Wastes to Profits: Advanced Anaerobic Digestion
This activity is a under the Waste to Profits project which targets to deliver advanced technologies to convert wastes from livestock and municipal water treatment into energy, fertilisers and value-add products.
The activity advances anaerobic digestion technology for stabilisation of many organic wastes and allows energy recovery in the form of methane. AD is extremely flexible, making this a strong platform to build and integrate other higher value-add technologies. However, while AD has been successfully demonstrated for treatment of water streams in red meat processing facilities, many conventional forms of AD are currently not economically attractive when applied to red meat processing solid wastes (i.e. manure, paunch, wastewater sludge). This activity aims to improve the economics of AD through research to:
- increase biogas revenue by up to 100%,
- decrease capital requirements by >30% and
- reduce or eliminate digestate disposal costs.
The outcomes from this activity also contributes to greater agri-industry particularly on solid waste management.
Collaborators
Queensland University of Technology
Funding
Meat and Livestock Australia
Project Outcomes
- Advanced Anaerobic Digestion enhances biogas production during AD while reducing the size and cost of AD infrastructure. Strategies for Advanced AD include pre-treatment of waste, co-digestion of multiple waste streams, manipulation of reactor conditions and process additives.
- More than 12 novel pre-treatments have been screened for application to RMP wastes, agro-industry wastes and other organic solid wastes. Different pre-treatments are effective on different waste streams.
- One pre-treatment technology targes lignocellulose waste stream which is one of the largest solid waste streams produced in agri-industry. The laboratory test results are being tested under real world conditions using larger demonstration facilities. The demonstration facility is applied as a platform for integrated technologies within wider project such as low-cost additives, nutrients recovery, organic fertilisers etc.
