Oslo Buses to Run on Sewage 68
Mike writes "Rather than let their sewage go to waste, the city of Oslo recently announced that it plans to cut carbon emissions by converting 80 public buses to run on biomethane generated from raw sewage. The city plans to adapt two sewage plans with the technology this September, and the new biogas buses will be quieter and will cut 44 tones of C02 per bus per year."
Original link (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/jan/27/biomethane-energy [guardian.co.uk]
For now on, every time a Slashdot editor posts a link that isn't the original source of the story, I'll be posting the original link.
Re:Not really new tech. (Score:3, Informative)
Gas-driven (not gasoline) buses has been around for at least a decade. It's just that they use a different type of gas.
Do you mean to say that methane driven buses haven't bee used up to now? I know for a fact they are used in Sydney and Melbourne though the CH4 comes out of the ground.
Re:Good! (Score:3, Informative)
$$$$$$ is why.
It costs more money to harvest it and make it usable. Plus storage and transportation bugs have been worked out of the petroleum industry.
hydrogen and electricity, baby (Score:2, Informative)
Exciting times. In my opinion electrical motor is the way to go though. The problem is the potential energy around us is not available as electrical power by itself, the latter needs to be produced and also stored. Which is where photovoltaics come in - given that Earth is radiated with about 50 - 250 watts of energy per square meter of land, our sun will give us all the power for electricity we need, even with our suboptimal solar panels of today. There is also hydrogen, the most abundand stuff in the Universe, and progress is being made there as well. The problem is our economy. Which slowly has to adjust, and that takes time. It takes time before the folks that profit from oil recovery collect enough money for their pension, and leave something for their sons and daughters and finally lay off that "gold mine" which is killing us slowly, and it takes time to collect the guts to start investing in something new and divorce our economy from oil, so that it does not collapse all too fast when oil is finally left alone where it rested for millions of years. It takes time to change the public perception of transport and consumption and the culture associated with it too. Speaking of the whatever non-scientific reasons for the slow change towards cleaner future, George Monbiots book "Heat" is a good read.
And just for some food for thought, Oslo where I happen to live, has bought two THiNK cars last year, the company behind these cars had to loan money from the government to make it to 2009. What I am trying to say is the mass of people is the last element you need to convince, and only after everything else is in place, do they start to think about alternatives to their combustion engine cars. And Oslo folks are really stubborn. They will not give up their family wagons all too easily or hastily.