A U.S company has partnered with an Israeli firm on technology to convert municipal wastewater into cellulosic ethanol.
Qteros has entered into a joint development project with Applied
CleanTech (ACT), a commodities recycling company based in Israel, to
use ACT’s Recyllose™-based feedstock, produced from municipal
wastewater solids, for ethanol
production. The process will employ Qteros’ Q Microbe™.
ACT said its Sewage Recycling System (SRS) produces alternative energy sources for the production of electricity or ethanol, while reducing sludge formation and lowering wastewater treatment plant costs and increasing plant capacity.
The companies said they are the first to demonstrate commercial success in creating ethanol from the cellulose in municipal and agricultural liquid waste, and to offer a process that all municipalities can use to help reduce expenses.
“Our customer is every municipality that has a wastewater treatment plant,” said Jeff Hausthor, Qteros co-founder and senior project manager. “It will provide a value-added product for municipal waste water plants, thereby making treatment plants much less expensive to run and helping local governments throughout the world with their constrained budgets.”
Israel Biran, ACT’s CEO, added, “It also helps answer the question of what municipalities can do with their sewage sludge, a major challenge now facing every wastewater treatment plant operator.”
ACT spent six years developing its integrated sewage recycling solution. Its Recyllose™-based feedstock offers high cellulose content and low moisture, facilitating more efficient ethanol production, the company said.
By using ACT’s proprietary feedstock, Hausthor said Qteros and ACT’s researchers have found that an ethanol production plant can produce 120–135 gallons of ethanol per ton of Recyllose™.
Since Recyllose™ is low in lignin (a major component of plant cell walls that is difficult to degrade), and lignin can be inhibitory to efficient conversion to ethanol, Hausthor said the material improves cellulosic plant operational efficiency 20% over higher lignin content feedstocks.
Qteros CEO William Frey said that with previous technologies, a cellulosic ethanol plant would have to produce roughly 20-30 million gallons per year (MGY) in order to be profitable. With the proposed Qteros-ACT process, Frey said, production with these economics could be viable at a smaller scale.
ACT President Dr. Refael Aharon said that a wastewater plant that handles 150 million gallons a day (serving a population of about 2 million people) can be sufficient to supply a smaller-scale ethanol plant with cellulose.
The research has been supported in part by a grant from the Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation. The BIRD Foundation funds joint efforts between Israel and the United States.
The U.S. government has set a goal of increasing annual production of alternative fuels like ethanol from today’s 10 billion gallons to 36 billion gallons by 2022.
Qteros says its Q Microbe™ converts a wide array of cellulosic biomass directly into ethanol in a single step, consolidating enzymatic hydrolysis and fermentation, largely eliminating costly enzymes and associated pretreatment, and simplifying the entire production process.
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