A technology that can take pollution from coal and metal mines and use it to generate electricity sounds like a fanciful dream, but it’s a reality, at least in a university lab in Pennsylvania, where researchers report that they have developed a a fuel cell that uses pollution from coal and metal mines to generate electricity. If it can go from the lab to commercial scale, it’s a real eco-tech twofer, helping to solve a serious environmental problem of mining while also providing a new source of energy.
Penn State University scientists describe successful tests of a laboratory-scale version of the device in a new study featured in the December issue of the American Chemical Society’s Environmental Science & Technology journal. Look for the article “Electricity Generation from Synthetic Acid-Mine Drainage (AMD) Water using Fuel Cell Technologies.”
Science Daily briefly summarizes the study.
In the new study, Bruce E. Logan and colleagues point out that so-called acid-mine drainage (AMD) is a serious environmental problem that threatens the health of plants and animals as well as the safety of drinking-water supplies, due mainly to the high acidity of contaminated waters and its high content of metals, particularly iron. AMD poses difficult and costly environmental clean-up problems.
They describe development of a new type of fuel cell that is based on microbial fuel cells, which are capable of generating electricity from wastewater. Using a solution similar to AMD, they showed that the device efficiently removed dissolved iron from the solution while also generating electricity at power levels similar to conventional microbial fuel cells. Improvements in the fuel cell will lead to more efficient power generation in the future, the researchers say. The iron recovered by the device can be used as a pigment for paints or other products, they note.
The mining industry would seem to be a logical source of additional R&D and venture capital funding to hone the technology and commercialize it.
2 Trackbacks
[...] 1Electricity from Mining Waste This entry was written by jcwinnie, posted on 2007-12-4 at 2:55 pm, filed under research. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.SIMILARLY TAGGED POSTS: Microbial Fuel Cell [...]
[...] Posted in Business, Environment, Science, Technology at 12:20 pm by LeisureGuy This is extremely cool: [...]