New Hampshire Company Aims To Make Biofuel From Sewage
Sewage tank or oil well? (image: newhampshirelakesandmountains.com)
Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Those are core tenets of the green movement. Most commonly, that means recycling glass bottles or newspapers, or shredding old tires to make the fill for playgrounds.
What about sewage? Wouldn’t it be great if we could do something with sewage? It’s essentially an infinite resource—as long as there are people, there will be sewage—and at present, it’s “waste” in all senses of the word; there’s nothing valuable or productive being done with it.
Until now (maybe). A New Hampshire company, Simply Green Biofuels, hopes to use sewage as the feedstock for oil-producing algae. As our Jennifer Schwatz has written, algae are a promising source for biofuel: high-yield, fast-growing, carbon-neutral, don’t tie up productive farmland, and can thrive almost anywhere—including on sewage. In fact, sewage plants already have algae; the trick is to grow the right kind and then harvest and process the algae economically, which admittedly is a trick no one has quite figured out yet. (Though several companies and researchers are getting close.)
Simply Green currently repurposes waste vegetable oil from restaurants into biodiesel. Processing oil-producing algae into fuel is just an extension of what they already do, which is why they have partnered with Clean Power Development to build an algae farm that they hope will be fed by sewage from the Berlin wastewater treatment facility.
Biodiesel is also a flexible fuel, inasmuch as diesel fuel and home heating oil are chemically identical. Biodiesel can be used, depending on how it’s blended, to heat your home or drive your car or truck. And its net carbon emissions could be zero. If we can produce biodiesel using a never-ending, otherwise worthless waste, that’s a blow for energy independence and the environment.
NH Dealer’s Success with Biofuel is Emblematic of Heating Oil’s Greener Future | HeatingOil.com says: says:
[...] B5 heating oil is supplied by Simply Green, a leading biofuel supplier based in Dover, NH that has made news with its experimentation with sewage as food to grow algae that can be processed into biofuel. For now, Simply Green uses restaurant [...]
Heating Oil Weekly Roundup: Weather Maps, Garbage to Fuel, and Tidal Energy | HeatingOil.com says: says:
[...] green technology getting grosser? Wind turbines look cool, but getting energy from cow manure? Or biofuel from sewage? Awfully resourceful, but still, blech. Now ABC News has a report from the AP’s Jason Dearen on a [...]
Turning Carbon Dioxide into a Resource | HeatingOil.com says: says:
[...] increases production costs. Some companies that have announced plans to turn sewage into biofuels, like New Hampshire’s Simply Green Biofuels, have not yet found an economical way to process algae into [...]
Biofuel Producer Details Advantages of Biofuel Heating Oil | HeatingOil.com says: says:
[...] but biofuel can be produced from a seemingly endless variety of kinds of “biomass”, including municipal sewage (of which there is surely an unlimited and otherwise useless supply) and algae grown in vertical [...]
Company to Create Manure-to-Energy Systems for Farmers | HeatingOil.com says: says:
[...] HeatingOil.com has previously reported on efforts to turn waste into energy, noting on November 10 efforts to extract methane from cow manure in Greeley, Colorado. Similarly, on Sunday HeatingOil.com highlighted that Simply Green Biofuels is looking to use sewage as feedstock for oil-producing algae. [...]