Discovery Channel & Paul O'Callaghan: Turning Human Waste into Energy

Feces, Poo. Guano.

This stinks.

These words don't exactly have a positive connotation. Let's face facts. It's not nice to call something a piece of. But poo is a source of power. How much power? More than you could possibly imagine.

Inventor Dean Kamen is on a quest.

To find technology that will solve humanity's hardest problems. With correspondent Joanne Colin, they'll meet the mavericks whose radical ideas will change our world forever. So, Joanna, I have an interesting statistic for you. If you took all the human and cow excrement produced worldwide for just two days and extracted the energy from it, you could power New York City for an entire year.

Are you kidding?

Methane can be a great power source, and it's inside poop. But I've got another odious statistic for you. Cows alone produce nearly 15% of methane gas. That's more greenhouse gas than all the cars in the world. And virtually none of that's being turned into energy. And the poo from people? That isn't being turned into energy either.

How do we take all of that waste and turn it into energy?

That's what we're gonna go.

While Dean heads to California, I'm at Blue Spruce Farms in Bridport, Vermont. From the outside, it looks like your typical farm. But inside, a dairy farmer named Marie Audette is taking American agriculture into the 21st century using massive makers of energy, awesome emblems of environmental efficiency. Cows.

We milk 1100 cows. Yeah. And they give us.

How many are in here?

There's probably 500 in here.

Okay.

And they produce almost 8,000 gallons of milk every single day. For us, this right here constitutes a lot of investments for us. We are a business, and we have to be profitable. Otherwise we can't exist.

Marie's family opened the farm in 1958. Since then, while demand for dairy has gone up, prices paid to farmers have largely stayed stagnant, driving most family farms out of business.

50 years ago, I think there was 640,000 dairy farms providing food for the country. We're down to just over 50,000. There are not very many of us left. So now we're trying to reach out and say, okay, we can be smarter about this. We've got to find technologies to make us more efficient.

Marie considered a variety of options, but the best way to bring costs down was right under her nose.

Our cows, we can count on them to poop 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

No shortage of manure.

That's right. As long as they're eating, they're creating fuel for cow power.

Here's how it works. Most cattle farms dump their cow poo in big lagoons, which can leak, poisoning the land and nearby water supplies. Instead, the manure on Marie's farm is first collected in the barn.

Well, if you look right down at the floor underneath cows, we have what's effectively a squeegee on wheels.

Oh, look, here it goes. That's a lot of cow manure. Then the feces flows into a big tank that's heated to 100 degrees called the digester.

So, Joanne, I bet you don't know you're standing on top of 600,000 gallons of manure.

Like all animal poop, this manure emits methane gas. The methane rises to the top of the digester, where it is pumped into the generator. The gas fuels the generator, which produces electricity, which goes through the cables to support the local power company's grid.

And so this is enough to power.

Your farm and more. We power equivalent of 400 homes.

So you and your family have no electricity bills.

Exactly. We have a credit. We get some money back.

And the poo's powers aren't exhausted yet because after all that time in the digester, its liquids are filled with nutrients. Now, most of that can be used for fertilizer, but some are heading to America's first family farm algae facility fueled by feces.

This is the first of its kind algae products system. We're basically taking the wastes that Marie provides us with. Lots of nutrients from the manure and.

Growing algae in this facility.

From the algae, we'll then extract oil.

Algae have a lot of oil inside them, but getting it out isn't easy. Now, for the first time, engineers are using a new approach with an existing technology called electrophoresis. While covered in water, the algae would be given an electric shock, ripping them apart and releasing their oil. That oil then rises to the top, where it is siphoned off and used for biofuel.

And there's a high yield of oil from this sort of fattened algae.

Yes.

You can get a lot more oil.

From algae than you could, for instance, oil from soybeans or oil from any other oil crop. So algae has the potential to produce a tremendous amount of fuel on a very small area.

