Comments by "Antony Wooster" (@antonywooster6783) on "Turning Human Waste into Renewable Energy?" video.

@GonzoDonzo The reason that the gas is "dirty" (i.e. contaminated with H2S.) is that the fermentation vessel is too hot, i.e. above 32Degrees Celcius. If it is at 37 Degrees, it ferments faster, but it makes H2S as well as methane and CO2.
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Interesting program. I had never heard of HTC. What I did not understand from the program, is how it gets rid of heavy metal pollutants. in the early '70s I was given a tour around the Anglian Water's sewage treatment plant in Cambridge UK, where they were fermenting the sewage (at 32C ) to make methane, CO2, water and solids. They had a gas engine driving a 300KW generator which powered the plant and AW's offices and their vehicles were all running on the methane-CO2 mixture. What shocked me, was that they had a large surplus which they burnt to waste! It was equivalent to burning about 60 gallons of petrol each day. They said that it would be "too complicated" (!) to feed it into their generator and put the power into the grid. They told me that the solid sludge resulting from the fermentation could not be used for fertilizer because of people flushing e.g. paint down the toilet, meaning that it was contaminated with lead.
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Yes! imagine being an archeologist, 2000 years from now and finding a 20th Century landfill!
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@FTCWO Fermenting ing the waste from one human, and burning the resulting gas, one can generate about 2.5Watts, continuously. which is about 0.06kWh/day. How much one can get from burning the remaining solid waste, I have no idea.
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In Imperial, China, theTriads would compete with each other for the right to buy the poop from a neighbourhood. This was known as "the Golden Essence Trade" and was very profitable. Big barrels on wheels, would go round the neighbourhood collecting every day. The "product" was taken to processing plants, well out of town, where it was formed into bricks and dried and sold to farmers for fertilizer. (This may be the reason that the Chinese civilization did not collapse with the exhaustion of the soil, as the Sumerians, Babylonians etc did.)
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