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27 August 2007
Brewery Waste into Energy
Australia finds a valuable new energy source from a beer by-product
Contact: Professor Jurg Keller, Director
Advanced Wastewater Management Centre, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072
International Telephone: +61 7 3365 4727 FAX: +61 7 3365 4726
Website: http://www.awmc.uq.edu.au
TRANSCRIPT:
BLANCH : Australians may be known for their indulgent beer drinking habits but who would have thought that the country might one day be recognised for being powered by beer? Foster's is our largest brewery, distributing its product worldwide. Each day tens of millions of litres of waste water occur in the beer-making process. Now the brewery is teaming up with scientists to create a valuable new energy source - electricity - from that beer waste water.
Researchers at the University of Queensland have developed a way of recycling the waste twice over to clean the water and produce energy in the process. The experimental technology has been given funding by the Queensland state government for a chemical reactor to be built at a Foster's brewery near Brisbane.
Professor Jurg Keller is Director of the University's Advanced Wastewater Management Centre who explains how they transform organic matter leftovers of brewery waste water into a source of energy.
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : Yeah there's quite a normal process actually, it's quite interesting in many ways because we're really converting in one step organics into electric energy through a process that's called microbial fuel cell.
BLANCH : And what exactly is a microbial fuel cell and how does it work to create watts?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : The microbial fuel cell has got two aspects; one is it's a microbial-driven process, so it's driven by bacteria to take-up sugar and starch and other materials that are in the waste water from the brewing process, and they actually convert it into electric energy directly, which is why it's called a fuel cell. That's very similar to a hydrogen-driven fuel cell where the hydrogen is used to make electricity.
In this case we use organic leftovers, the sugars and so on that are converted into electric power directly, and the bacteria are actually the catalyst, they're making the process actually happening by taking up the organics and actually removing them and in the process producing direct power that we can harvest in the fuel cell.
BLANCH : And it's not just electricity, there's water as well apparently that's clean?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : Yeah that's the whole process, I mean we're not such much interested in just getting the power out, I mean the main interest in many ways is actually to remove these organics from the waste water, and that's quite important because that's what needs to be done in order for the water to be cleaned and in fact in many cases, like in the brewery in this case, even further treatment is then done to recycle it even back into the factory.
BLANCH : Well the state government grant is awarded on the basis of the success of your bio-cell prototype, so what are your plans for creating a bigger more workable model?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : Yeah this is a new grant that we got and we're a bit brave in many ways, because we're really jumping from a bench-scale lab model which is quite a small one, to a what we call a pilot-scale fuel cell, which we'll install at the Foster's brewery just south of Brisbane here, and that's pretty much a big step up. But we're still working on it and I think it'll be quite a success.
BLANCH : It's going to be quite a big larger isn't it, because it's a big step up from the one that you have in the lab, so how much bigger will it be than the prototype?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : Yeah that's right, I mean most of our systems in the lab they're sort of 200 millilitres, or point-two of a litre. We've got one unit that is a bit bigger now, that's a few litres now, but this one we might actually want to go to two-and-a-half thousand litres, so that's really about 100 to 200 times bigger than what we've got so far running, and that's the challenge and it's certainly causing quite a few of the headaches that we're having at the moment. But I think we're getting through them.
BLANCH : So talk about the potential for electricity generation because for instance if you had a chemical reactor capable of harnessing all the waste from the Foster's site in Brisbane, I mean how much would it produce, how much electricity would it produce?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : Yeah it's quite a large brewery there and because of that there's quite a big of waste water and with that there's quite a bit of these organics that we can convert into electricity. And we've done some estimates that it would probably be enough to power about two-thousand households, based on the total water and organics that they've got available there now.
Our system's not going to be that big, it's only going to take a small stream because that's still a big step up from what we're doing at the moment. We'll see in future, I mean the brewery itself actually is already recovering a lot of these organics in the form of bio-gas through their process there and they use that bio-gas as part of their heating process in the boiler. So they're already recovering that energy, so it's not likely that they'll actually install this system at full-scale at this brewery. But the applications are more for smaller applications, small breweries or wineries or the like which have more of the benefits in having a small system which is actually adaptable and grows with the demands of the brewery.
BLANCH : Which brings me to this question because I was wondering, we're talking about beer and brewery waste water and whether this technology is applicable to--you mentioned the wine industry, but are there other industries as well for that matter that this would be applicable to?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : Oh yeah indeed, I mean the main thing that we're taking up, or the bacteria take up--it's not us but them doing the work--is really just very common organics that are in waste water from a lot of industries, particularly food and beverage industries generally, starch manufacturing, sugar mills, fruit juice manufacturing and that sort of thing, and also canneries where fruits are processed, and they all have a lot of sugar and starch in there which is actually the raw material that the bacteria convert into the electricity. So it's got to have quite a number of applications that we foresee in the future.
