MFC

©  2009  Rose George

I’ll be speaking on a radio show tomorrow about a US wastewater treatment plant that wants to set up a sludge pelletization and gasification process (but has so far been thwarted). So obviously I had to do some homework into shit-related energy production, in the course of which I found the delightful homepage of Dr Bruce Logan and his team at Penn State, who are working on and obsessed by the power and potential of microbial fuel cells. This isn’t new technology, particularly: Energy is produced by using electrons generated by bacteria consuming the organic matter in wastewater. But so far it is neither large-scale nor economic, not when it has to compete with the cost-effective superiority – however short-lived – of fossil fuels. But MFC energy would be clean and renewable, and it’s not like we’re lacking the source material. There are much, much better explanations of all this, in pleasingly plain English, on Dr. Logan’s site here, for example. There’s an international site devoted to “the beauty of microbial fuel cells” here. And for those of you who have time to watch what an MFC does, for hours on end, there’s an MFC web-cam, too.