Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: gunsmith on May 17, 2011, 08:53:18 PM
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college students come up with good reason to drink beer too
http://www.wlbz2.com/news/watercooler/article/159428/109/Ohio-students-working-to-convert-urine-into-electricity?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAGE|t
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Lotsa good stuff can be extracted from urine... not the least of which is saltpeter. I believe it was during the Napoleonic wars, they had guys running around the cities collecting urine for powder production.
Also, insulin used to be extracted from urine.
Urea itself is an important raw material. Think polyurethane. It was Wohler who first synthesided urea in the lab, thereby destroying the myth that all organic chemicals had to be produced by a "life force" of one kind or another.
You could probably just let it ferment, burn the methane off of it and be better off, energy wise, but that's just a guess.
Opinion: Like most of this greenie stuff, it seems to me that the processes involved take more energy than is ultimately produced --or saved. But then I am as reverse-PC as you can get. However, that's just my usual "first take" on a lot of this stuff. Show me the numbers. (And it's up to the process developer to generate the numbers -- not me.)
I'm not signing this one so nobody will know who posted it.
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You could probably just let it ferment, burn the methane off of it and be better off, energy wise, but that's just a guess.
Opinion: Like most of this greenie stuff, it seems to me that the processes involved take more energy than is ultimately produced --or saved. But then I am as reverse-PC as you can get. However, that's just my usual "first take" on a lot of this stuff. Show me the numbers. (And it's up to the process developer to generate the numbers -- not me.)
I'm not signing this one so nobody will know who posted it.
Man, who peed in your cheerios this morning???
:D
Seriously though, my first thought was pretty much the same.... How much energy is going into the hydrogen extraction....
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Man, who peed in your cheerios this morning???
:D
Me:
But then I am as reverse-PC as you can get.
Good enough answer?
Seriously though, my first thought was pretty much the same.... How much energy is going into the hydrogen extraction....
Me:
Well, even trucking the stuff around the country to a processsing point is getting pretty expensive.
When they say something "saves (or produces) thus-and-so-many ergs (kWh, BTU, tons-of-carbon-emissions)," I always want to know how much it costs. That "cost" in energy, including everything like the raw materials to build the processing plant, petroleum products used in making all the little plastic goodies required to build the plant, the paint on the walls, machining the dies to produce the plastic parts, the heat to melt the plastic and inject it into the molds, etc., etc.
I had to laugh when they installed motion detectors around our building to turn lights on when you entered a room and off when nobody was around. What did it "cost" to build even one of those detectors, plus the extra wiring and so forth? How long would it take to amortize out the true cost ?
So much of this conservation stuff is like a kid's party balloon. You push in here, it comes out there.
Terry, 230RN
(I'm po'ed a little about those automatic light switch things in particular because several times I've had the lights go off in the john whilst I was sitting on the pot. Gotta wave your arm or something above the stall walls to tell it, "Hey, you! I'm still here, dammit!")
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That's what you get for taking so long :P
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Yes, some fiber was not built into the cost analysis either.