BlueTech Forum 2011 - Hot Tech Area - Energy and Resource Recovery from Wastewater

It's a very exciting area because I'm a sad person. But, you know, we're now realizing there's energy there, there are resources there. And globally, I guess the water industry will be facing carbon reduction commitments, certainly something that's a legal requirement in the uk now that it's just coming up. The utilities have carbon managers because they're going to be taxed on this stuff. We've heard a bit about phosphate. We're going to be hearing a bit more about that now. It's a vital resource. It's part of our DNA, it's part of our cells. Energy transfer systems. Without phosphate we can't have life. Weisworfer is a way that we can recover back phosphate.

Energy.

As I say, in the UK at least it uses 1% of the electricity. Interestingly, it uses 6%, but nobody talks about that. Apparently in EMEA there's 4 grams of carbon. I didn't know that. I have previously. Well, there's an elephant in the room for the water industry and that's nitrous oxide. 298 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. It's emitted from wastewater treatment. We haven't really quantified it. It's something that's going to come around and bite us, I think before too long when we start talking about carbon production commitment seriously. And I think we will have time.

For.

Rocket science meeting wastewater treatment. I previously said that the wastewater area is not rocket science. I'm not bright enough to do rocket science. But fortunately we have somebody who is bright enough to do that and could well be our own speaker. So with that little teaser, I would like to get David up, our first speaker.

Thank you for inviting us. Our company is Thermo Energy and what we do is resource recovery from waste water. We were founded 25 years ago in response to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. And that act allowed companies, without penalty, to recover and reuse the process chemistry that is in there. Waste water. Water. Over those 25 years, we've developed a platform technology called Control atmosphere separation technology. It's based on flash vacuum distillation. We operate under a vacuum and by playing with the physical chemistry of the wastewater and the process chemistry, we have learned how to separate out and recover the process chemistry in a form that it can be reused at a very high quality. Our systems, as a result, have a number of benefits that other wastewater treatment systems do not have. We are a simple process, we are compact, and more importantly, we are able to generate a positive return on our investment for Our equipment. Many of the installations that we have have a two year payback or less. So there's not a cost associated with our equipment. It's more of an investment that has a specific return. We have a number of markets that we're targeting. Our overall market is about $2 billion in size. And historically our traditional markets over the last 25 years have been metals recovery, glycol, VOD, particularly sugar. And recently we've just won a project in New York City to remove ammonia from wastewater at that 26 ward plant. That's a sampling of the types of projects that we've done over the last 25 years. Our technology has been very versatile. We've been able to combine our technology with other pre treatment and post treatment technologies and are able to extract some of the newer markets for U.S. and applications in rare earths, transition metals. We just won a job in first quarter of this year to remove transition metal from a manufacturer of ores. This metal had a value of over $1,000 a pound and they wanted to recover it. And we've been able to develop a system to do just that. We are also looking at other applications for Glypol. For example, aircraft de icing fluids contain a high amount of glyphol. We're able to remove that glyphol, recover it and reuse it back as an aircraft de icing fluid. All of the applications that we have have high value and as a result of that, we are able to return to our clients a revenue stream that allows us to again pay for our equipment and also allows a design, build, own operate model for us. As I mentioned, we've been in business for over 25 years. We have over 70 installed systems still operating out there. We have developed a series of proprietary technologies to separate out our chemicals and we've been able to apply that to a number of applications across a lot of different industries.

Our.

Process technology and our approach to this is by combining both technology and our engineering experience with our process water and process chemistry in order to give to our clients a package that allows them to integrate this seamlessly in their process manufacturing system. The picture that you see there is actually a large drinking water project that we did for the US Navy that had a system in Djibouti that was not working. And we've been able to take that system and install it and produce high quality drinking water for our service people. The Djibouti Navy base sits on a geothermal fault and water that comes out that they're using for the intake water has A very high TDS and TSS content and we've been able to remove that. Those are multi filters and GACs and we also have use our platform technology for that. Our strategy in terms of developing the market. We've been in business a long time and as you all know that the marketplace is very fragmented in terms of who controls the channel. There are engineering companies, there are manufacturers reps, there are companies that are out there selling directly into those channels. What we're trying to do in terms of our strategy and sales strategy is to attack not only market segments that we see as high value, but what we're also trying to do is expand our sales channels by forming agreements with manufacturers reps. We have a number of partnerships that we've established with engineering firms like Aecomp and Contigo, which is a large de icing operations manager for airports and develop our own direct sales force and very extensively use the Internet to generate sales. We've been doing a lot of very aggressive marketing. We found over the years that if we do not get in front of our ultimate client, there's a lot of other people that get into the way of that decision making. So what we're trying to do is go out, reach that client that is going to buy and try to get them to see the benefits of our technology. We offer both equipment sales and also design, build, own, operate. By generating a revenue stream, we're able to offer a design, build, own operate model to our clients. And in many cases we're able to pay off our equipment obviously from the revenue that we get from those revenue streams. Okay, and with that, thank you.

