Poo Power

I'm sure some folks were thinking "poo what?" So without further delay let's just get to the dirty details.

From Wired magazine...

The city of Oslo is converting 80 municipal buses to run on biomethane captured from human waste, a novel approach to cutting CO2 emissions and meeting Norway's plan to be carbon-neutral by 2050.

Beginning in September, the two sewage treatment plants in Norway's capital will collect methane, a byproduct of the microbial process that breaks down sewage, and pump it into city buses. City officials say the switch will cut fuel costs and reduce the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by both the treatment plants and the buses.

Poo-to-pump fuel may sound gross, but it isn't like there are guys in hazmat suits shoveling raw sewage into gas tanks. Biomethane is produced during a four-phase process called anaerobic digestion that uses microorganisms to break down everything from human waste and leftover food to lawn clippings and stuff swept from the slaughterhouse floor.

Until now, much of the methane produced by Oslo's sewage treatment plants was flared off into the atmosphere, releasing about 17,000 tons of CO2. But with the city concerned by a big jump in transportation-related air pollution, which has climbed 10 percent since 2000 and contributes to more than half of the country's annual CO2 emissions, officials decided to capture the stuff and burn it in buses.

Talk about a virtuous cycle. Those Norwegians are brilliant although a tiny bit gross.