While most car makers are focused on developing vehicles that run on electricity, hydrogen, and even solar and wind power, in an effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, there is one other alternative energy source that is available in abundance, but has yet to be used in the automotive industry at a true commercial scale. It’s biomass, which is derived from various plant materials, as well as urban, farm animal and human waste. While biofuels produced through conversion of residues from plants and animals are being used as transportation fuels in many countries around the world, particularly in Brazil and the United States, human waste has yet to reach its full potential as a source for production of biofuels, and a British energy company is looking to change that.
GENeco, a UK-based company that provides renewable energy solutions, has partnered up with Bath Bus Company – a bus service provider that operates in the English city of Bristol – to create a pilot project involving one of Bath Bus’s vehicles running on biomethane gas that GENeco produces from human waste. The Bio-Bus, which already got some clever alternative names, such as “Poo-Bus”, is powered by biomethane, which in addition to human waste, is also made from food waste, and has a range of 186 miles per one tank of gas. According to GENeco, it takes five years worth of human waste to produce enough biomethane gas to fill one tank.
The bus has a 40-passenger seating capacity, and it made its first trip on a shuttle route from Bristol to Bath, covering 20 miles and emitting considerably lower amounts of carbon dioxide in the process, as compared to a regular diesel bus. It emits 90 percent less carbon dioxide than a gasoline-powered bus, and 30 percent less than a diesel bus. The bus transports up to 10,000 passengers per month between the Bristol Airport and the city of Bath.
GENeco produces biomethane by treating sewage and food waste using a method called anaerobic digestion, where organic waste is broken down into methane and carbon dioxide with the help of microbes. The carbon dioxide is removed in the process, along with the impurities that the waste contains, so that there are no inconvenient odors coming out of the vehicle while the fuel is being burned in the internal combustion engine.
In addition to supplying transportation fuel, GENeco also injects some of the gas it produces into the national grid, thus providing energy for thousands of households.
Nearly 35,000 tons of biomethane are produced in GENeco’s plant annually, which can meet the energy needs of 8,500 homes, according to the company itself. Charlotte Morton, the chief executive of the Anaerobic Digestion and Bioresources Association, said that biomethane could replace as much as 10% of the gas needs in the UK.
“Gas-powered vehicles have an important role to play in improving air quality in UK cities but the Bio-Bus goes further than that and is actually powered by people living in the local area, including quite possibly those on the bus itself,” GENeco’s general manager Mohammed Saddiq said in an interview with the BBC.