0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Hi!In the UK, more than 1600 people die every day. Since human body is 70% water, and average weight 75kg, we have 35 tonnes of biomass every day.What energy can we produce from that and how much?
The big problem would be collecting from all over the country.
I want to post this idea to a Sustainability competition, do you think I can win?
Like Bored Chemist says, gathering the bodies would pose an important obstacle. Delivering bodies from around the country to a power station will require burning large amounts of petroleum products in order to power the vehicles
To do a quick calculation, I'll use this estimate of 110,000 kilocalories for an average human: https://www.quora.com/How-many-calories-are-in-a-human-bodyAdmittedly, this is probably a slight underestimate, since indigestible things like hair and fingernails could potentially be burned to release some energy as well. I'll ignore that for the time being. 110,000 kilocalories times 1,600 people is 176,000,000 kilocalories. There are 4,184 joules in a kilocalorie, so 176,000,000 kilocalories times 4,184 is 736,384,000,000 joules per day. There are 86,400 seconds in a day, so 736,384,000,000 joules divided by 86,400 is 8,522,962.96296 joules per second (about 8.5 megawatts).That's not a lot of energy compared with many power stations, which usually run from hundreds of megawatts to multiple gigawatts. It is more, however, than a typical wave power plant and a few tidal power plants. See this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stationsLike Bored Chemist says, gathering the bodies would pose an important obstacle. Delivering bodies from around the country to a power station will require burning large amounts of petroleum products in order to power the vehicles (unless you used solar-powered cars or something, which have their own issues). If you burn more energy transporting the bodies than you get from burning the bodies, that would render the point moot. I may look into calculating that fuel burn later.
I was thinking not to burn the corpses but to feed bacteria or something to produce biofuel. 35 tonnes of bacteria food every day would sustain a huge bioreactor.