New Yorkers will soon be cooking with their own gas.
The poop of Big Apple residents is being turned into methane at Brooklyn’s Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant — and the gas will now be used to fuel up to 5,000 local homes.
“We have found a gas well in the middle of Brooklyn,” said Donald Chahbazpour, Gas Utility of the Future director at the National Grid power company. “But the feedstock is not fossil fuel — it’s us.”
The decade-in-the-making farts-to-fuel project — a joint venture between the city Department of Environmental Protection and National Grid — is slated to be up and running by the end of the year.
It will save the equivalent of 19,000 cars’ worth of carbon emissions a year, officials said.
“It’s clean, it’s green and it’s local,” city wastewater boss Pam Elardo said.
The effluent effluvium is already being used to partially power the Newtown Creek plant itself.
But the facility has been producing more gas than it needs — so it has been burning the extra vapors off, pumping greenhouse gas emissions into the air.
Now, National Grid will capture the excess gas and remove the moisture and carbon dioxide — turning it into the kind of high-quality methane that can be used to fire up the blue flame on your stoves.
“We’re basically building a fancy filter,” Chahbazpour said.
But Chahbazpour and Elardo insist the deuce-derived gas is no different from the stuff that’s already flowing into your home.
“It’s indistinguishable from a molecular perspective. The only difference is the feedstock is us,” Chahbazpour said.
Under a pilot program being run by the DEP, 130 tons of food waste collected each day from hotels and restaurants will also be fed into the project.
“It’s very exciting,” said Elardo, calling the city’s collective fecal matter “a valuable commodity.”
“We’re taking a locally sourced natural carbon and making a gas product that is environmentally sustainable.”
The Department of Sanitation has already been harvesting methane gas from decomposing trash at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island for three decades.
But the Newtown Creek project is the first time that gas from human waste will be sent into homes.
And while the Greenpoint facility is the city’s only human-wind farm for now, Chahbazpour said officials are hoping the project will extend to its 13 other wastewater plants in the future.