I really do have a clock over here, so this is going to be fun. Can't miss it. For those of you in the audience, my name is Ross Patten. I'm the President and CEO of MaxWest. We are a technology development company and operating company that. Oh, there's the push buttons here I guess. We are a technology development and operating company that has developed a system that includes gasification, dewatering and drying that extracts.

The.

BTU value that's in wastewater. At our facility in Sanford, we receive the biosolids either from customers who give it to us in a liquid state, which would be about 4 or 5% solids, or we bring it in a cake form which is about 17% solids. We then dry the material, dewater it, dry it, gasify it and create a complete energy loop. It's a simple design, it's very modular. The technology is broken down into about 80 wet ton modules. Can be scaled up in modules of 80 tons, 80 wet tons. The technology has proved to be very reliable. We are developing a second generation of technology based on the lessons that we've learned about handling biosolids. Our business model is a business model of design, build, own and operate. This is a picture of the gasifier in Sanford operating. Our business model is design, build, don't operate. We also a unique part of our system is that we can treat multiple customers. Through our system. The Sanford facility services four different municipalities. Their biosolids in each case are different.

And we've learned a lot about how.

To handle that, how to mix them, the polymer usage, the dewatering, and so on. In the United States, There are over 16,000 wastewater treatment treatment plants that are a potential market. You can see that if we were to sell one cell systems, there would be about a thousand systems that we could sell. But the system is designed so that we can bring in many customers into our facilities. There's about a $2.5 billion market here in the United States worldwide. We've had great interest in Europe and in China to our technology. So it's a very robust market. We have, as I mentioned, a facility in Sanford that's been operating since 2009. And we have been working on projects where we either are negotiating with private operators or municipalities. We have projects in Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, and here in California. And those projects are in different phases of the project and permitting. As I mentioned, our business model is a low risk business model to our customer. We will come in and design, build, own and operate the facility. For 20 years. My background had been in the service business with Browning Ferris Industry Solid waste Company and also with a company called Syne Grow, which is the major player in the business, servicing over 1,000 customers. And I learned from my experience there that the business model of the regional facilities is a good model to service. If someone's having biosolids disposal problems in one market, there's usually four or five of them all clustered together. Our system allows them to get together and solve the problem on their own recently. Something that's very validating to the company is that we were successful in attracting Invesco to invest $32 million in the company. We had already had a very dependable investment group, Clean Energy, who had invested about $20 million in the company. We now have funds to go ahead and do two projects with our own equity to prove to the market that that we can execute on our business plan. Invesco is a large fund out of London and the United States. They also are a big player in the water industry where they have an index fund that they track the industry very well and they know the problems that companies are having with their biosolids. Our business model is a solid one. I've been, as I mentioned, in the service business for a number of years and I like providing service, put our money where our mouth is and the customers are very interested in how municipalities are strapped for cash. And if someone steps up and says we'll design, build, own and operate, it's free, attractive to them.

Okay.

And that's it. 1 minute and 40 seconds left.

