how industries & cities can circulate water & energy
Since 1977 we help a broad range of industries as well as cities 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 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. That’s why we developed our pioneering high-rate AD+™ anaerobic digestion 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 AD+™ plant in 1980 in Europe followed by many more worldwide mainly in S.E. Asia.
Our first generation high-rate AD+™ units operating since 1979 till today converted about 80% of the organics (as COD) in wastewaters and slurries to biomethane. Today, our latest high-rate AD+™ units convert up to 95% of the organics to biomethane in various wastewaters and slurries such as the slurries from biofuel industries yielding up to 41 MW biopower.
In 2013, we developed and realized our first high-rate organic solids thermophilic (52 - 54 °C) AD+™ unit converting up to 90% of the solid agri-organic the solid agri-organic feedstock to biomethane in less than 5 (five) days. This enables us to multiply the capacity of existing solid AD units by 3 to 5 times at much higher efficiency resulting in 4 to 7 times higher bioenergy yield with far less residue in the most sustainable and cost-effective way. In addition, we convert our AD+™ solid residues from organic industries to high quality biofertilizer containing organic carbon, NPK and micro-nutrients along with active micro-organisms compatible to those in fertile soils. As proven in field trials our AD+™ biofertilizers result in superior crop quality and yield as compared to chemical fertilizers.
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.