________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“ We work with organic waste producers like brewers, distillers, cooked food and ingredients manufacturers, and biofuel producers to offer turnkey waste to energy projects. We co-locate our equipment on the customer’ s site, turning their organic waste into cleansed water that can be discharged locally or reused on-site along with carbon neutral biogas that can then power their thermal energy processes or be converted into electricity. By turning a waste stream into a product that feeds an energy generation process, we are effectively turning a cost center into a profit center, adding value to their business, with most of our customers achieving a three-to-five-year return on investment.” From a technical perspective, electromethanogenesis means growing bacteria on electrodes, which then breaks down organic waste and generates electrons, accelerating the process of methanogenesis to turn organic waste into methane much quicker than traditional anerobic digestion.“ While the process of electromethanogenesis has been studied at an academic level for several years, WASE has successfully been able to scale the process to a commercial level that no other business has achieved,” David explains.
“ Over the last eight years, we have conducted a huge amount of field testing and design refinements to identify a novel method of electrode construction and deployment in the anaerobic environment,” he adds.“ Not only are our generators around ten times faster than anerobic digesters, but they also generate around 30 percent more usable energy and can be stored in a 70 percent smaller footprint.
By turning a waste stream into a product that feeds an energy generation process, we are effectively turning a cost center into a profit center
“ Our installation at a dairy farm in Snowdonia, Wales, was a key project for us, as it wasn’ t only our first full-scale commercial installation, but it’ s also the world’ s largest operational electro-methanogenic reactor, turning cattle slurry into energy to power the farm. We’ re now constructing a number of projects in the UK within the food and beverage sector. At Hepworth Brewery, for instance, we’ re turning brewery waste into energy, saving them around £ 150,000 on waste haulage while also cleansing the waste to such a high degree that it can be discharged into a local river ecosystem where a rare and protected snail species lives.
“ We’ re also working on some very large and varied applications in the US, with our technology being used to offset very high waste haulage costs and generate high volumes of biomethane. As there is both a high demand for carbon credits and a high market price for biomethane, the US is a very attractive market for our expansion.”
Another interesting aspect of the WASE IP is biosensing and soft sensing technology.“ These technologies use the electrical signals that the biofilms generate to inform our machine learning platform, WASE Intelligence, which in turn optimizes the system operations to reduce down time and maximize energy yields,” David elaborates.“ This allows us to interpret the electrical current as a signal for aspects like whether we need more feed or a different temperature. We’ ve built thousands of hours of data over the years, and we can build control interventions based on these data points, allowing us to remotely adjust a customer’ s operating system to minimize downtime.”
94