Disposing of excess sludge – the organic remnants of the wastewater treatment process – is a significant economic and environmental challenge for anyone who operates a wastewater treatment plant. The facility needs to treat the wastewater and then remove the biosolids. What if the sludge was not an irritation and instead became a valuable part of the facility’s resource recovery?
Recycling organic materials from wastewater is an important initiative for facilities that want to capture the energy potential in their waste. By implementing anaerobic digestion, facilities can stabilize the biosolids, create supplemental income, and participate in renewable energy source initiatives.
If you want to reuse your biogas, the first step is to install a gas holder membrane system. This can be built on a concrete slab or as a cover for a new or existing anaerobic digestion tank. The feed to the digester does not need to be limited to your own plant’s waste stream. You can look to local industries, such as restaurants and grocery stores to provide another source of waste to become biogas. This process is known as co-digestion.
WesTech can work with you to develop a biogas storage facility at your plant and maximize your biosolids digestion and biogas production. Our engineers are experienced in how to design anaerobic digesters with biogas storage, avoid treatment inefficiencies and short-circuiting with sludge mixing equipment, and optimize the rate of digestion with a sludge heat exchanger.
Both new installations and retrofits benefit from anaerobic digestion solutions when there is a sufficient concentration of solids delivered to the system. Biogas is an economical way for plants to generate and provide heat and/or electricity, lower the overall cost of plant operations, and reduce the plant’s carbon footprint. As an income source, plants can also scrub the gas and sell it back to utilities as natural gas and sell biosolids for land application. By processing and repurposing waste that would have gone to landfills, anaerobic digestion also provides environmental benefits.