The plan is to use the algae's oil to fuel their farm and farms nearby. Marie and Mark think they're about one year away. You're the first one who's kind of stuck your neck out on the line to really make this happen. It's Kind of a brave thing to do.

This creative energy that you're sensing here is probably out of necessity and survival as much as anything else. You know, our family's been here for 50 years. We provide our own energy needs from within the farm. And if we can do that, we're going to be here for a long time. These technologies that you're seeing here, I mean, that's the way of the future. This is the future of American farming.

Coming up. Can your bowel movements make coal? Almost. But getting there ain't pretty. In that truck, So far, we've seen a farm that's able to turn feces into fuel. They did it by using cow poo to feed algae that can then be harvested for oil. Impressive stuff, but it's hard to imagine doing that on any kind of a massive scale anytime soon. We could build an Olympic sized swimming pool's worth of algae every second for the next 25 years, and we still wouldn't meet America's energy needs. I also think that their solution doesn't help us solve the problem of what we do with the human waste in this country. That's a big problem. We spend more than $5 billion a year just on processing our poo. Doesn't that strike you as crazy? There's got to be a better way. So I'm flying to Rialto, California, where two guys at a company called Enertec have built an immense facility at a cost of $150 million. It's the only plant in America that can take your poo and turn it into pellets with the power of coal. It's called E fuel. So without any foul language, what are you guys doing here?

Most human waste and in the industry called biosolids, it's turned into a material that's like 25% solids and put on land. We want to stop that.

That's because some studies suggest that human waste, even after treatment, has toxins in it. Plus, we have thousands of trucks driving this waste millions of miles a year, dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and increasing global warming. EnerTech's CEO is trying to change that.

The waste that we're processing, it is a resource, and it can be made into something valuable. And that's what we're doing.

Kevin's grandfather, Norman Dickinson, is an inventor who spent years trying to maximize the amount of energy he could get out of coal.

My grandfather would always talk about his inventions, and as a little child, I'm like, wow, that's really cool. I'd love to be Able to help you someday.

Kevin began helping Norman in the 80s. That's when his granddad wondered, maybe we can get energy not just out of fossil fuels like coal or oil, but from our own feces. It was an extraordinary idea, but nobody thought much of it at the time.

People said that you would never raise enough money. Many people said that large companies would learn about you and they would, you know, they would bypass you. I mean, there was literally hundreds of explanations of why we wouldn't suggest seed. It's been a long haul, but this dream has come to reality.

It all begins with a smelly dump truck. I think I'll back up a little.

They treat it to make sure it's disinfected. So what we usually do is give it a little bit of help up on the ladder with a hose and help it slide down. You want to go do that?

Absolutely. Let's go give it a try.

All right.

That's probably the cleanest that trailer's been for a while, huh?

Lot of in that truck.

A lot of in that truck. This is the heart of the process right here. So what happens is, material comes in, it's cold out of that truck. We push it in here under a lot of pressures. Then we start adding heat with these heat exchangers right here. So it heats it all up. Then it goes into this reactor. Inside that reactor is when the carbonization process takes place.

And it's a pretty amazing process. Subjected to all the pressure and temperatures up to 450 degrees, the cellular structures of the biosolids ruptures, unleashing carbon dioxide. As a result, the biosolids now repel water instead of absorbing it. That's important because, remember, these guys want to turn your feces into a solid coal, like fuel. They've got to get the water out. So what's the big cylinder? I assume maybe the dryer?

You got it.

The biosolids are dried and then separated. That final product is better than 90% solid right now.

That's right.

So do you want to go see some E fuel?

I'd love to. So you're about to hand me a pile of poo.

Think of it as 21st century coal.

You know, most people know how to turn money into. It's nice to know that you're turning this into money. That's right.

It takes us about a day to turn that truckload of poo into this E fuel. Coal takes about 100 million years.

