Poop – The Forever Source Of Clean Hydrogen

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A team from Australia developed a new process that makes hydrogen and carbon-based nanomaterials. From human excrement!

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Image by SirCryalot from Pixabay

If there is one thing we can say about the future for sure, it is that we are going to need a lot of energy and that we are going to have a problem with waste. A team of experts from the Australian RMIT University comes with a technology can effectively or at the very least partially, solves both problems at the same time. It can get gaseous hydrogen from waste waters while capturing all the carbon from human excrement making it readily available for further use.

If this technology proves to be successful then it provides clean energy from a practically inexhaustible renewable energy source. And as a bonus it creates carbon-neutral waste-water cleaning. And if hydrogen becomes one of the key sources of energy in the future, then technologies such as the one from RMIT’s team could be exactly the way to go.

Nowadays, we commonly use processed material from waste-water as fertilizer. But about 30 % gets stored or ends up in landfills. We are able to get methane from landfills, but methane is not exactly a clean source of energy.

Kalpit Shah and his colleagues instead propose a new method of transforming human excrement from the waste-water into bio-charcoal rich in carbon. This bio-charcoal can be used as a catalyst that transforms the methane rich bio-gas into carbon and hydrogen. The process of transforming the excrement is very effective and done inside an advanced high-temperature pyrolysis reactor. Carbon and gaseous hydrogen gets created becomes part of a different form of charcoal that includes carbon nanostructures. This material could have many uses from cleaning the environment to storing energy.

The important thing is that while burning bio-gases releases a lot of carbon into the atmosphere their process instead uses carbon in a sensible way. At the same time their technology is not too large and thus mobile.

Experiments show that when the reactor runs for half an hour at a temperature of 900° Celsius about 70 % of the methane in the bio-gas transforms into hydrogen and carbon. Australians are already starting a test of the new technology which has been nicknamed Poop-to-hydrogen to find out how useful it could be used in waste-water cleaning.

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