Engineers from GENeco are obsessed with feces, in an environmentally friendly way. They have converted a VW Beetle to run off of methane gas that comes from human waste.
According to Natural News it is called it the Bio-Bug and it runs off of flammable poo gas. The methane gas that powers the engine is produced naturally as animal feces decay.
In the United Kingdom they are currently using a sewer system that breaks down human waste. It extracts gas efficiently and uses it for power. The collected gas is often used to create fuel for electric generators on dairy farms.
Here is a quote from the article relating to the collection of gas on farms:
“In order to reap power from poop, farms install an anaerobic digester which, over a period of twenty days or so, breaks down some of the collected poop’s solids into acids, which feed bacteria, which in turn digest the manure and produce bio-gas,” writes Alex Steffen in his book Worldchanging.
In the past, cars that were powered by methane suffered a lot of performance issues and there was always a clear downgrade switching to a methane motor.
“Previously the gas hasn’t been clean enough to fuel motor vehicles without it affecting performance,” Mohammed Saddiq – who designed the engine prototype – told Natural News.
“However, through using the latest technology our Bio-Bug drives like any conventional car and what’s more it uses sustainable fuel. If you were to drive the car you wouldn’t know it was powered by biogas as it performs just like any conventional car. “
The main factor in making a high-performance methane powered engine is a practice known as bio-gas upgrading. With bio-gas upgrading carbon dioxide is taken from the gas produced by excrement fermentation.
Incredibly the Bio-Bug can go as fast as 114 miles per hour, which is fast enough the outrun the eco-police in their Smart Cars. The bug is also considered carbon neutral because all of the carbon it produced from methane combustion would have been released by the decay of poop anyways.
GENeco says that one British sewer with the methane collecting adaptions could power a Bio-Bug for 95.4 million miles in one year. This would lower carbon emissions by 19,000 tons.
Or you could say that the human mud from 70 houses could power a single car for 10,000 miles, that’s another way to put it. While this is an interesting development based on that information it looks like methane engines would never be able to replace petrol powered engine based on current driving levels.
I’m still blown away that there are people who are willing to study poop so closely. Gross. Good job guys, you found a good use for unwanted poop.
