Sludge Watch ==> Australia - Alternative Po-or Sources

[Maureen Reilly]

Sludgewatch Admin:

Interesting story. Certainly the methane and volatile gases can be used for 
energy.
It is the babble at the end of the story that is foolishness.  Clean sludge? 
  With all the detergents, drugs, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals that are 
tipped into sewers, you cannot have 'clean sludge'.

.....................................................


Alternative poo-wer sources
Last Update: Tuesday, August 21, 2007. 11:14am AEST

By Terri-Anne Kingsley

If you're looking for an alternative electricity source for a small town, Dr 
Damian Batstone from the Advanced Water Management Centre, University of 
Queensland, reckons you need look no further than your local sewage 
treatment plant.

A new process makes recycling waste particularly suited for communities of 
fewer than 100,000 people, he says.

"It's already been proven at large scale, so there's a lot of new facilities 
going up around Australia at big waste water treatment plants," he says.

"They're currently producing energy for our use.

"It hasn't been available at the smaller scale yet because those projects 
are so capital-intensive, but we're trying to develop a low-impact process 
that will generate energy.

"We're about a year off having a pilot plant starting construction.

"We've proven the process...our next step is working out how, metabolically, 
it works, and trying to optimise it...and prove it at full scale."

The pilot plant will be built in south east Queensland - which is a 
condition of the grant that's fuelling the research - but once it's up and 
running, the concept could easily move out into the rest of the country. The 
pilot plant should be up and running within two years, Dr Batstone says.

"That will give the decision-makers somewhere to look at and see whether 
it's suitable for their community.

"I think the technology will be commercially available from a provider 
within three years."

And, by the time the pilot plant is up and running, Dr Batstone says they 
hope to have improved their results.

"We expect to have markedly better outcomes in terms of reliability, and 
considerably better outcomes in terms of performance."

The process uses either sewage or the waste from food processing.

"We generally won't mix sewage biosolids with food processing biosolids," Dr 
Batstone says.

And if enough raw material is there, the process will contribute up to 50 
per cent of the cost of running a sewage treatment plant. So you take the 
biosolids and process them, and use the resultant energy to run the sewage 
plant - meaning you only have to buy half the energy from the grid that you 
usually would.

"We see waste water as a resource rather than a problem," Dr Batstone says.

"We see that it's got energy available in it, it's got nutrients available 
in it, so a big part of this project is generating a clean residue that can 
be used as fertiliser afterwards. That reduces greenhouse emissions from 
fertiliser use by over 97 per cent."


http://www.abc.net.au/centralvic/stories/s2010661.htm