E fuel has only half the energy, but it only has one third the price. That means People that are using e fuel are getting 66% more energy for your buck. No other solid biofuel even comes close. But it's the potential environmental savings that are really exciting.

We save about 80,000 tons a year in greenhouse gas, all carbon dioxide emissions compared to a plant that's using coal.

So every ton of your that gets burned instead of a ton of coal is a big win for the environment. If all the waste treatment facilities in America made e fuel, we would reduce carbon emissions by an astonishing 6.5 million tons a year. That's the equivalent of taking more than a million cars off the road. So it's a win, win, win.

It's a win, win, win.

With global warming on the rise, it looks like the the once ignored ideas of Kevin's granddad are finally being taken seriously.

We've got a lot of people visiting this site from all over the world. Things have come together for us, and it is a perfect time.

Well, you might turn out to be like a lot of the other great successes I've met in my Life. After about 40 years, an overnight success.

Yeah. Thank you.

Coming up, a fiery furnace of feces pushes Joanne to the brink.

The stink.

So, in Vermont, we've seen a futuristic farm that uses methane from cow poo to power hundreds of homes while also getting oil from algae. And in California, we've checked out a facility turning feces into fuel. But that algae is a ways off from making enough oil to matter much. And the California plant is still using a lot of electricity. But what if there were a way to harness every bit of energy from feces without using any electricity at all? That would mean a real green revolution. And appropriately, it starts in Ireland.

I'm in Cork, Ireland's second largest city. This picturesque place may be 1,500 years old, but when it comes to waste, they're on the cutting edge with a processing plant that's almost literally turning guano into gold. At the center of this environmental alchemy is scientist Paul o'. Callaghan.

Joanne.

Paul, you're not proposing a dip in this pool, are you?

You can go if you want.

I hate to think what's actually in this pool.

Not for swimming.

Hi. Very nice to meet you.

Likewise, indeed.

So where are you exactly?

You're at the Carrigren and wastewater treatment plant in Cork City, Ireland. Every day, 40 million gallons of sewage comes through this plant from about a quarter of a million people. This is the first step in the treatment process where we take in the water and we allow waste to settle out of it.

Delicious. Quite a cocktail going on down here.

That's quite a mixture.

But where I was going was even less appetizing. I can only describe it as dookies inferno.

Okay, look, I brought you here today to give you an idea what we're dealing with.

This stinks.

It does. It does indeed. I agree. It's a purpose, man. So is the energy that it can potentially produce.

You seem fine.

I'm used to it. Currently, they dewater it, they dry it and they spread it onto farms. What we're going to look at next will be a technology which can take this and unlock some of the energy and the resources which are actually contained within it.

So I hope that where we're heading. I'm going to feel a bit less nauseous.

You will, you will.

Or you want to stay here another hour to get used to it?

I don't want to do that.

Let's go.

So all of that dried material, all of that dried sludge we saw in.

That building, we smelled in that building.

Indeed smelled. So still has energy locked inside of it. A lot of energy. That's energy which is going through this plant 365 days a year. And in every city in the world that has a wastewater treatment plant, you can potentially unlock that energy. And we just need to change how we think about it, to see it as a resource as opposed to a waste.

It was onto an experimental plant run by a cutting edge company called Supercritical Fluids International.

So welcome to our treatment plants. This is our demonstration facility where we can treat the sewage waste from 14,000 people at a full scale plant. You would be looking at more like 500,000 people to 1.5 million.

Okay, but is sewage sludge, raw sewage? At this point? When it comes in, it's pretty raw.

At this point. We're essentially mixing and blending the sewage here, getting it to one consistency. And then it goes into this feed tank, which is the first step in our process.

The treated sewage goes through pipes and into a series of pumps.

This is the next step, really, where we bring up the pressure using these pumps. These are high pressure pumps. We increase the pressure to 3200 pounds per square inch.

Which sounds like a lot of pressure.

