how industries & cities can circulate water & energy
Since 1977 we help a broad range of industries as well as communities to clean their wastewaters for reuse and to convert their organic waste to circular bioenergy in the most efficient way. For the city of Antwerp we developed and realized their new sewage treatment with our first low-rate solids AD+™ anaerobic digestion unit producing 4.8 MW circular bioenergy from 1979 up till today.
At the same time, as a result of the first fossil fuel crises, many industries were keen to convert their organic wastewaters and waste to bioenergy instead of wasting a lot of electrical energy to oxidize it to CO2 in classic wastewater treatment. That’s why we developed our pioneering high-rate mesophilic (at 30 - 37°C) AD+™ in close collaboration with Prof. Dr. ir. Willy Verstraete and his team at the Ghent university. After successful piloting, we realized our first full scale high-rate AD+™ plant in 1980 in Europe followed by many more worldwide. In 2013, we realized our first high-rate organic solids thermophilic (at 52 - 54 °C) AD+™ unit. This unit converts up to 90% of the solid organic feedstock to biomethane in less than 5 (five) days as compared to the 60% to 80% conversion over 15 - 20 days in current AD plants. This enables us to retrofit upgrade existing solid AD units as to multiply their capacity by 3 to 5 times at much higher efficiency resulting in 4 to 7 times more bioenergy with far less residuals in the most sustainable and cost-effective way.
Our latest high-rate organic solids thermophilic AD+™ plant converts thick slurries from biofuel industries to 41 MW biopower to support the public power grid.
In addition, we convert our AD+™ solid residues from organic industries to high quality biofertilizer for healthy soils and crops.
In parallel, as the environmental standards in Europe and in other parts of the world become more stringent, we develop and apply our unique AS+™ technology which upgrades the core Activated Sludge (AS) process as used in more than 95% of all sewage and wastewater treatment plants worldwide. AS+™ adds innovative bioprocesses that capture, crack and biodegrade a wide range of recalcitrant organics from synthetic dyes in textile wastewaters and various “hard” organics in other industrial wastewaters down to the micropollutants in municipal sewage such as residual medicines. In addition, our AS+™ add-in SNDN+™ bioprocess converts all nitrogen compounds very efficiently, via 50% nitritation + anammox, directly to inert nitrogen gas (80% in air). ). In this way, AS+™ converts up to 99% of all organics (as COD) + all nitrogen compounds (as total nitrogen TN) as certified at full scale. The resulting AS+™ effluent is very clean and clear and suitable for direct reuse after optional NF/RO membrane filtration if/as needed for up to 5 times longer membrane service life at the lowest total cost as proven in our sustainable water reuse (SWR) units.
Hence AD+™ and AS+™ provide 100% circular solutions to most organic industries.