Fuelled by Urine - Cheaper than Platinum

Urine powered fuel cell

Cheap fuel cells that use carbonised and dried urine as a catalyst in place of platinum could be a reality in the near future.

Fuel cells often use platinum as a catalyst, driving up the cost of the technology. Researchers have been looking at ways to replace the metal with carbon nanostructures, but those are expensive to produce too.

Researchers from the Department of Advanced Materials Chemistry, Korea University demonstrated that equally effective carbon compounds can be extracted from urine — making them a cheap stand-in for platinum or synthetic carbon.

The scientists collected urine samples from healthy individuals, which they heated to evaporate the water contents, leaving behind a dried, yellowish deposit. They then super-heated various test samples of dried urine in a range between 700 and 1,000 degrees Celsius for six hours to carbonise the urine.

The heating process caused salts and other elements to gasify and leave behind carbon. Urine is loaded with other elements besides carbon, which makes the leftover carbon highly porous — ideal for fuel cell catalysts.

Most importantly, the urine carbon was an excellent conductor of electricity, especially the batch that was heated to 1,000 degrees. Researchers said this is the first time carbon was extracted from urine using this simple method.

According to the scientists, roughly 300 to 400 milligrams of urine carbon can be extracted from a single litre of urine, and the ease of harvest means this could very well be a scalable idea.

Yes...Sustainable Rum Production

Let's be a little frivolous today.

Nothing like a shot of rum on a cool or cold evening, especially around a campfire.  Think of outback Australia with a campfire blazing or a sea going sailing ship in the roaring forties.  But did you realise that even rum production is going ........well, sustainable!

While the term sustainable has many connotations, in this case it is about improved water use as well as smart, sustainable biomass energy use.

The Caribbean is well known for rum production, as is Bundberg in Australia.  Two of the biggest rum producers in the Caribbean though, have been embracing much more sustainable options in the rum distilling process from sugarcane.

Rum production produces rather nasty wastewater which needs to be disposed of some how. The Serrallés Rum Distillery in Ponce, Puerto Rico produces DonQ, its main brand of rum, which is the most popular rum in Puerto Rico. It is one of the largest rum distilleries in the Caribbean with an annual output capacity of 15 million proof gallons. The company has spent a decade and $16 million on a new filtration system.

Serrallés used to dump its wastewater into nearby fields, but during rainy season the waste would run off and the distillery would have to shut down when flooding starting which cost the company $200,000 a year. There are claims that Serrallés has turned the "$75 million distillery into one of the cleanest in the world."

The filtration system also saves the company money, as Roberto Serrallés, the VP of business development points out. The wastewater produces biogas which the company uses to run its boilers. Serrallés, who is a sixth generation rum maker with a Ph.D in environmental studies from the University of Oregon, said that the system saves them "as much as nearly 50 percent of annual fuel use."

Serrallés is not the only Puerto Rican rum maker to make its operations more sustainable, with itsmain competitor in Puerto Rico, Bacardi Limited also moving that way.  Bacardi released its 2012 CSR report a few months ago which highlights steps it is taking to reduce energy and water use, reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and source more responsible materials. Bacardi Limited is the largest privately held spirits company in the world.

So next time you have a bacardi and coke........you can claim to be drinking sustainably produced rum!!  Will you remember that after a few rums??  Or care?

Renewable Energy IS Getting Cheaper

A series of reports published on 6 June 2012 by the International Renewable Energy Association  [IRENA] [See www.irena.org ] shows some detailed figures in the publications about the costs of renewable energy form various sources, and the expected costs over the next few years.

Solar energy in various formats seems to be trending strongly lower in costs, while hydro power is already about the lowest cost around for renewable energy.

Cost of solar has reached very attractive costs for domestic use in a number of countries, with Germany among the lowest cost countries.

The reports are free and easily downloadable from their web site, and provide a fairly non partisan view of renewable energy costs in various forms, covering a rang eof solar types, hydropower, wind energy, biomass and similar.  It is interesting to note that biomass can be an attractive option cost wise in areas where residuals exist and can be converted to energy.  The reports are separate for the various energy forms.