process, giving a mixture of volatile compounds. Materials may be depolymerised in this way during waste management, with the volatile components produced being burnt as a form of synthetic fuel in a waste-to-energy process. For other polymers thermal depolymerisation is an ordered process giving a single product, or limited range of products, these transformations are usually more valuable and form the basis of some plastic recycling technologies.
I think you’re arguing “there’s so much heat it won’t be medication anymore.” I’m unconvinced that, that means it’s less dangerous … consider cases like the [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_pit](burn pits).
Cool, you go be unconvinced. That has no bearing on reality. If you can’t tell the difference between open fire burning and closed vessel pyrolisis (or more advanced methods of chemical decomposition), nothing I have time to present will correct that misconception.
Idk if it’s bad idea or not, but I’ll happily provide them with some of the precious material to experiment on. For a small fee, obviously, for science!
Trains aren’t the solution to every problem. They are slower than planes, don’t work on water, and need infrastructure (tracks). They are great where they do work, but where electric planes work, there’s no need to put them down.
They seem to be since electric planes don’t really exist for passanger flight and are unlikely to exist in a future near enough to be meaningful. For water we got boats so that’s the one place where trains aren’t the solution.
Tracks are a lot cheaper than airports as far as infrastructure is concerned while also going to more places and the speed of travel is a worthwhile sacrifice to stop pollution from planes. Plus sleeper trains are so comfy compared to the hell that is the cramped airplane seat with less leg room than you need to actually fit your legs there.
Let’s replace all intercontinental flights with high speed rail and sleeper trains, and only use planes for long haul flights over water. For those planes that do stay in the sky, let’s fuel them with renewables. Poo based jet fuel does not add carbon to the environment.
Is this another one of these “eco-fuels” that take about ten times the energy they store just to produce them, and no one will tell you where that energy will come from?
I mean if you can get it from actually good sources (solar, geothermal) where that type of energy is in excess then use ships powered by it to transfer it around the world is that a huge problem?
I mean, if we can’t build more high speed rail, planes will be used. And they’re the largest contributor in transportation, right? Or at least the highest output/least efficient means of travel. Eliminating a huge contributor is a good thing.
Of course there would be other things that are worth curbing, but I don’t think we should shit on (eh?) killing emissions from a large contributor.
Well, I’ve always wondered what would happen after humanity burns through all fossil fuels on the planet, if flight and space flight would be impossible. So at least it seems like it’s possible with renewable resources.
It’s comforting that future generations will still be able to reach for the stars in doo doo rockets.
The energy comes from excess generation in renewables for load balancing, that base load thing people mistakenly say they can’t do.
It’s clever and simple, you put a whole load of potential generation in knowing that to meet your essential and desired demand on low generation days you’ll need excess capacity which will over produce on high generation days. You then plug that in to a system which has tanks of feedstock in this case poo and empty storage capacity so that in peek generation periods it can run at maximum, when it’s only a little over the requested load it runs at limited power and if there’s a time with no excess power it turns off for a bit.
That’s why all the carbon capture and processing facilities are focusing on modular parallel design, it’s very easy then to create scalable production tied to excess load.
Of course this is only one of the many possibilities, the nuclear lovers want to build nuclear powered sequestration and processing facilities, Iceland made one using geothermal, the American one is wind and the proposed Saudi one trailer about being solar thermal.
Oh and actually the efficiency is incredibly impressive now, with some of the active catalyst chemistry they’re developing we’re getting into heat pump style efficiency gains and it’ll looking more likely we’ll be able to go below parity in cost per gallon Vs mined hydrocarbons.
I know it feels like people never explain the complex side of things but that’s because journalists are bad at their jobs, there’s whole organisations out there dedicated to this sort of planning and a lot of the stuff they talk about and work towards ia incredibly well thought out and sensible.
Together, the research team developed a process to convert human waste into a thick, black liquid that looks like crude oil and behaves like it. Using fractional distillation, the team can then derive the fuel of interest, much like oil refineries do.
Based on the (almost no) data available here, this does seem likely to be a lot of steps and a lot of energy required just to turn the poop into the substitute for crude oil, and then do all the standard further refining of that into jet fuel. I’d be very dubious about the actual real-world value until some magical further data is shared, because this innovation surely won’t help anyone if the fuel it makes is more expensive than regular jet fuel.
I’d be completely unsurprised to learn they were using thermal depolymerization. The process was patented about 30 years ago and can take just about any organic material and turn it into essentially light oil. When there was a plant testing it with turkey carcasses in the US, way back in 2003. It was competitive with oil production costs, provided that turkey guts cost less than $20/ton and oil cost more than $80/barrel.
I have been saying we should use this for waste treatment plants since they first started testing this. The water we get at the end is more pure; drugs, most chemicals, and germs are broken down; and we get a saleable product at the end. Depending on the cost to build and run, we could get a better result for less money.
