UK firm develops jet fuel made from human poo | The starting material is generated in excess and available in plenty. It is a win-win for everyone that the waste is repurposed.::undefined
Do you smell that Randy? It’s chemtrails and they’re brewing up a shit storm right over our heads.
RANDY
Is this another one of these “eco-fuels” that take about ten times the energy they store just to produce them, and no one will tell you where that energy will come from?
I mean if you can get it from actually good sources (solar, geothermal) where that type of energy is in excess then use ships powered by it to transfer it around the world is that a huge problem?
It might be, if it’s more efficient to use that energy for some other option.
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.
No, see if it’s not the perfect solution to literally everything then it’s just not gonna work. /s
Well, I’ve always wondered what would happen after humanity burns through all fossil fuels on the planet, if flight and space flight would be impossible. So at least it seems like it’s possible with renewable resources.
It’s comforting that future generations will still be able to reach for the stars in doo doo rockets.
Together, the research team developed a process to convert human waste into a thick, black liquid that looks like crude oil and behaves like it. Using fractional distillation, the team can then derive the fuel of interest, much like oil refineries do.
Based on the (almost no) data available here, this does seem likely to be a lot of steps and a lot of energy required just to turn the poop into the substitute for crude oil, and then do all the standard further refining of that into jet fuel. I’d be very dubious about the actual real-world value until some magical further data is shared, because this innovation surely won’t help anyone if the fuel it makes is more expensive than regular jet fuel.
I’d be completely unsurprised to learn they were using thermal depolymerization. The process was patented about 30 years ago and can take just about any organic material and turn it into essentially light oil. When there was a plant testing it with turkey carcasses in the US, way back in 2003, it was competitive with oil production costs, provided that turkey guts cost less than $20/ton and oil cost more than $80/barrel.
I have been saying we should use this for waste treatment plants since they first started testing this. The water we get at the end is more pure; drugs, most chemicals, and germs are broken down; and we get a saleable product at the end. Depending on the cost to build and run, we could get a better result for less money.
Now, let’s talk about the efficacy of converting human remains and the price of cemetery plots…
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.
The energy comes from excess generation in renewables for load balancing, that base load thing people mistakenly say they can’t do.
It’s clever and simple, you put a whole load of potential generation in knowing that to meet your essential and desired demand on low generation days you’ll need excess capacity which will over produce on high generation days. You then plug that in to a system which has tanks of feedstock in this case poo and empty storage capacity so that in peek generation periods it can run at maximum, when it’s only a little over the requested load it runs at limited power and if there’s a time with no excess power it turns off for a bit.
That’s why all the carbon capture and processing facilities are focusing on modular parallel design, it’s very easy then to create scalable production tied to excess load.
Of course this is only one of the many possibilities, the nuclear lovers want to build nuclear powered sequestration and processing facilities, Iceland made one using geothermal, the American one is wind and the proposed Saudi one trailer about being solar thermal.
Oh and actually the efficiency is incredibly impressive now, with some of the active catalyst chemistry they’re developing we’re getting into heat pump style efficiency gains and it’ll looking more likely we’ll be able to go below parity in cost per gallon Vs mined hydrocarbons.
I know it feels like people never explain the complex side of things but that’s because journalists are bad at their jobs, there’s whole organisations out there dedicated to this sort of planning and a lot of the stuff they talk about and work towards ia incredibly well thought out and sensible.
POOP FUEL CAN’T MELT STEEL JETS
Another stupid fuel idea. How many #2s do you need to fly from New York to Los Angeles? Probably a shitload…
But seriously, this is just another idiotic Idea. Yes, you can make fuel from a lot of sources, but neither the quantity is there, nor is this in any way efficient or cost-covering.
I once calculated that we would need to cover each and every square centimeter of agricultural area in my country with rapeseed plants without crop rotation to produce the bio-fuel that the jets in my country burn. And that does not even include the energy needed to plant it, harvest it, and process it.
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.
That’s a lot of Canola oil!
Your claimed calculation is very vague, I have to say I don’t believe for a second you actually did that and it’s laughable you’re claiming you did
When someone tells me that they’ve noticed a fundamental flaw that all the leading minds in the field have not it does not lead me to think that the field itself is flawed rather the person I’m speaking to’s understanding of it.
Of course we understand that it’s not all going to come from one source but where there are waste products like stalks and leaves left over from food production, poo, algae, and etc it makes sense to work towards using all of those so we can transition away from the extracting oil and gas.
It is not that I had found a “fundamental flaw”. Those eco-fuel things simply don’t scale up to realistic levels, and the people who are behind it know that their small-scale experimental systems will never power the current level of aviation fuel demands.
Yes, human poo has some energy left. But it is way less than the same amount of fuel, I.e. you need several tons of poo to create a ton of fuel.
OK, lets have a look at this poo idea. Human faeces have an energy density of 8kJ/g. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1793018/#:~:text=As the energy content per,measurements of stool wet weight.
Aviation fuel has an energy density of 43.5kJ/g. Source: https://s2.smu.edu/propulsion/Pages/energyex.htm#:~:text=The energy density of aviation,about 820 kg%2Fm3.
