Mississippi State University researchers are finding a new way to transform waste into energy. Rafael Hernandez, assistant professor and co-director of the renewable fuels and chemicals laboratory, said the process will use waste and organisms from the water treatment process to create biofuels.
“We are extracting that mixture of microorganisms, we are extracting the oils from the organisms and we are generating biodiesel or renewable diesel from them,” he said.
Last year, the production of biodiesel, which primarily comes from soybean oil, was approximately 180 million gallons, but the increase in production has strained the process because of the soybean’s other use as food.
“The idea is to find other sources of oil that are not competing with the food market and that are reduced in cost,” Hernandez said. “In wastewater treatment facilities the infrastructure is already there, and we have many [facilities] across the nation.”
Producing fuel at wastewater treatment facilities will also provide an incentive for developing countries to clean wastewater because it will provide a fuel source, he said.
Todd French, assistant professor and co-director of the laboratory, said the appeal of the process is that it does not compete for resources.
“You’re not competing for drinking water; you’re not competing for irrigation water,” he said. “This water is coming through a facility because it needs to be cleaned up.”
French said he met Hernandez while working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg.
At a biodiesel conference in 2002, he said they became interested in the fuel and how to use cellular material to create oil.
Soon they discovered the microbial sludge used from wastewater treatment made a cost-effective microbial source for biofuel.
“We were [testing microbial organisms on plants] and we asked, ‘Why can’t we do the same thing with the wastewater treatment plant?'” French said. “They degrade things and instead of making gas and water, these make oil.”
He said his experience as a microbiologist meshed well with Hernandez’s chemical engineering background.
The combination helped influence the unique idea, which they’ve worked on for more than four years.
He said Kirk Schulz, vice president for research and economic development, should be credited with uniting the two researchers.
“He’s the one that hired [us],” he said. “He knew that if we brought these two disciplines together, good things could come of it.”
Hernandez said that with the help of government funding and collaboration with a company in southern California, the researchers are working on implementing the system into a treatment facility.
“It takes people supporting it with funds, collaboration with industry and letting industry be the leader in implementing this from the bench scale, to the [smaller] pilot scale, to large scale,” Hernandez said.
The research for finding new energy sources is a part of the Sustainable Energy Research Center, which was created in 2006.
SERC works to integrate efforts dealing with sustainable energy, said Hernandez, and combines multiple approaches and ideas, like biodiesel, ethanol and biocrude.
While evaluating the ideas’ potentials as energy sources, the technology will in turn help Mississippi.
“The idea is to have the university be a center of technology development for green industries and generate jobs,” Hernandez said.
Andro Mondala, who is working on his engineering doctorate, said working on the wastewater research project has been a valuable experience.
“It’s a lot of fun and it’s actually pretty neat that we’re doing research that has a concrete effect, and we’re doing this to solve [environmental] problems that have been going on for quite some time,” Mondala said.
Hernandez said students should pursue their interests in biofuels, science, engineering or their desire to help create an environmentally efficient campus.
“If [students] would like the university to be green or would like the shuttles to use biofuels, or would like whatever waste is generated to be used efficiently, tell the faculty or the administration,” he said.