Photograph of Tinto River. (Credit – Carol Stoker)
About half of the coal mine discharges in Pennsylvania have pH under 5 standard units.
Ecotality Life, which covers green tech, green gadgets, and green gizmos, had an Enviro-Tech Twofer. Goes to show you that it pays to read your Science Daily.
First a quiz, before providing the details: “How many of you knew about AMD?”
No, not, Advanced Micro Devices — Global supplier of integrated circuits for personal and networked computing and communication. Get your geek minds off Opteron, and pay attention!
How many of your knew that AMD (Acid Mine Drainage) “is a serious environmental problem that threatens the health of plants and animals as well as the safety of drinking-water supplies”?
Neither did I. Hm, wonder why?
Bruce E. Logan and PSU (Penn State University) colleagues believe that they have developed a novel way to make use of the high acidity of contaminated waters and its high content of heavy metals, particularly iron. It is a twofer because “AMD poses difficult and costly environmental clean-up problems.” If the technology, which makes use of pollution resulting from the mining of coal and metals to generate electricity, can go from the lab to commercial scale, then “it’s a real eco-tech twofer, helping to solve a serious environmental problem of mining while also providing a new source of energy.”
In a university lab in Pennsylvania, a state know for lots and lots of mining waste, researchers “have developed a a fuel cell that uses pollution from coal and metal mines to generate electricity. “Sounds like a fanciful dream, but it’s a reality.”
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.”
Hong Liu, an assistant professor of biological and ecological engineering in the OSU College of Engineering, and Bruce Logan, professor of Environmental Engineering at Penn State University, pictured working on development of a new “microbial fuel cell”.
The post from Ecotality Life gives a brief summary of the study that appeared in Science Daily. The Penn State University researchers got the idea for development of this new type of fuel cell from colleagues’ research with microbial fuel cells capable of generating electricity from waste water.
Other Similar AG Posts Possibly RelatedUsing 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.
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[...] whereas the truth is that even if carbon capture and storage were implemented, it fails to address water quality or other environmental quality [...]