Sunday, December 18, 2016
HOW TO TURN POOP INTO FUEL.
Poop better referred to as feces or waste has found another use aside from fertilizer and electricity generation,now there is a new technique that converts poop to petrol. The need to look at alternative to promote environmental safety as regards waste management has produced so many by-products that are economical but also eco-friendly. Researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have successfully taken raw sewage and converted it to what they call biocrude oil, which can be refined in the same way as crude oil to make fuels like gasoline and diesel. The technique is called hydrothermal liquefaction, and it’s an accelerated, artificial version of the process by which crude oil is created inside the Earth’s crust. Waste is subjected to high pressure and temperature—3,000 pounds per square inch and 660 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively—which cause it to break down into basic chemical compounds.Scientists have essentially taken a natural process that normally takes millions of years and replicated it in a lab such that it can be done in hours. The researchers working on this project estimated one person, over the course of a year, could generate two to three gallons of biocrude oil. A 42-gallon barrel of crude oil yields about 19 gallons of gasoline, so assuming a similar conversion rate, three gallons of biocrude may yield about 1.4 gallons of gasoline. This waste to wealth initiative if properly harnessed can revive countries whose economy is fuel-dependent and also boost other countries that have no reliable means of survival but have enormous waste they generate and litter the environment constituting a nuisance. The first step towards harnessing this waste will be to build proper toilets with sewage treatment plants to collect the waste and start the journey towards conversion and fuel generation.