Hello, my name is Greg Wyant and I'm the president and CEO of Pasteurization Technology Group. That's a mouthful. So I should probably explain what we do. What we do is we help wastewater treatment facilities handle two big problems that they face. And we do it in one project, kind of like Walmart two for one. We help them with on site renewable energy generation as well as wastewater disinfection for reuse. And we're able to do that under one platform. And I'll explain a little bit about how we do that. At wastewater treatment plants there are digesters that generate digester gas or biogas. Typically this fuel is just flare. It's a horrible greenhouse gas. And the best way to deal with it or historically has been to just flare it. What we do is we, we take that biogas or digester gas, we clean it up and then we burn it in H bourbon. This allows the facility to generate renewable energy on site using the biogas. But then we take it a step further. And what we do is we take the exhaust heat from the turbine, which is like a stationary jet engine. And so the exhaust heat is anywhere from 700 to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. And we take that energy and set. Instead of it just getting wasted into the atmosphere, we transfer it using an air to water heat exchanger into the wastewater stream. What this allows us to do is raise the wastewater stream up to a temperature that we can disinfect or pasteurize all the pathogens. In the case of the State of California, that's approximately 180 degrees Fahrenheit. But we take it even a step further. And so now you've got this disinfected wastewater stream that's 180 degrees. Well, you're going to have a problem getting rid of 180°F water. So what we do is we take the energy in that wastewater stream that's been disinfected and we transfer it in another heat exchanger, a water to water heat exchanger. And this does two things for us. One, it lowers the temperature of the disinfected wastewater so that it's at a temperature that can be discharged safely, only 3 degrees above its incoming temperature. And secondarily and most importantly, in a selfish aspect, it allows us to get approximately 40 times the volume that you could get in a single pass heating system. It allows us to become incredibly efficient and see large volumes from a smaller plant. We've pilot planted three different locations over the course of about seven years. We're one of a few technologies that are certified under Title 22 in the state of California, which is one of the highest standards in the world for wastewater disinfection. And we've had our process patented worldwide. As has been discussed multiple times. This is the renewable energy and wastewater market. Disinfection market are multi billion dollar markets. It's not a question of size. As we talked about initially. The target market for us is the US 16,000 wastewater treatment plants. Approximately 3,500 of those digester gas and over 90% of those according to the EPA are just flaring. So instead of flaring it, we look at that as that's our low hanging fruit, because we can actually utilize this as a fuel to drive our system. Our technology is a great, incredibly robust. It doesn't need kind of dainty or clean water. It can handle dirtier water streams. And so we think that there are some neat opportunities moving forward in emerging markets. With China and India. We've also had some conversations with some people moving it from kind of a municipal space to kind of the commercial and industrial, the food processors as well as the oil and gas business. We're pretty fired up because we earlier this year signed our first two sales. So we're in a commercial stage. We're kind of getting overrun with RFPs. So that's exciting but also daunting. We're starting to get a sales or quote backlog. And there's two things for us that are exciting about that. One, the dollar volume. But most importantly, I think it's that it means that the consulting engineering community, which act as kind of the gatekeepers for a lot of these large municipal markets, they're comfortable with our technology. Turbines and heat exchangers have been around for a long time and it's not like we're designing some widget that may not work at scale. And we're almost more excited about their comfort level than the dollar volume. And we're currently raising expansion capital to kind of handle the demand that we're faced with. Our strategy, relatively straightforward strategy of assemble pieces, add a substantial margin and sell the system to the end user. So and what we're calling secret sauce is kind of how we attack the different disinfection standards and the control software that manage this. This the second one, Capital Light. It's the favorite one of our cfo and it's a capital light business model from the standpoint of we don't need to build a 50 or 100 million dollar facility to generate our products. We get to use the turbine manufacturers and the heat exchanger manufacturers. So we don't have to expend capital to build a manufacturing facility. Which means we should be able to achieve some pretty significant and aggressive roi. One of our goals is always to find good partners to work with, especially on the vendor and supply side because they've been in the business of turbines and heat exchangers for a while. So we're working on that as well as the consulting engineering community. As mentioned, they're the gatekeepers to a lot of the projects. And so we need to get them to feel comfortable with our technology and move forward. And last but not least, because it's hidden by the clock, it's about execution. And that's my job. We need to execute on our game plan. We think it's a solid one. We're really, really excited about the prospects of helping on both the renewable energy side and wastewater disinfection because the plants today don't realize it, but that water coming out of their plant is valuable and the farmers who don't get water and need it long term are going to. And it's exciting to be kind of on this wave that's building on the wastewater disinfection for me. So we'll be outside. We'd love to talk to you if you have any thoughts, even if you think they're crazy. And we want to thank Paul and everybody for having us. Thank you very much.

My name is Matt Wilson.

