Animal power
3 Sep 2010
Biosource has developed a continuous anaerobic digestion (AD) process that, it claims, could provide a major advance in biofuels production. The process, which mimics the digestive processes of grazing animals such as cattle and sheep, has been already granted a UK licence and has patents pending.
The newly formed company’s process employs a tubular bioreactor - developed at the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) in collaboration with professor Mike Theodorou, formerly of Aberystwyth University, a microbiology expert on cow and sheep gut function.
Biosource is targeting the UK’s rapidly expanding market for AD facilities, where organic waste is broken down using a range of micro-organisms and turned mainly into bio-energy. The market is estimated to be worth £4.5 billion per year in the UK, where around 40 million tonnes of organic waste is created each year, much of which ends up in landfills.
Until now, development of continuous fermentation processes has proved difficult due to the design of the bioreactor. Biosource believes it has overcome this by creating a system that can deliver anaerobic digestion and bioenergy via a continuous process in a cost-effective and scaleable way.
“Our system is able to culture micro-organisms in a tubular reactor, causing the breakdown of waste biomass materials via anaerobic digestion,” said Theodorou. “The process uses a novel mixing technology and is so efficient that the bioreactor required for the process is of a much more manageable and affordable scale. We believe it’s a major advance in how to create bio-energy from organic waste.”
He added: “With our process focusing on bioenergy production from the conversion of cellulose and hemicellulose crop residues and recycled organic waste, there is no need to dedicate agricultural land to the sole production of bio-energy crops.”
Biosource is a company spun in to the Aberystwyth University Campus created by CPI Innovation Services, the commercial wing of CPI, based at Wilton on Teesside - a centre set up to support innovation and growth in the UK’s chemical, bio-chemical and printed electronics industries.
It will help commercialise the new process, which has also received funding from the Welsh Assembly government.
