Imagine turning food waste, farm waste and even sewage into diesel and electricity.
A feasible way of doing this is exactly what won SA researcher Chelsea Tucker a highly coveted honours in the world of innovation.
Tucker, a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town, was recently named one of 10 Emerging Talent winners in the international Falling Walls Lab competition.
Her entry, “Breaking the wall of energy insecurity in Africa”, is based on the Decentralised Diesel System she designed for her PhD.
The system is designed so that off-grid communities “can use their own unwanted waste to generate all their energy requirements, which is good news for remote, energy-scarce regions of sub-Saharan Africa and beyond”, UCT said in a statement.
Falling Wall Labs is an international forum for outstanding young innovators and creative thinkers in science, technology, medicine and other fields.
The link is to the Berlin Wall, which fell in 1989 after separating East and West Berlin for nearly 28 years.
The platform allows young innovators to introduce their “breaking walls” ideas to the public.
Said Tucker: “As a researcher, it’s a profound experience to have a project you care so much about sparking the interest of a global audience. It was incredibly exciting to take the virtual stage with some of the top scientific minds from across the globe to showcase the hard work that has gone into the waste-to-fuel initiative and the Decentralised Diesel System.”
Her project offers a solution to two of the world’s most pressing issues: a glut of waste and a lack of energy in emerging economies.
“Organic waste sent to landfill decomposes to produce greenhouse gases, which exacerbate global warming. By using organic waste to create energy, we’re saving tons of carbon dioxide and methane from entering the atmosphere,” she explained.
Because the system is modular, overhead costs are low and “significant infrastructure” is not required so it can be built anywhere in the world – most notably “remote regions of Africa that do not have access to energy”.
With the climate change and fossil fuel crises, the UCT team is hoping this technology will become available in the next decade, but more resources are needed.
“We’re trying to source funding to build the first fully functional prototype of the modularised system,” Tucker said.
Tucker is keen that not only remote communities get to use this technology. As the waste-to-fuel initiative works on an entirely circular economy (everything thrown away gets recycled and reused), she hopes the public will get behind waste recycling and separation, putting their organic waste aside for municipal pickup.
This will take buy-in and collaboration, she said.
“The idea is that waste would go to a local depot, where it is dropped into the local Decentralised Diesel System and converted to electricity (that will be used throughout the community) as well as diesel,” said Tucker.
The diesel will have two functions. It can be sold to community members for their cars (at a competitive price in comparison to imported fuels), or it could enable backup electricity generation, and micro-grid systems functioning on solar or wind.
“This way, load-shedding becomes a distant memory,” she said.
The long-term plan is to develop this system for commercialisation such that waste management and energy creation can be done on a municipal level.
“This is not a foreign concept globally, but SA is quite behind. In India there are waste-to-energy plants set up across the country to give various communities access to low-carbon electricity.”