I'm with Multifort Marvis. Adam Summit was supposed to be giving this talk, so I'm working with a few notes today. We're in the process of recovering valuable nutrients from wastewater. We don't consider it a new technology. There exists that are in place, they're proven, they are economically viable. We just feel that we're coming to market with a variation that will allow us to maximize the number of plants that are available to be able to use it. As you know, phosphorus is a Valuable resource and it's not renewable. There's much discussion about pink phosphorus and how many years they've got. Less so the ability to recover from waste watering, we think is an important service as well as an economical and viable business. It's not used properly. It causes problems in rivers and streams. Excess phosphorus is fertilizer that drives plant growth in oceans and waters and streams. And to be able to cover it and put it into a high value slow release fertilizer is a much better use of the resource than mining it, processing it and then shipping it around. The current solution plants are using to treat phosphorous issues is the addition of alum and iron, which is just an ongoing expense, adds to the biosolids that they're creating and the waste that they have to dispose. And it's just an ongoing cost. Our system, you take the wastewater from the biosolids that have been either centrifuged or belt filter pressed, that return back to the headworks of the plant, raise the pH to create an optimum system for crystallization. Add magnesium chloride and it's able to react on one mole to one mole to one mole reaction to magnesium, the ammonia and the phosphorus and creates a high value slow release fertilizer. What it is is you're bringing in the wastewater and putting it through a fluidized bed. It's a cone technology. Our system is simple. Once through system, we do not try and grow and build a finished fertilizer product inside the cone. Ours is just put the centrate through once, add the magnesium chloride, get the crystallization to occur. It happens instantaneously and the crystals will form. And after about a day you can pull them off and recover them and use them. This is a sample of the product recovering from our pilot plant that we're just operating and running in Corvallis today. It's best suited to plants with the anaerobic digesters. However, we're also focusing on industrial wastewater plants as well as agriculture. The process was started in the swine industry and proved very successful there. We've got an operating facility at a dairy digester in the Pacific Northwest. But the wastewater plants are the most exciting opportunity for us right now. We're getting a lot of interest from around the world on very different things, but we're trying to stay very focused and move slowly and just get our installations in and running profitably and economically here in North America. First, the best markets for it are.

The.

Targeted areas where they're having existing phosphorus problems and they are decreasing the limits on wastewater plants. So the plants are wanting to reduce the phosphorus levels that are being recycled around their plant and requiring to be treated over and over and over. If we can recover it into a valuable product, it's much better than binding it up with iron and sending it out into the biosolids. We've got a full scale facility that is under construction in Boise, Idaho. It's expected to be completed in December of this year, likely early spring next year. When it's finished, it should be the largest production facility for sprue bite in North America. We've got pilots that are running, as I said, we've got one in Corvallis that's finished in another week and it'll be headed out to the east coast. We are very busy with the RFPs that plants that are now have learned about recovering phosphorus and implementing struvite systems that they are now coming to commercialization. Currently seeking assistance and funding right now. We've been self funded up until now, until we can get operational and profitable and we're looking to expand more rapidly now.

And.

The other points I just wanted to finish making, we're piloting with leachate as well. We're recovering the phosphorus and magnesium at leachate and it's being combined with thermal energy's process and turning where they will recover the phosphorus and pretreat the waste and help it for a condition that can then go to a thermal energy system and they can recover the nitrogen. Which we find is a very interesting opportunity and combination. The fertilizer that we're creating is because we're not making a finished fertilizer product at a wastewater site. We've been told by the wastewater plants that they prefer to focus on just treating their wastewater. They just want to get rid of their phosphorus problem and not become a fertilizer production facility. So we're taking it off site. And the fertilizer people we're discussing with are adding, they're asking us to add certain chemicals. For example, the NPK of screwvite has no potassium. So if we can put a bit of potassium, we believe we can create even a higher value product than just the screwvite alone. Our main goal is to find key partners that will help us in our business. Not just, you know, getting money is one good thing and it's great, great to have, but we're more focused on finding key partners that can also assist us grow and develop our business. And that's it. Thank.

You.

