UK's New Bio-Bug Uses a Different Kind of Biogas for Green Transportation

As their development continues, electric cars remain one of the most popular forms of green transportation currently on the market. However, biogas and methane fuel have been around for some time now have have done a long way towards making their own impact. Frequently coming from the byproduct of farm animals, especially cows, biogas is a cheap and effective alternative fuel source that is already commonly used in some parts of the world. In England, where biogas as an automotive fuel isnt so popular, one company has decided to convert an automobile to run on biogas from a slightly different source: human waste.

Wessex Water, a sewage treatment company based in the United Kingdom, has worked with GENco, a renewable energy and organics company owned by Wessex Water, to develop a new form of green transportation in their Bio-Bug. The Bio-Bug is a Volkswagen Beetle that has been converted by The Greenfuel Company, specialists in converting cars to allow them to accept new fuel types, to run on biogas. According to GENco, the Bio-Bug is capable of performing exactly like a normal Beetle that runs on fossil fuels except that it can be run for an entire year off the waste coming from only seventy toilets from the Bristol area. The fuel used by the car comes from Wessex Waters' current biogas treatment facility that has been treating human waste and sewage in order to create biogas for electricity generation for some time. Mohammed Saddiq, the CEO of GENco, said in their press release that when the fact that they were producing a surplus of biogas came to their attention, this seemed to be an innovative and useful way to invest it.

While using biogas to power green transportation hasn't exactly taken off in the United Kingdom, it is currently popular in various other parts of the world. Sweden currently has in operation over 11,000 cars that run biogas and also has projects to convert buses and trains over to biogas fuel. There has also been a large amount of biogas use in China and India in past years due to the ease in which the resources needed to create it can be obtained and created from various livestock. It is also a popular method of creating renewable energy and has gained some popularity in the United States. In California, for example, almost half of the sewage plants currently in operation utilize a method of creating and using biogas to generate electricity.

Although Wessex Water and GENco currently have no plans to adopt their Bio-Bug into a mass produced form of green transportation, they have shown interest in using it as the basis for running a fleet of biogas fueled company cars. It is possible, however, that given the success of biogas production in the United Kingdom and the relative ease by which Wessex Water was able to create the Bio-Bug that someone may see the potential and try to take advantage of the ample resources and idea themselves. Maybe someday in the future there will be more biogas cars on the roads in the United Kingdom than any other kind of car.

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