Saturday, November 21, 2015

Biogas Digesters on Mt. Everest

Engineers are helping to develop a system to convert the 12 tons of poop left on Mt. Everest by climbers each year into useful energy for local residents.  What was previously an environmental problem is well on it's way to becoming a beneficial resource for warming and lighting homes.

Picture by Paul Sober
The difficulty with using the poop directly as an input to a traditional bio-digester is that it's extremely cold there and there is not a lot of carbonaceous bio-waste laying around (because stuff just doesn't grow very well there).  Engineers have designed a system using solar cells and batteries to increase the temperature to an acceptable level and they're working on a system to increase the carbon:nitrogen ratio so that the gas produced will have lower CO2 levels.

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