A person in charge of new york Electric Power Bureau said that a sewage treatment plant in North America adopted a new fuel cell device for the first time, which was proved to be effective after one year's operation. According to them, the system can generate 200 kilowatts of electricity, which is enough to meet the power supply required by 60 standard families.
Shalom Zaehringer, who is in charge of research in new york Electric Power Bureau, said that in the power generation project implemented by 1998, they converted more than 20 tons of waste gas that would have burned in the air or drifted away with the wind into electric energy, and the generated hot water could be used to heat fungi that contribute to waste decomposition.
Zaehringer said that the fuel used in fuel cells is hydrogen, and standard fossil fuels such as natural gas, gasoline and methane all contain hydrogen. Because fuel cells use chemical reactions to get energy from hydrogen instead of burning hydrogen, they won't produce any big pollution.
The person in charge of the electric power bureau said that the sewage treatment plant benefited the most from it, and the equipment in the plant could replace natural gas or other fuels that must be purchased with a large amount of free methane waste gas. These devices can also use biogas from landfills to generate electricity.
After inspecting these new equipments, officials in charge of the environment in new york expressed the hope to install fuel cells in part of the new york 14 sewage treatment plant, so as to recover part of the waste gas. At present, these sewage treatment plants produce1600 million cubic feet of waste gas every year, but most of them are burned in the factory in vain.