One of the easiest ways to help the planet might come from…human waste. 💩
Natural gas is a commonly used fossil fuel. The secret? Natural gas is mostly just methane; the same gas created from human waste.
In fact, toilets exploding can absolutely happen, which is why bringing a candle into an outhouse is a very bad idea. Some places even put this to use, such as using sewers to fuel street lamps(called sewer gas destructor lamps), which have the duel-purpose cutting down on smells and dangerous gas buildups
There’s also more 💩 can do for us. For example…
- ⚡️Generate power (use the methane to replace natural gas).
- 🚗 Create fuel for vehicles
- 🔥 Create fuel for gas burners
- 🌱 Create compost (biosolids from the sewage treatment/methane plants) to help with phosphorus mining shortages
These options could greatly help with the transition from fossil fuels, and provide incentives for all cities to stop dumping raw sewage(yes, many places still do this).
Videos for more learning:
Isn’t that still a carbon-based energy source? Aren’t we trying to move away from those?
Methane is a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so it’s better to burn it. It’s also better to burn the methane that is going to be released from sewage anyway and leave fossil fuel gas trapped in the Earth’s crust.
The main difference is that it would be moving from non-renewable sources to renewables. As well as that, the methane is already there being released, it’s just right now we don’t use it and instead a large portion of the world just dumps it into the ocean or rivers untreated. So it would be turning human waste pollution into fuel and fertilizer instead of contaminating water sources and releasing the methane.
In cold climates, heat pumps don’t work when it’s gets to -40c, so people who own them have gas furnaces as a backup. The same happens with electric vehicles; their range drops with the temperature, and some stopped working a few days last winter.
SO that’s why human waste is considered a “transition fuel.” It’s an option to supplement other energy sources until we have what we need to transition away for good.