UQ’s Dr Korneel Rabaey will hone his knowledge in wastewater research as he taps into an exciting new way of producing energy-rich biofuels from wastewater and biomass.
Dr Rabaey, a research fellow from UQ’s Advanced Water Management Centre (AWMC), who holds an ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship, has received an $80,000 2009 UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award to explore a novel route for the production of butanol from wastewater.
The required wastewater is plentiful in industries such as sugar refineries and breweries.
The project, which is in its preliminary stage, will look at the production of butanol using Bioelectrochemical Systems (BESs).
These systems combine wastewater treatment with the production of butanol from butyrate - a typical fatty acid formed during fermentation - and/or carbon dioxide.
“The butanol itself is not the most important outcome of our research at the moment. Our key objective is to create an interface, where we drive microbial conversions using electricity,” Dr Rabaey said.
“If successful, this approach will allow us to use electrical current, whether derived from wastewater or any other (renewable) source to perform biosynthesis of a wide variety of chemicals including butanol, propanediol and bioplastics.”
In 2007, Dr Rabaey was part of a joint project between UQ and Foster's to turn beer wastewater into electricity. The research into the microbial fuel cell was awarded $140,000 from the Queensland Government's Sustainable Energy Innovation Fund.
“Wastewater contains nutrients (for agriculture), water (which can be made to any quality) and organics. The latter represent both building blocks for value chemicals or can be used to generate electrical or thermal energy,” he said.
“The current approach to wastewater treatment rarely leads to adequate recovery of these resources, with anaerobic digestion being the exception.
“When bioelectrochemical systems, then called microbial fuel cells, came up in the early 2000s, I found that their unique features would allow unforseen control of the wastewater treatment process, while allowing to recover the resources it contains.
“The resource tapped into here is the energy, or better, reducing power wastewater contains – just what is needed to produce a fuel.”
Dr Rabaey said BESs could take energy from wastewater, and use this energy to supply reducing power and create biofuels or biochemicals.
“Recovering the energy, the nutrients and the waste from wastewater creates three marketable products which should make wastewater treatment a net profitable business,” he said.
“Hopefully, in one to two decades, wastewater will be a valuable resource, used within a normal industrial sector rather than going through City Council, tax-paid treatment plants. I am convinced that BESs can play a key role in this development.”
Media: Dr Rabaey (07 3346 3222, k.rabaey@uq.edu.au) or Eliza Plant at UQ Communications (07 3365 2619).
