With ongoing concerns about over-reliance on fossil fuels, researchers and entrepreneurs are looking for alternate ways to generate energy. One university scientist has created a power plant fueled by organic waste, including table scraps from restaurants. Tamara Keith reports:
Transcript
With ongoing concerns about over-reliance on fossil fuels, researchers and entrepreneurs are looking for alternate ways to generate energy. One university scientist has created a power plant fueled by organic waste, including table scraps from restaurants. Tamara Keith reports:
At Boulevard, an upscale restaurant, diners lunch on seared sea scallops, paella and grilled escolar among other options.
Back in the kitchen cooks are careful to keep all food scraps out of the trash.
(Kitchen sounds, scraping sounds)
The food scraps from this restaurant and 2,000 others in the San Francisco Bay Area are already being collected to turn into compost.
But now some of that food, about 8 tons a week, is going to a new biogas power plant at the University of California Davis. Tim Quaintance is a chef at Boulevard. He says he’s pleased that his leftovers aren’t just going to a landfill.
“It’s nice that in the past things that have basically been thrown away are now actually being used, and with this technology really contributing to reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.”
(Generator runs in background)
In Davis, the table scraps are being converted into fuel at an experimental power plant known as the Biogas Energy Project. With its four large steel tanks and 22 kilowatt generator, this plant is the first real-world demonstration of a technique called anaerobic phased solids digestion.
Rayhong Jha is a professor of biological and agricultural engineering at the University of California Davis. She first developed this technology on a smaller scale in her lab.
“What you see here is 20,000 times larger than the reactor system I use for laboratory testing.”
It may sound like something out of a science fiction movie, leftovers into power, but Dave Konwinski says it’s real. He’s CEO of Onsite Power Systems Incorporated which licensed the technology and operates the plant.
“Every ton of collected food waste will provide enough either electrical or thermal energy to run an average of 10 California homes.”
Konwinski sees this test plant as the first step to commercializing biogas power plants. Here’s how it works: the food waste as well as grass clippings and other would-be-trash go into a sealed tank where bacteria break the mush down into water and organic acids… kind of like what happens if you leave lettuce in the fridge too long. When that’s done, the organic acids are pumped into another tank where different bacteria convert the soup into methane gas.
“Biogas can be used to run a generator, we have a generator we’ll be running here, or we can use it in the boiler to offset natural gas heat, and we’re looking at taking the gas and converting it into vehicle fuels.”
The trash and recycling company that serves San Francisco, NorCal Waste Systems, is providing the raw materials. Robert Reed is company’s director of corporate communications.
“This research and other research like this is very important because it could be a double or a triple. What I mean by that is it could produce new energy. It could reduce the amount of material going to landfills. And it could help reduce the creation of greenhouse gasses.”
And Reed says if this technology proves to be commercially viable, the results could be huge. In just California alone, 38 million tons of garbage is sent to landfills each year. He says half of that could be converted to power, and that’s enough energy to continuously power the entire city of San Francisco.
Suddenly leaving a little broccoli on your plate doesn’t seem like such a bad thing.
For the Environment Report, I’m Tamara Keith.