Cars, People & Carbon Neutrality: A Symbiosis

by Wendell Cox 08/09/2010

The potential for a symbiotic relationship between the environment, cars and people may be about to take a giant leap forward. London's Daily Telegraph reports that a group of engineers from Genco have developed a bio-bug (Volkswagen bug) that runs on human waste. The car is powered for 10,000 miles from the excrement from 70 households (annually). The human waste bio-bug would be carbon neutral because it would not add any greenhouse gas to that already produced. The fuel would be produced at sewage plants, which already produce the necessary methane fuel from waste. While the technology, fully implemented, would not produce sufficient methane to power the entire fleet of cars, it would be a significant step forward and is further indication of the potential for technology to make substantial greenhouse gas emission reductions.

Bio-Bug Photo

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Now a days environment

Submitted by AbleSmith on Tue, 04/17/2012 - 23:22.

Now a days environment friendly vehicles are playing important role in low carbon society but if we use electric cars then power demand is needed in the society.
Second Hand Cars

sure, this solves all of our problems...

Submitted by peter on Wed, 08/11/2010 - 10:56.

Let's see, if we harvested the methane from the waste of every household in America, that would be enough energy to power 16 billion miles of travel (1.6 x 10^10). Sounds like a lot, except it represents only about 0.5% of the total vehicle miles travelled annually in the US, or 3,000 billion (3 x 10^12)... or to put it another way, each US household could travel about 142 miles on human biogas, out of 25,000 vehicle-miles per household annually.

I'm not saying every little bit doesn't count, but we can expect to solve our carbon emissions problem without also learning to use less energy.

Less Energy

Submitted by Wendell Cox on Thu, 08/12/2010 - 14:34.

Indeed.. and the technologies on the horizon for improving the energy efficiency of vehicles are very promising. See http://www.newgeography.com/content/001662-the-need-expand-personal-mobi...

Wendell Cox
Demographia
www.demographia.com