So if it was possible to get a lossless conversion of human poo to aviation fuel, you would need more than five tons of poo to create one ton of fuel.
A 747 from NY to LA burns about 60 tons of fuel. Source: https://www.quora.com/How-much-fuel-is-needed-to-fly-a-Boeing-747-from-New-York-City-to-Los-Angeles#:~:text=New York to LA would,be 16%2C716 gallons of fuel.
So you would need over 300 tons of shit to power that flight - if the conversion was lossless. It most likely is way worse.
Now a human produces between 125 and 500g of faeces per day. Source: https://www.healthline.com/health/do-you-lose-weight-when-you-poop#how-much-does-it-weigh
So you would have to collect the days worth of shit of way over half a million people to power this flight. And all this - again - with a lossless conversion. The reality is probably more like a 10% conversion productivity, meaning you would need ten times the poo.
I leave the question if this technology is actually sustainable to the reader.
And yes, my calculation of rapeseed oil based fuel was similarly funded in facts.
And those numbers are for ONE flight. How many thousands of planes are in the air each day?
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.
I mean I’m pretty sure a water treatment center can spare some shit for this test
This might actally power a few dozen flights a day nationwide. All the other ones will still have to rely on dead dinosaurs.
Yeah, screw every effort to get us away from dependency on fossil fuels, am I right?
No. I just expose that aviation at the current level simply is not sustainable in any way.
They’re going to install more bathrooms on the planes and serve mexican bean salsa at boarding. That way the fuel can be made in flight.
You get a 10% discount if you use the lavatory during the flight
if I eat the fiber heavy in flight meal, will that be knocked up to 15%?
No because the meal is also made of 40% human poo
Not true, the FDA only allows 15%. You’re thinking of rat feces.
Range extender
I’ve always thought about how cool it would be to find a use for cat shit.
Imagine if every time your cats used the litter box, it made you money.
Have you tried grinding it into a powder and mixing it with your coffee?
I don’t drink coffee.
You drink your cat shit straight, like god intended.
That’s why they call me Mr. Mistopoolees.
A civet cat isn’t a true cat, it got the name because it remotely looks like s vast
What about snorting it?
well shit
shitter will never be full again
Don’t go anywhere near the exhaust pipe.
This is a fantastic idea, here in the UK we’ve just been dumping raw sewage in the rivers and poisoning the coast because it’d cut into water companies record profits to treat it (also Brexit chemical shortages or something)- if we can turn the poop into something useful that can sell then the won’t let a drop off that precious filth go to waste.
Na kilo hoven, kilo cukru…
The environment would be saved if I could turn all the shit I experience at work into fuel.
let poo return to the earth. jets also. we don’t need poo jets adding to the crap in the air.
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.
We can stop them by taking their money away and giving it to those who need it.
No leisurely intercontinental flights until all children are free from starvation!
Stop subsidising air travel and people are gonna prefer trains and boats real fast.
To be even more doomer, people will have to stop living their lives when we run out of everything, so we might as well start winding down now.
I’d argue that private jets would have to be banned before I’d accept any regulation on economy flights to visit my family that I see every two years
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.
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.
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
As if flying wasnt a shitty enough experience as is.
Fast as shit.
Will it still pollute the atmosphere?
Yes. But the waste is likely to still produce methane that has a bigger climate warming effect that the equivalent co2 of burned but for a shorter period. The general consensus suggests it’s better to burn methane than release it into the environment.
The better solution is to fly less, or wait till flying truly green. The big issue is the incredible amount of subsidy we allow for airlines. Tax or fuel for aircraft is very low. If we cut these subsidies and starting taxing aircraft fuel at similar rates to cars electric/hydrogen aircraft would come about much sooner.
Also, if its in human poo it’s already in the carbon cycle and so really less of an issue. The problem is bringing up carbon that’s been removed from the cycle (subterranean oil or gas pockets) and putting that back into circulation. Granted it would be better to pull carbon out of the atmosphere (somehow), but at least using poo wouldn’t be adding NEW carbon. That’s my understanding anyway.
Carbon can exist in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, (CH4), or as a lot of bigger organic molecules like ethane. Over years, methane you release will eventually decay into CO2. But until that happens, the methane has 20 times the greenhouse effect that CO2 does. So processes like this can take CO2 from the air and turn it into methane, which is bad.
We need less flying, but if we’re going to have flying, it should use technologies like this which have 1/10th the lifecycle emissions of fossil jet fuel.
According to an article I read, the total lifecycle greenhouse emissions is 10% of fossil jet fuel.
Here’s how it works: A farmer grows crops like, say, beans, which take energy from the sun and carbon from the air, and use it to make tasty sugars and proteins. You eat the beans, and your body absorbs the easy nutrients to get. But the stuff that’s hard to get out is left in the food mass and turned into poo. You go to the toilet and your waste is collected by the sewage system. Then this company takes your poo, and uses energy from the grid to subject it to a process that makes crude oil. Then they distill jet fuel from the crude.
All of the carbon that is in the jet fuel came from those beans you ate, which got it from the air. So the jet fuel isn’t adding any new carbon to the air. There are still emissions associated with putting energy into the poo to refine it into oil, though, because it’s using energy from the grid.
