Grease. Gunk. Sludge. Where Most People See a Nasty Nuisance, These Scientists See Powerful Potential.
(U.S. Department of Energy) Join us on this episode as we wade into the world of bioenergy and learn about the folks working to turn noxious waste into useful energy. Then read on for more bioenergy stories and background from the Department of Energy and our 17 National Labs!
WARNING: Unless you’ve got a cast-iron stomach, you might want to hold off until after lunch to listen to this one.
Green Eats
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Would you like coffee with that?
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Goo for the Gold
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The Good, the Bad, and the Algae
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Transcript:
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WITNAH: How do they get from gunk to gas? Well, for starters, they let nature do the dirty work, using a combination of chemistry and biology to convert the unwanted material into useful biofuel components. And Phil’s lucky — he doesn’t actually have to see or smell the gnarly stuff.
PIENKOS: I have to admit that I have yet to encounter a sample of brown grease. I leave that to my colleagues who actually work in the laboratory. I do not work in the laboratory. They are very careful to work with it in a fume hood, in a chemical fume hood, so that the smell is blown out the roof rather than into the laboratory.
INTERVIEWER: So they’re the ones on the front lines.
PIENKOS: They are indeed. But despite the “gnarly” nature of the material, they are all committed to the success of this project.
WITNAH: You might be asking yourself, why on earth would these scientists put themselves through this? Could it really be worth it?
PIENKOS: Overall in the United States, there’s enough brown grease generated that could produce somewhere around a billion gallons of biofuel a year. So this is not a small scale.
WITNAH: The impact of this work could be massive. We’re talking the equivalent of fuel for more than one million cars and trucks. Removing brown grease could reduce stress on our water infrastructure. And turning it into energy could even let utilities take wastewater treatment facilities “off the grid,” to shield them from cyber attacks.
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DOZIER: And if you thought we were stopping there, think again. Today, we’re taking a hard look at the stuff that gets dumped down our sinks, flushed down our toilets, and washed into our waterways.
KREER: Coming up, we’ve got two more stories about some of the dirtiest jobs we know. Scientists working to turn waste that looks and smells horrible — which no one likes — into energy, which everyone likes!
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DOZIER: We take you now from the Pacific Northwest to the shores of south Texas to explore waste of another kind. So far, everything we’ve talked about has focused on waste that goes down our drains. The kind of waste we do our best to capture and treat, so it doesn’t cause problems down the line.
DOZIER: But what about things that don’t flush neatly out of sight and into our sewer system with the press of a lever? Take pesticides and fertilizers, for example. South Texas is a rich agricultural region, known for growing cotton and sorghum. And when it rains, some of the chemicals sprayed onto those crops get washed into rivers and streams.
DOZIER: You’ve probably heard about the problems this can cause. Massive blooms of algae, fed by nitrogen and phosphorous, choke waterways and suffocate fish. In the Gulf of Mexico, a so-called “dead zone” has grown to the size of Delaware as the microscopic plants flourish, then die en masse.
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