So those were four very interesting papers. Transition met. I mean China was in there quite a lot. China's introduced a 130% tax on phosphate exports because it's strategically so valuable. I think the US has probably stopped phosphate exports as well. The eu, I think, is going to have. Well, Sweden and Germany both have legal targets coming in for phosphate recovery from wastewater. Everybody in this room is excreting 98% of phosphate in their diets because they're just turning over cells. Children accumulate phosphate, young animals accumulate phosphate, but we're just turning it over. Without the phosphate, we wouldn't have a diet. So wastewater is a really valuable resource for recovery. Today's mines will be exhausted by the end of the century. At the current rate of extraction, that's pretty unquestionable. What the size of the reserves is after that, that's the question. Maybe it's 200 years, maybe it's 400 years. It's not a great legacy to leave for future generations. As we've heard, the engineers, the consulting engineers are the gatekeepers or maybe the blockers. But engineers rush to be second, somebody said. So crossing the chasm is not to be underestimated. And so you need longevity in this business. Some of these people have crossed Castle, which is fantastic. Flaring biogas is just extraordinary. But the US energy has been so cheap that people haven't bothered to use it. Now we've got technologies coming along using it. In the booklet there is reference to the EU Sludge Directive. I have it on very good authority that will not be revised. So don't build that into your business plan. And the youth slug for it will not be revised. Now, something that I, since we are ahead of time, I mentioned rocket science. It was something I saw. Last summer, Stanford University put out a press release about this. How to instead of trying not to produce the elephant or minimizing the size of the elephants in the room, the nitrous oxide that I referred to maximize the nitrous oxide production and burn it in a rocket engine. Just amazing to me. Anyway, I got really excited and also maximizing the conservation of organic matter in the wastewater so that after getting your rocket fuel, your nitrous oxide, you can then get maximum biogas for biogas utilization. So if you'd like to come up and make your presentation, that would be fantastic.

Well, thank you for that very exciting introduction. It got me more excited as well. Okay, so my name is Yamiche. I'm a graduate student at Stanford University under the direction of Craig Friedle in environmental engineering and Ryan Cantwell in Aeronautics and astronautics. And last summer we found a unique opportunity to combine Bioreactors and rockets to get energy from waste nitrogen in the form of ammonia. This process we've termed coupled aerobic anoxic nitrous decomposition operation, or candu, in the theme of the Cannon, the Holland and the Charon processes. So here's the CANDU process. In conventional nitrogen treatment, ammonia goes to nitrate, which takes two moles of oxygen to do so. And then nitrate is reduced to nitrogen, which takes 5 reducing equivalents. Those reducing equivalents typically come from organic matter. So that's organic matter that cannot otherwise be converted into methane. So it's an energy sink. In our proposed process, we short circuit the nitrogen cycle by partially oxidizing ammonia to nitrite, thus lowering the oxygen demand, number one operational cost of wastewater treatment facility. And then partially removed reducing nitrite to nitrous oxide while reducing our reducing equivalents. So that frees up organic matter to convert to methane. And we decompose nitrous oxide into nitrogen and oxygen and get energy out from nitrous oxide itself. So we have a route for generating energy from waste nitrogen and we free up organic matter to make more methane. There's multiple embodiments of the CANDU process and this is just one of them. In the first step, ammonia goes to nitrite in a partial oxidation step, much like the Charon process. In fact, it is the Charon first step of the Charon process. And then we have a second stage in which an iron cycle reduces nitrite to nitrous oxide almost completely. In fact, we have over 85% conversion efficiency of nitrite to nitrous oxide with an iron cycle. And then the iron is, and that's an abiotic, a very fast abiotic reaction. And then the iron is reduced back into ferric to ferrous form with COD using iron reducing organisms, again very fast organisms. And then in the third step, nitrous oxide is decomposed catalytically into nitrogen or oxygen to generate heat. And this is a self sustaining reaction. This is one embodiment, as I said. So we see many advantages to can do. And they include increasing methane, potentially two to three times more methane production as compared to conventional nitrogen treatment, significantly lowering the oxygen demand of wastewater treatment. And oxygen demand is the number one operational cost of wastewater treatment facilities. Reducing biomass the number two operational cost of wastewater treatment facilities. We rely on very robust organisms and very fast range kinetics. So our process is resistant to upsets and lowers capital cost. By having very fast reactions and nitrogen, we provide an avenue for extracting energy from waste nitrogen itself. And this is a patented process through Stanford University. And I was told to have just a few slides. So this is a very quick overview of the process. And I'm outside, down at the end to the left, if you have any questions afterwards. Thank you very much.

With that, I think it's lunchtime. Enjoy your lunch and look forward to an exciting afternoon.