BLANCH : Jurg, is this the first time that it's possible to generate electricity directly out of the waste that's in this waste water?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : Well it's not the first time as such, in fact we've been going back in the literature and we've found not just us but others have found a paper from 1911 where some scientists at the time actually already discovered that there seems to be electricity being produced by bacteria under some conditions. So it's really quite an old technology in that sense, but it hasn't really taken off until just a couple of years ago, maybe three-four years ago when it's really started to be realised that there is a few steps that we can actually overcome--a few hurdles that we can overcome which have really helped a great deal in pushing this technology up.
And the focus these days on the recovering of resources from the waste water, which are primarily the water itself but also the organics which in this case we can recover in the form of energy, but also nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorous can also be recovered, and all that has been driving this research arm quite strongly. And so it's really taken off in a big way in the last few years.
BLANCH : And what makes your research different from other projects around the world which are exploring similar technology?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : I think...well as far as we know we're the first ones that actually sort of take the jump out of the lab and put it onto a real system and at that scale. I mean the largest I've heard of so far is about 30 litres, so we're going to be quite a bit bigger than that as well, about another 100 times bigger than that.
So that's posing a lot of additional challenges, but that's fun and that's part of what research is all about, to really push the boundaries and make these things applicable, and that's really where our work has been in many cases focused in the past ten odd years that we've been working in this field at the University of Queensland, that we're really trying to develop systems which we then can really apply in the full scale or at least pilot scale initially, and then full-scale applications to really make a difference where it matters.
BLANCH : So when would you hope to have the fuel-cell operating at the brewery, the one that's just south of Brisbane?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : We're hoping to have this all up and running by the end of September because we've got a big conference running at the same time, and we expect two to three-hundred or probably 400 international and national participants at the conference, and so we want to show off a bit. But there's a plan to have a side visit to the brewery anyway, because they've got a very advanced system there as a full-scale system and that would be a very nice add-on to have this up and running. So we're well on the way to get there but it's still going to be a bit of a challenge.
BLANCH : So there's every chance we could be powered by beer in the very near future then?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : (laughs) Yeah I don't think we want to have the beer used for that, but the brewery waste water maybe helping to power a bit of the energy, but it's not going to be the solution to the energy crisis or the energy challenge in the future. It's a help, it's certainly going to be very useful, particularly because if you want to treat this waste water in other ways if it's not through bio-gas, then you have to really put in quite a lot of energy.
So it's not just the energy we're producing but we have the potential to also save quite a lot of energy that you otherwise would have to expend in order to treat the waste water. So that makes it a double benefit in that sense.
BLANCH : Professor Jurg Keller who is the Director of the Advanced Wastewater Management Centre at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, describing their plans to turn brewery waste water into energy.
Brewery Waste into Energy
Australia finds a valuable new energy source from a beer by-product
Contact: Professor Jurg Keller, Director
Advanced Wastewater Management Centre, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072
International Telephone: +61 7 3365 4727 FAX: +61 7 3365 4726
Website: http://www.awmc.uq.edu.au
TRANSCRIPT:
BLANCH : Australians may be known for their indulgent beer drinking habits but who would have thought that the country might one day be recognised for being powered by beer? Foster's is our largest brewery, distributing its product worldwide. Each day tens of millions of litres of waste water occur in the beer-making process. Now the brewery is teaming up with scientists to create a valuable new energy source - electricity - from that beer waste water.
Researchers at the University of Queensland have developed a way of recycling the waste twice over to clean the water and produce energy in the process. The experimental technology has been given funding by the Queensland state government for a chemical reactor to be built at a Foster's brewery near Brisbane.
Professor Jurg Keller is Director of the University's Advanced Wastewater Management Centre who explains how they transform organic matter leftovers of brewery waste water into a source of energy.
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : Yeah there's quite a normal process actually, it's quite interesting in many ways because we're really converting in one step organics into electric energy through a process that's called microbial fuel cell.
BLANCH : And what exactly is a microbial fuel cell and how does it work to create watts?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : The microbial fuel cell has got two aspects; one is it's a microbial-driven process, so it's driven by bacteria to take-up sugar and starch and other materials that are in the waste water from the brewing process, and they actually convert it into electric energy directly, which is why it's called a fuel cell. That's very similar to a hydrogen-driven fuel cell where the hydrogen is used to make electricity.
In this case we use organic leftovers, the sugars and so on that are converted into electric power directly, and the bacteria are actually the catalyst, they're making the process actually happening by taking up the organics and actually removing them and in the process producing direct power that we can harvest in the fuel cell.
BLANCH : And it's not just electricity, there's water as well apparently that's clean?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : Yeah that's the whole process, I mean we're not such much interested in just getting the power out, I mean the main interest in many ways is actually to remove these organics from the waste water, and that's quite important because that's what needs to be done in order for the water to be cleaned and in fact in many cases, like in the brewery in this case, even further treatment is then done to recycle it even back into the factory.
BLANCH : Well the state government grant is awarded on the basis of the success of your bio-cell prototype, so what are your plans for creating a bigger more workable model?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : Yeah this is a new grant that we got and we're a bit brave in many ways, because we're really jumping from a bench-scale lab model which is quite a small one, to a what we call a pilot-scale fuel cell, which we'll install at the Foster's brewery just south of Brisbane here, and that's pretty much a big step up. But we're still working on it and I think it'll be quite a success.