Now, let’s talk about the efficacy of converting human remains and the price of cemetery plots…
Now, let’s talk about the efficacy of converting human remains and the price of cemetery plots…
I mean seriously but yes crematoriums should be hooked up to district heating, apparently they don’t even use much energy if you operate them right. There’s a slow-burning trend in Germany to move from traditional cemeteries to dedicated forest plots: First you get cremated, then put in a biodegradable urn, then buried under a specific tree. Unmarked, but it’s in a register somewhere so next of kin can find it.
I’m thinking a step past cremation, where oil and solid fertilizer is produced. So harvest the oil and fill that urn with the non-hydrocarbon solids, and go from there.
Another stupid fuel idea. How many #2s do you need to fly from New York to Los Angeles? Probably a shitload…
But seriously, this is just another idiotic Idea. Yes, you can make fuel from a lot of sources, but neither the quantity is there, nor is this in any way efficient or cost-covering.
I once calculated that we would need to cover each and every square centimeter of agricultural area in my country with rapeseed plants without crop rotation to produce the bio-fuel that the jets in my country burn. And that does not even include the energy needed to plant it, harvest it, and process it.
Your claimed calculation is very vague, I have to say I don’t believe for a second you actually did that and it’s laughable you’re claiming you did
When someone tells me that they’ve noticed a fundamental flaw that all the leading minds in the field have not it does not lead me to think that the field itself is flawed rather the person I’m speaking to’s understanding of it.
Of course we understand that it’s not all going to come from one source but where there are waste products like stalks and leaves left over from food production, poo, algae, and etc it makes sense to work towards using all of those so we can transition away from the extracting oil and gas.
It is not that I had found a “fundamental flaw”. Those eco-fuel things simply don’t scale up to realistic levels, and the people who are behind it know that their small-scale experimental systems will never power the current level of aviation fuel demands.
Yes, human poo has some energy left. But it is way less than the same amount of fuel, I.e. you need several tons of poo to create a ton of fuel.
So you would have to collect the days worth of shit of way over half a million people to power this flight. And all this - again - with a lossless conversion. The reality is probably more like a 10% conversion productivity, meaning you would need ten times the poo.
I leave the question if this technology is actually sustainable to the reader.
And yes, my calculation of rapeseed oil based fuel was similarly funded in facts.
Exactly. Bio-fuels simply will not sustain aviation at current levels. The only way to solve this is to drastically reduce air travel down to sustainable levels. Which might be “rescue helicopters only” if push comes to shove.
If push comes to shove the rescue copters will take a back seat to the military. There is what should be, and what likely will be, and those things are often very different.
Fun thing about calculations is that if you write them down you can pull them out and show it to people who are skeptic about your claims, like I am being right now of your claims.
I actually would if it had not been on the site that should not be named, and which has the most shitty search engine. Maybe I’ll try Google, if my posts are still there.
It converts it to co2 and its a structure like carbon capture stuff. Im not big on carbon capture but if you running this thing anyway it might make sense to run the output into some carbon capture scheme as it should reduce both the production and running energy since it can use some of what this is already doing as far as pulling in and exhausting the air. might be good for the exhaust to go down an old well or something to.
Not sure if there is much chance for effective carbon capture. The article states that this works for getting rid of very low concentrations of methane (so burning is not possible). That means that even with the methane 100% turned into carbon, we are talking about very small concentrations.
well there would be the native co2 in the air its taking in too. My point is if it was worth it enough to do on its own its already done most of the heavy lifting so I bet if a carbon capture technique was worth it, it would be riding the output of this.
The atmospheric half life of methaine is just under 10 years. So if you release 1k lbs of methaine in 10 years there will be 500 lbs left 10 years after that ther will be 250 ect.
Indeed that’s 10 hundredweight. Which maybe ironically enough is rather intuitive for me, Germany still uses pounds and hundredweight (Zentner) in informal and sectorial use, meaning 500g and 50kg.
It's complicated. The breakdown of methane in the atmosphere depends on hydroxyl radicals that are created at a regular rate. If you have more and more methane released, and/or you have other chemicals that also react with those radicals, the overall average half life will increase. Both those things are happening, so the old half life really isn't as accurate as it used to be. Guess which number the IPCC still uses for its models though.
Yes but the heat it retains in that time is 85x the effect of base CO2, which makes sense: decomposition of the methane releases energy. It does a much better job of reflecting the IR until it breaks down, then in the act of breaking down releases energy.
"Today's livestock farms are high-tech facilities where ammonia is already removed from the air. As such, removing methane through existing air purification systems is an obvious solution,"
sounds like it will be something they can just add to existing systems at big livestock operations, and the removal rate is pretty high
Sure, reducing the methane emissions of a few farms might lead to an increased consumption of meat. Which would annihilate the positive effect brought by such innovation.
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