City Gets Poop-Fueled Buses

Just in time for Earth Day, officials unveil plans to power Oslo's buses with fuel made from human waste

What if the solution to our dependence on oil was right under our, uh, noses all this time?

It doesn't get much greener than this: City officials in Oslo, Norway have created a biofuel made from fecal matter converted to methane, and are planning to power the city's buses with it. With each resident excreting about 2.1 gallons' worth of diesel per annum, 250,000 people can operate 80 buses for 62,000 miles each, according to city reps quoted in Slate.

Oslo's reps go on to explain how crap is the petrol of the future: The extracted biofuel is obviously carbon neutral, it's way cheaper to produce, it'll reduce carbon dioxide emissions in relatively tiny Oslo by 30,000 tons a year (so imagine what it could do for a place like Mexico City), and the vehicles will be "92 percent less noisy." (No, this last part is not explained.) Slate blogger William Saletan even posits a future in which we'd get a cut of the substantial overall savings -- in other words, a time when we'd get paid to poop for the good of the planet.

Just one question: We know those vegetable oil-powered cars smell like French fries, so will this stuff have an equivalent source-to-stench correlation?

Copyright FREEL - NBC Local Media
Contact Us