BLANCH : It's going to be quite a big larger isn't it, because it's a big step up from the one that you have in the lab, so how much bigger will it be than the prototype?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : Yeah that's right, I mean most of our systems in the lab they're sort of 200 millilitres, or point-two of a litre. We've got one unit that is a bit bigger now, that's a few litres now, but this one we might actually want to go to two-and-a-half thousand litres, so that's really about 100 to 200 times bigger than what we've got so far running, and that's the challenge and it's certainly causing quite a few of the headaches that we're having at the moment. But I think we're getting through them.
BLANCH : So talk about the potential for electricity generation because for instance if you had a chemical reactor capable of harnessing all the waste from the Foster's site in Brisbane, I mean how much would it produce, how much electricity would it produce?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : Yeah it's quite a large brewery there and because of that there's quite a big of waste water and with that there's quite a bit of these organics that we can convert into electricity. And we've done some estimates that it would probably be enough to power about two-thousand households, based on the total water and organics that they've got available there now.
Our system's not going to be that big, it's only going to take a small stream because that's still a big step up from what we're doing at the moment. We'll see in future, I mean the brewery itself actually is already recovering a lot of these organics in the form of bio-gas through their process there and they use that bio-gas as part of their heating process in the boiler. So they're already recovering that energy, so it's not likely that they'll actually install this system at full-scale at this brewery. But the applications are more for smaller applications, small breweries or wineries or the like which have more of the benefits in having a small system which is actually adaptable and grows with the demands of the brewery.
BLANCH : Which brings me to this question because I was wondering, we're talking about beer and brewery waste water and whether this technology is applicable to--you mentioned the wine industry, but are there other industries as well for that matter that this would be applicable to?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : Oh yeah indeed, I mean the main thing that we're taking up, or the bacteria take up--it's not us but them doing the work--is really just very common organics that are in waste water from a lot of industries, particularly food and beverage industries generally, starch manufacturing, sugar mills, fruit juice manufacturing and that sort of thing, and also canneries where fruits are processed, and they all have a lot of sugar and starch in there which is actually the raw material that the bacteria convert into the electricity. So it's got to have quite a number of applications that we foresee in the future.
BLANCH : Jurg, is this the first time that it's possible to generate electricity directly out of the waste that's in this waste water?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : Well it's not the first time as such, in fact we've been going back in the literature and we've found not just us but others have found a paper from 1911 where some scientists at the time actually already discovered that there seems to be electricity being produced by bacteria under some conditions. So it's really quite an old technology in that sense, but it hasn't really taken off until just a couple of years ago, maybe three-four years ago when it's really started to be realised that there is a few steps that we can actually overcome--a few hurdles that we can overcome which have really helped a great deal in pushing this technology up.
And the focus these days on the recovering of resources from the waste water, which are primarily the water itself but also the organics which in this case we can recover in the form of energy, but also nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorous can also be recovered, and all that has been driving this research arm quite strongly. And so it's really taken off in a big way in the last few years.
BLANCH : And what makes your research different from other projects around the world which are exploring similar technology?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : I think...well as far as we know we're the first ones that actually sort of take the jump out of the lab and put it onto a real system and at that scale. I mean the largest I've heard of so far is about 30 litres, so we're going to be quite a bit bigger than that as well, about another 100 times bigger than that.
So that's posing a lot of additional challenges, but that's fun and that's part of what research is all about, to really push the boundaries and make these things applicable, and that's really where our work has been in many cases focused in the past ten odd years that we've been working in this field at the University of Queensland, that we're really trying to develop systems which we then can really apply in the full scale or at least pilot scale initially, and then full-scale applications to really make a difference where it matters.
BLANCH : So when would you hope to have the fuel-cell operating at the brewery, the one that's just south of Brisbane?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : We're hoping to have this all up and running by the end of September because we've got a big conference running at the same time, and we expect two to three-hundred or probably 400 international and national participants at the conference, and so we want to show off a bit. But there's a plan to have a side visit to the brewery anyway, because they've got a very advanced system there as a full-scale system and that would be a very nice add-on to have this up and running. So we're well on the way to get there but it's still going to be a bit of a challenge.
BLANCH : So there's every chance we could be powered by beer in the very near future then?
PROFESSOR JURG KELLER : (laughs) Yeah I don't think we want to have the beer used for that, but the brewery waste water maybe helping to power a bit of the energy, but it's not going to be the solution to the energy crisis or the energy challenge in the future. It's a help, it's certainly going to be very useful, particularly because if you want to treat this waste water in other ways if it's not through bio-gas, then you have to really put in quite a lot of energy.
So it's not just the energy we're producing but we have the potential to also save quite a lot of energy that you otherwise would have to expend in order to treat the waste water. So that makes it a double benefit in that sense.
BLANCH : Professor Jurg Keller who is the Director of the Advanced Wastewater Management Centre at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, describing their plans to turn brewery waste water into energy.
