"From Poop to Petrol: Sewers Produce Efficient Cellulosic Ethanol Feedstock " Green Car Advisor

From Poop to Petrol: Sewers Produce Efficient Cellulosic Ethanol Feedstock

Poo power raises its banner again as a Massachusetts biofuels company and an Israeli water recycling firm announce a joint venture to turn biomass into cellulosic ethanol.

The companies, Qteros, of Marlborough, Mass., and Applied Clean Tech, of Israel, aren't the first to find that the gunk in sewage can be fermented into fuel, but they've got a novel approach.

Applied CleanTech has developed a process for recycling "wastewater solids," the stuff we inelegantly call poop, into a low-moisture feedstock for ethanol production. Qteros has developed what it believes is a better bug -a proprietary microbe technology for turning biomass into ethanol.

By teaming up, the two figure to be able to market to "every municipality that has a waste water treatment plant," said Jeff Haustor, Qteros' co-founder and manager of the project. the plants can use their accumulated waste to produce fuel that could be used in city-owned vehicles,

"It also helps answer the question of what municipalities can do with their sewage sludge," added Israel Biran, ACT's chief executive (We found one a while ago that was turning it into hydrogen for fuel-cell electic cars!)

The companies say their process improved cellulosic ethanol plant efficiency by up to 20 percent because the reclaimed sludge is easier to convert than other, woody biomass feedstocks.