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| March 4,
2005
Santa
Barbara,
California
[Renewable
EnergyAcce
ss.com]
Fuel Cells
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| Energy
in
Wastewater
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| Toronto,
ON,(UPI)
--
Electric
energy
could be
generated
by methane
extracted
from a
city's
wastewater
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Unive |
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| Industry News Feeds
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| Energy
in
Wastewater
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Toronto, ON,(UPI) -- Electric energy could be generated by methane extracted from a city's wastewater, University of Toronto researchers have determined.
Civil engineering professor David Bagley, who conducted the research with lead author and doctoral candidate Ioannis Shizas, used bomb calorimetry, a technique that measures the heat content of materials, to determine the amount of energy stored in wastewater's organic matter.
Their research revealed Toronto's wastewater contained enough organic material to potentially produce 113 megawatts of electricity or close to 990 million kilowatt hours a year.
"With a 20 percent recovery of that potential energy into electricity, the wastewater treatment plants could produce enough electricity for their own operation," Bagley said. "Any recovery of potential energy above that can be returned to the grid."
The city plants currently use aerobic treatment, where microbes decompose organic matter in the presence of oxygen. By using anaerobic digestion instead, in which microbes decompose matter without oxygen, the byproduct of methane-rich gas has an energy content approximately 75 percent that of natural gas, which could become a valuable energy source in the future. |
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