This approach used by the OSU researchers can be broken down into following steps:
OSU’s new microbial fuel cell technology uses reduced anode-cathode spacing, evolved microbes and new separator materials to improve the amount of energy that it can harvest from the organic mater. These improvements allow the fuel cell to produce electricity more efficiently than with anaerobic digestors (which is essentially a process of recovering methane gas from decomposing waste) – and actually treats the wastewater more effectively (source). |
If you've been paying attention to the political back and forth of the presidential campaign this last week (and props to you if you haven't), we've been hearing the candidates talk about energy issues. Whatever your politics are, everyone agrees that increasing our energy source capacity is needed. Energy costs are a significant part of wastewater treatment plants budgets, and overall wastewater treatment accounts for 3% of electrical energy consumed in the United States (source). When you take these facts into account, the research coming out of Oregon State University this week becomes very exciting. Researchers have developed a microbial fuel cell that produces anywhere between 10-100 times more electrictricty per volume (source). The new technology "could eventually change the way that wastewater is treated all over the world, replacing the widely used "activated sludge" process that has been in use for almost a century" (source). Melissa Lott breaks it down the basic process for us below. While these advances may not be the single silver bullet to our future energy problems, they certainly provide a part of the solution. Perhaps our future will be filled with many different puzzle pieces of energy sources - fossil fuels, nuclear, wind, solar, hydropower, and yes, wastewater.
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When you think of the grand scheme of things, 40 years to our planet Earth is just about nothing. However, this year Landsat is going on it's 4oth year of bringing us images of Earth. Landsat passes over each part of the Earth every 16 days, and has been since 1972. To celebrate this anniversary, Google put it's computers to work, processed the data, and made it accessible to all of us. The imagery that the resulting timelapse videos provides is remarkable and it some cases incredibly informative. The change of water bodies because of human usage over time is particularly telling. For all the information available, check out the Google Earth Engine. Below, I picked out three of my favorites. The first video gives a great overview of Landsat and the Google project, while the second and third show the changes in the Las Vegas area and the Aral Sea. |
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