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Powerful Ideas: Turning Winery Waste into Fuel
Fox News
As if turning grapes into wine wasn’t enough, now wineries are aiming to transform their waste into fuel.
The first example of a new renewable method for generating hydrogen fuel from wastewater is now operating at a California winery. The refrigerator-sized generator takes waste from the Napa Wine Company in Oakville, Calif., and feeds it to microbes inside. With the aid of a little electricity, these naturally occurring bacteria break the organic material in the wastewater into hydrogen gas.
There is a lot more energy locked in the wastewater than is currently used to treat it, explained researcher Bruce Logan, an environmental engineer at Penn State University. Eventually, the winery would like to use the hydrogen to run vehicles and power systems.
“It’s nice that Napa Wine Company offered up their winery and facilities to test this new approach,” Logan said. “We chose a winery because it is a natural tourist attraction. People go there all the time to experience wine making and wine, and now they can also see a demonstration of how to make clean hydrogen gas from agricultural wastes.”
Napa Wine Company’s wastewater comes from grape disposal, wine making, cleaning equipment and other processes. The company already has on-site wastewater treatment and recycling, and the partially treated water from the hydrogen generator will join other water for further treatment and use in irrigation.
The experimental generator will continuously process about 1,000 liters of wastewater a day. “This is the first time that a reactor of this size has been attempted either in the laboratory or the field,” Logan told LiveScience.
The generator started up in September, “and the performance continues to improve,” Logan said. Still, “we are not yet at our goal of daily production of one liter of hydrogen per liter of reactor,” he added. “We hope to generate more energy in the form of hydrogen than was used to treat the wastewater, thus making the winery a net power producer.”
November 4th, 2009 at 7:45 am
Great idea , but how about drilling for some new oil and building refineries , power plants in the mean time . We will never run on solor and wind exclusivly , just because you say it does not make it so .
November 4th, 2009 at 10:00 am
i agree wiyh Paul Dee
every bit helps .but drill for the immidiate consumption and prepare for the future
when another energy will become cheaper than fossil fuel than it will sell by it self
make a plane run on wind or solar !!!!!
November 4th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
We need to replace fossil fuels as soon as possible because of the limited availablity of them, and the fact that they will run out. The larger reason is that we are putting to much CO2 into the air without a good understanding of what this will do. I think we have a better idea — making the planet hotter and causing the weather to be less predictable and have a greater intensity of what ever it does.
November 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
I was mislead by the title, in that I thought they were using a different form of energy. Indeed, I thought the article was going to present how officials were rounding up winos and shoving them into biomass reactors, thus producing electricity and cleaning up neighborhoods at the same time. Oh well, my mistake.
November 4th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
S.B.Stein – Sorry you’ve bought into the “limited availability” of fossil fuels. There are untapped resources that will last centuries.
Want to reduce/eliminate fossil fuel use? Build nuclear plants. Oh, sorry, the environmentalists frightened the public out of this solution. Now that the leader of this movement has recanted his original biased anti-nuke campaign, it’s a little late to turn this issue around. Well, at least Sweden and Japan are on the right track.
November 5th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Well, first off the earth is not warming… that is a politcal scare tactic. But, yes there is a need to find alternative energy sources. It is more due to the rising costs of fossil fuels that is more driven by greed than anything else (well also the governments desire to move the population into a more government dependant state) Anyway, congratulations for the efforts and yes we need to address the future, but as stated by a couple other posters we need to address the “NOW” as well… and oh by the way… the weather has never been very predictable… and the champions of the “cliamate change or global warming THEORY” are basing their claims on data that is illegetimate at best. The quality of which if presented representing any other finding would be immediately dismissed as foolishness. But because it is a driving “POLITICAL” motivator and has become a catch phrase, it is unseemly to even question the validity of the idea. Of course it is possible to believe that arrogance and not science is why this incorrect and dubious fabriction still persists in the minds of the uninformed.
November 7th, 2009 at 12:43 am
tis is the semi topic
November 14th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
LOL. Which climatology-related discipline did JoeM say he holds a Ph.D. in again? Oh that’s right, he didn’t. But I’m sure he knows more than 97% of the scientists who are actively studying this and believe that we are contributing to the warming in recent decades. All hail JoeM, come to save us from our folly of listening to the scientific community.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090119210532.htm
November 17th, 2009 at 9:54 am
We need to use the current fuels we have for teh next two hundres years or so! We have an abundance of oil in America….we just need to simply drill!
In case you all didn’t understand my message…let me say it little slower:
D R I L L F O R O I L S T U P I D!
November 17th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Obviously Mark will quote anyone. If he really did his research he would know that Dr “Peter T. Doran” who did the global warming study in his sciencedaily report above is a member of the Union of concerned Scientist, A non profit Global warming preaching pact. For, 3,146 scientist you find, there are equal numbers who disagree. I don’t think people are arguing against finding new fuels, we just want the green people to stop scaring people and drill and build what we know works while searching for other means.
November 17th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Oh yea, Mark apparently believes there are a little more than 3,146 scientists in the world studying this, since he said 97%, and this is the number quoted in the article. Mark does believe what he reads…….
November 17th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Wow one litre of hydrogen per day! BTW How many thousands of barrels of oil(37 gals per. I think)come down that pipeline in Alaska every day? How many liters are there in a barrel anyway?