Brief intro, my focus is processesing sewage effluent using algae for full recycling of the water. With solids removed and called secondary effl...

Published on by

Brief intro, my focus is processesing sewage effluent using algae for full recycling of the water. With solids removed and called secondary effluent, it is about half in weight in nutrients so a rich source to grow algae with, the problem in dealing with sewage is that algae take much longer than the chemicals normally used so must keep up with volume. So, using algae requires 24x7 growing in bioreactors, not ponds, this makes insulation, aeration much easier & other advantages but no one makes anything for this specific use. Given those, about 2-gal/7.5-L of biodiesel can be grown per day per person on a city system, this is a lot of biofuel so from a sewage treatment plant is a way to make all local transportation fuel needs, and the water is recycled. The pressed cakes are a good fertilizer yet must be de-toxified if needed at city scale to avoid poisoning fields, a favorite species boosted wheat yields 25%, this still being studied yet there's potential in all this for agriculture as well. My background has been geomorphology so got into groundwater hydrology, watersheds, wastewater treatment, have visited Lake Tahoe, CA, full recycle plant that going since the 70's, researching this method for about 8-years now. I advocate for waste-to-energy in many forms yet this means a transportation biofuel that removes CO2 and emits O2 to make it, a local supply of a renewable resource using existing infrastructure, and with further work miniaturized to household-rural scale.