Learn more about our biogas research:
- “New technology turns food leftovers into electricity, vehicle fuels,” News Service, 10.24.06
- “New ‘digester’ converts garbage to energy,” News Service, 10.4.04
- “Biogas,” NewsWatch video, 2006
- California Biomass Collaborative
Our researcher involved with biogas technology:
- Ruihong Zhang, professor, Department of biological and agricultural engineering
Table-scrap energy
Here is a time-traveler’s look at the possible future of energy as influenced by UC Davis activities — a preview of everyday life as we might experience it five to 50 years from now.
Predicted timing: 2025
Sorting the curbside recycling: Paper and glass go here; they’ll be back as, well, paper and glass.
Plastics go there; they’ll return as clothing, carpets, fence rails and lawn furniture. And that third bin? That’s for banana peels, leftover lasagna and stale bagels.
The garbage truck now coming down the street is running on compressed natural gas made from the table scraps it got from you last week.
How’s that for a nifty bit of green futurism? The truck takes your food scraps to a nearby processing plant where, in a series of big stainless steel tanks, bacteria eat the carbon compounds and excrete hydrogen and methane gases.
The gas mixture is pumped into the garbage truck’s fuel tank. And away the truck goes, back on its collection rounds, with nary a trip to the local landfill.
Perfected an anaerobic digester
This “anaerobic digester” process was perfected in 2010 by Ruihong Zhang, a UC Davis professor of agricultural and biological engineering, and her industry partner, Dave Konwinski, the CEO of Onsite Power Systems Inc.
Digesters now reclaim 45 million tons of food annually that we Americans once buried underground, wasted.
Today, California homes, restaurants, soup kitchens and college dining halls — even farmers and canneries — send their vegetable- and animal-based leftovers to biogas energy plants.
So let the kids leave the pizza crusts; UC Davis has turned them into oil wells.
— Sylvia Wright