Yeah, it's an incredible amount. 3200 psi. It would be like an elephant standing on a dime. Okay.

Squashed.

Squashed indeed. Yeah. Or about 100 times the pressure in the tire of your car. Then we increase the temperature.

We've squished the poo.

Now we're going to cook exactly We've squished it and now we're going to heat it and bake.

What kind of heat are we talking about?

You're talking 700 degrees Fahrenheit.

Wow, that's hot enough to melt lead about 500 degrees beyond water's boiling point. I think I'm intimidated.

Come into the.

I step into what Paul calls the hot room. It's here that one of the most difficult problems in waste disposal is dealt.

With.

What to do with the water that makes up most of our poo.

So organic waste, human waste, animal waste, they're mostly water.

Even though it doesn't look like it.

Yeah, it's still 70 or 80% water. I mean, you and I are 70% water. And our waste is even higher percentage.

Remember, we spend $5 billion a year just processing our solid waste. And most of that cost is just to separate the water from the solid waste. What if we didn't have to do that here?

Rather than trying to remove the water from the waste, we use the water. We use the water as a medium to destroy the organic material.

It's a breakthrough idea coming up. You think, you know, H2O, it can be a liquid, ice, steam. Well, guess what, science fans, there's a fourth form of water. And what these guys are doing with it might just change the world.

To get the inside poop on how human waste is being used for energy, go to planetgreen.com Dean.

Joanne's in Cork, Ireland, where a cutting edge company is taking the simplest ingredient imaginable, water, and using it to obliterate human waste and generate energy in a pollution free way that's never been tried before. The human waste, partially treated, comes into the plant and is subjected to incredible pressures and temperatures up to 700 degrees Fahrenheit. This combination brings the water way past its boiling point. It's no longer water, it's not steam, and it's definitely not ice.

It's not a solid, it's not a liquid, it's not a gas. It's in a fourth state, supercritical. It's somewhere in between a liquid and a gas. It will diffuse like a gas, but it will dissolve like a liquid. And you get very rapid rates of reaction in supercritical water.

These reactions are so dramatic that engineers all around the world are racing to use this fourth form of water in nuclear reactors. That's because this fourth form form of water, invisible to the naked eye, has enormous power.

Supercritical water oxidation will basically destroy any organic material known to man. Pharmaceuticals, explosive wastes, Poo Poo. That's one of the easier ones to destroy.

Hazardous toxic waste.

Absolutely. Any highly hazardous, highly toxic waste will be completely destroyed in this process.

In just 60 seconds, the piped in pooh is completely dissolved and broken down into its molecular components.

Supercritical, super quickly.

Indeed.

So much steam is produced from the water that it can power the entire plant. And then some additional energy is sent onto the electrical grid for use by homes and businesses. And the carbon dioxide is sold as gas.

So what you see here in these beakers, that's what we started with.

Right.

Within 60 seconds, it was completely oxidised. We've decanted the water. And this is the ash which is left behind.

That's the silica.

That would be the silica.

The silica, a clay like material, can be sold as an ingredient to make cement. This is phosphorus, and the phosphorus is used for fertilizer. So the waste coming into this plant is 100% recycled. It's almost impossible to imagine that there aren't harmful byproducts from being able to do this.

You get complete destruction of all the material in there into harmless and safe byproducts. So we're actually releasing the energy can export electricity back to the grid as opposed to consuming energy in the process.

Who knew?

It's all in the poo.

It's all there. You just got to figure out how to reuse it.

Dean, I really like what those guys are doing in Ireland, and I see no reason why you can't use supercritical water in the treatment for animal waste as well. I think it would really help fight global warming and bring energy costs down.

Well, it really will be exciting when they can finally cost effectively extract useful energy from what we used to think of as waste.

It would be a revolution.

Yeah, Perhaps the smelliest revolution in history. But if we all join in, maybe we can finally stop wasting our waste. That would be a good thing.