This new Toyota car is full of shit.
It turns out all of our waste might not go to…well, waste.
The new Toyota Mirai is powered by poo because it generates its renewable hydrogen fuel straight from our sewage, Quartz reports.
Mirai literally means ‘the future’ in Japanese, and this environmentally friendly slick ride seems to embody just that.
Hydrogen cars could be a huge step in solving the global warming crisis but they’re just not very popular.
Yoshikazu Tanaka, chief engineer of the Toyota Mirai, calls it a “chicken or the egg” problem:
No one wants to purchase hydrogen cars because there are no hydrogen fuel stations, and nobody wants to build hydrogen fuel stations because there are no hydrogen cars.
To find clean energy, Toyota looked to one of the dirtiest places – sewage plants.
The company are taking the solid sewage (which usually ends up at landfill) and they add microorganisms to the mix. Give it a good stirr and filter the methane and carbon dioxide (biogas) that is created before filtering out just the CO2, adding a dash of water vapour to creates hydrogren and more CO2. Finally extract the CO2 one more time before you can enjoy your 100% clean, pure hydrogen.
Yep, bet you didn’t think you’d be reading a poo recipe today.
Marc Melaina, a senior engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Denver, said:
It’s not a new or advanced technology.
In India, they have loads of biogas plants in villages and such that are just part of their energy infrastructure.
Currently, the Fukuoka plant in Japan produces 300 kilograms of hydrogen per day, which is enough to fuel 65 Mirai vehicles.
There are currently only 29 hydrogen fueling stations in the entire US and most are in California so there needs to be a serious increase in demand and supply to get this ball rolling.
So currently the Mirai has a range of about 312 miles, and because the fuel stations are so few and far between, long road trips are currently out of the question.
