Ambos Nogales Biodiesel Project
The water’s flowing in the Santa Cruz River between Rio Rico and Tubac, but it still stinks. Since the multi-year drought we’ve been suffering through, the bulk of the flow is currently effluent, treated wastewater from the bi-national treatment plant in Rio Rico. So how can we help reduce that smell, and help the river heal? In this time of focus on renewable energy development, part of the answer may have to do with turning waste into energy.
The plant is now scheduled for a serious make-over, thanks in part to FOSCR* and community pressure as well as many years of good government work, so that stink should be well on its way to disappearing in a few years. However, even a state-of-the-art sewage treatment plant has limitations on what it can properly handle. Some substances flowing into almost any plant can seriously degrade the treatment process and result in poor-quality effluent. Even when our new plant comes on-line, we need to protect it from these bad actors.
One of the major headaches for the Rio Rico plant is oil. Not the industrial kind (although that kind is certainly toxic to the plant); I mean here the cooking kind. Even though it’s an organic, bio-degradable substance, it clogs both sewer pipes and the treatment plant pipes and lagoons, wreaking havoc on the bacterial processes that do the hard work of purifying the wastewater coming in. And since over 2/3 of the sewage flowing into the plant is from the huge city of Nogales, Sonora, the majority of cooking oil and grease messing up the treatment plant is likely from across the line.
So how can this gunky flow be stopped? Not only restaurants, but also the cafeterias in maquiladoras (large factories assembling parts from the U.S. with cheap Mexican labor) and other industrial sites and households contribute to the problem. Since it’s much easier to pour waste oil down the drain than it is to store and bring to a landfill (there’s no trash pick-up in the city of Nogales, Sonora), this is a wide-spread and serious problem; deep-fat frying is a time-honored and popular cooking method in our region.
Enter a creative team of problem-solvers from the Border Programs Unit of the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ). Hans Huth, the hydrologist of the group, saw an opportunity in the cooking-oil dilemma. Why try for heavy-handed regulation (which would have to be acceptable to and enforced by Mexican officials) when a money-saving energy source was waiting to be exploited? Hans had been using “bio-diesel” he made himself, cheaply and easily, out of waste cooking oil in his Tucson garage. He runs his diesel car on it with no problems. Why not do the same for the industrial sites, which could use the eco-friendly fuel in their own vehicle fleets instead of costly commercial diesel fuel? And that would make the “waste” oil suddenly too valuable to pour down the drain.
Armed with a grant, Chief Mike Foster of the Rio Rico Fire District and Hans Huth and his team are setting up a very modest production room that will turn waste oil into fuel in a couple of days, for about $1.20 per gallon. If this process catches on—and local industrial managers are sure to see its merits—a serious water quality problem will have been transformed into a renewable energy source.
Many of our current environmental problems may have similarly creative, economically- as well as ecologically-friendly solutions. We have but to support the scientists that are exploring more sustainable ways for us to live, the creative souls who think “outside the box”, and the wisest of our public servants, who really do work for the “greatest good for the greatest number”. It is good to know that in this political climate, such people still exist.
(Article by Sherry Sass, who was trained as a biologist, and is a founding member of FOSCR. Visit www.adeq.state.az.us for more information on Arizona Department of Environmental Quality.)
Click here to learn about the October 2008 Ambos Nogales Media Event.
