Biofuels From Hazardous Waste

Today, I am thinking about supply chains. With the failure of manufacturing for critical PPE and the price of oil dropping through the floor, there is a whole bunch of ripple effects in the world of consulting and industrial infrastructure. These ripples kind of annoy me. The total reliance we have on fossil fuels is, frankly, dumb. There is a lot of evidence showing that if we removed the Federal subsidies for oil and gas and compared it to renewable energy sources, renewable comes out on top.

“Oh,” cry the critics, “But we can’t switch over to non-planet ruining materials because our infrastructure is completely built around and dependent on these sources.”

Poppycock, I say.

A former friend called yesterday and was chatting about his interests in engines and a new combustion engine Mazda is putting out that registers a 90% efficiency. That’s pretty fantastic all on its own. But that got me thinking. First, why can’t we just switch to straight electric?

Easy.

Electricity has to come from somewhere. Water. Nuclear. Solar. Cool. All those already exist. But what if we could grow our own hydrogen producers or biofuel producers that would facilitate a transition from existing combustion -fueled sources to those delightful renewable systems that need more time to generate a proper distribution net?

Enter the biofuel. Not your average sugar-cane or ethanol biofuel. That was so last year.

As any good water engineer will tell you, bugs are delightful. A complex waste stream grows complex critters and those critters eat all kinds of things and produce all kinds of things. In my world, we have a lot of complex carbohydrates called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and metals that need to get chewed up. A lot of those creatures produce hydrogen sulfide as a byproduct, which isn’t going to do us any good, given that is massively toxic (and ruins all my nice pretty installed electronics). But let’s take this from a different angle.

The NEB ratio is a metric used to evaluate bioenergy systems by comparing the energy available for consumption in the produced energy carrier (ie toxic industrial waste) to the energy required to make the energy. We will also need to look at a critical amount of energy needed for end-state, point of use materials. Let’s assume that biofuel is going to replace diesel and gasoline, for example.

In this model, the trick would be to develop local, point of generation microbial and fungal communities that could degrade and sequester the contaminants of concern and produce useful oil and/or hydrogen. The oil could directly become the new biofuel material and the hydrogen could be incorporated into powering other, specialized vehicles. This would result in a very, very high NEB and potentially a very profitable experience since right now all that hazardous waste has to be treated and discharged at loss. What if it because an energy source that could be sold at profit? Money. Money coming out of your ears. Especially for those industries like the railroads that use more diesel that any other industry on earth except for the US Navy. Now, they could produce their own fuel out of a waste product and possibly even sell the excess.

This is called maximizing the life-cycle assessment and it is the gold standard for us environmental engineers.

But, Ossie, you say, there can’t be creatures that eat toxic waste and poop bio-oil or hydrogen! That must be impossible!

Au contraire, my darlings. PAH’s bear some strong similarities to lignocellulose feedstocks and those can easily be broken down with a combination of plants, microbes, and fungi (especially fungi. Mushrooms will save the world. You heard it here first, folks). Granted, most of these produce methane as a byproduct, but that’s combustible as natural gas and could be a good substitute for that fossil fuel as well.

My hypothesis is that is would be possible to expertly tailor an industrial waste stream through a bioreactor (anaerobic or aerobic) to produce bio-oil, hydrogen, or alternate fuel sources that could then be used to power the industry itself and enough excess could be generated to fuel civilian and community needs to prevent needing any more mined fossil fuels.

Now, this is not particularly a new idea. Agricultural companies have been experimenting with anaerobic bioreactors to generate plant power for years. Especially beer manufacturers, cause all that yeasty goodness is just sugar waiting to get turned to gold.

What I’m talking about here is the real hard-core industry that is classified as toxic/hazardous waste and currently gets discharged for municipal plants or stormwater systems to deal with (thank you, Donald Trump for killing all the regulations that protect our water. Boo.")

For these systems, picture an industrial water system that used raw water to fill clear, plexiglass columns exposed to sunlight with a decant system that would allow off-gas collection and bio-oil skimming with a pipeline directly into storage tanks for active use (on rail lines, for example). In places with low light, a proper anaerobic bioreactor could substitute and help power trains and planes by propane-type substitutes instead.

Pretty, right? No pollution, 100% use. Produce enough to even sell to local needs. All homegrown, available, modular, and cradle-to-cradle sustainable with minimal impact to existing facilities to manage that transition to clean energy sources, potentially even making the transition PROFITABLE. Which, as we know, is the only way to get anything done in this world.