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Excuse my ignorance, but could this possibly lead to an energy source powered by animal waste/urine?
by throwaway743 5y ago
Excuse my ignorance, but could this possibly lead to an energy source powered by animal waste/urine?
- Turing_Machine 5y agoI don't think the ammonia concentrations are high enough to make it cost-effective. There's a reason why commercial ammonia is produced from petroleum rather than being extracted from animal waste. If you wanted to use animal waste, you'd probably be better off fermenting it into methane (that definitely works, and is actually used as a power source in some specialized situations).
- AngryData 5y agoCould it? Yes. Will it? Never, it is worth far too much as fertilizer even when artificial fertilizer is relatively cheap. It is like running a wood fired power plant on antique furniture.
- dredmorbius 5y agoThere's not enough biomass production in the entire US to provide an alternative to present fossil fuel consumption. Even highly optimistic proposals to replace a small fraction of petroleum consumption (aviation fuel) with biofuels would require an area equivalent to much of the central plains states. And that's about 6% of net fuel use. Wastestream energy flows are, by definition, a subset of the net input. Estimates I've seen are for about 1/3 of net energy input being available from waste-streams, though that's usually focused on solid waste. Urine production is based on protein breakdown (urea), which as a nutrient is typically 10-30% of net calories. Even before digging further, the net total resource would be fairly small. Not entirely insignificant, but given costs of collection and processing ... probably unrewarding.