The bioengineers of University of California Davis have found a way to process leftover food and convert them to biogas. How? They give these scraps to specific microbes placed in giant tanks.

The organisms then devour the food literally and their digestive process is the one responsible for the conversion. The biogas produced by these microbes, which is mostly made up of methane and hydrogen, can be burned to generate electricity or be compressed into liquid to power specialized vehicles.

An industrial-sized demonstration unit capable of producing 300,000 to 600,000 liters of biogas a day has been running at UC Davis since last October. While the bioengineers still don't fully grasp how the microbes convert solid food into biogas, they are currently trying to sequence the genomes of the said organisms to make more-productive bioreactors.

"Sequencing these organisms will give us a better idea of who the players are so we can better control the conditions or improve the design to further improve conversion of waste into biogas", commented UC Davis bioengineer who developed the system Ruihong Zhang.

Using organisms to convert waste into biogas isn't entirely new at waste water treatment plants. However, the big difference in this system is that it allows solid materials to be converted directly to methane and hydrogen.

Leftover-powered SUVs anyone?