Biofuel from Sewage

Qteros forms a partnership to use sewage as a feedstock for making ethanol.

These days, more and more companies are finding that sewage is a veritable "black gold." In recent years, sewage sludge has been mined for electricity, fertilizer, fish food, and gasoline. Now two companies have partnered up to turn sewage into ethanol. While others have worked to produce ethanol from municipal solid waste, sewage from wastewater has been a relatively unmined ethanol source.

On Q: The Q microbe (pictured), a lollipop-shaped organism that naturally breaks down and converts plant matter into ethanol, is now being used to make biofuel from sewage. Credit: Qteros

The cellulosic ethanol company Qteros, in Marlborough, MA, and Applied Cleantech (ACT), a recycling company based in Israel, are combining technologies to turn sewage into ethanol biofuel. According to the companies, the process could produce high-quality biofuel while cutting down on monthly bills at wastewater treatment plants.

Jeff Hausthor, Qteros cofounder and senior project manager, says the recycling process uses solids from wastewater treatment as its primary feedstock - a material that facilities usually pay to have trucked away to landfills or used as fertilizer. "Given the feedstock has a negative cost, it is going to save every municipality money while they're generating energy from something they needed to throw out before," says Hausthor.

Sewage makes sense not just from an economic standpoint but also from a scientific one, according to Jim McMillan, a principal biochemical engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory who is not involved in the project. One of the major steps in cellulosic ethanol production involves breaking down plant matter and separating cellulose from its tough lignin shell, either by mechanically shearing the material or by treating it with harsh chemicals. In contrast, the sewage that streams in from sewer pipes contains plant matter that is high in cellulose and low in lignin.

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Six years ago, researchers at Applied Cleantech recognized sewage as an alternative cellulose source and designed a system to recover cellulose from wastewater treatment plants. As incoming sewage flows through the system, a series of mesh trays filters out liquid and recovers solids. Suspension tanks filter out sand from sludge, and the leftover mix is dried and pressed into pellets or pulp.

For the past year, Qteros has been feeding the mix to its ethanol-producing organism, the Q microbe, a bacterium that naturally eats plant material and ferments cellulose into ethanol using its own enzymes. Researchers found that the Q microbe produced 120 to 135 gallons of ethanol per ton of waste mix, compared with 100 gallons of ethanol per ton of conventional feedstocks like corn stover.