Rocket Science for Sustainable Wastewater Treatment

Now two Stanford University engineers are developing a new sewage treatment process that would actually increase the production of two greenhouse gases - nitrous oxide (aka, "laughing gas") and methane - and use the gases to power the treatment plant.

Craig Criddle, professor of civil and environmental engineering and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford. "By encouraging the formation of nitrous oxide, we can remove harmful nitrogen from the water and simultaneously increase methane production for use as fuel."

Criddle, an expert in wastewater management, has joined forces with Brian Cantwell, professor of aeronautics and astronautics, who has spent the last five years designing rocket thrusters that run on nitrous oxide.

For Criddle and Cantwell, the first step in building a green treatment plant is raising the right kind of bacteria. Criddle said, "To get the right microbes, we need to encourage the growth of bacteria that produce nitrous oxide gas." One way to accomplish that is by reducing the bacteria's oxygen supply, he said. Conventional treatment plants pump air into wastewater sludge - a process called aeration. The idea is to convert nitrogen waste into harmless nitrogen gas by promoting oxygen-loving bacteria that thrive on sugars and other organic matter in the sludge. As an alternative, the Stanford team wants to create a low-oxygen environment in the treatment plant, where nitrous oxide-producing bacteria are favored, while aerobic species die off.

These nitrous oxide producers consume relatively small amounts of organic matter. That's good news for other anaerobic microbes that produce methane gas by feasting on organic compounds. "When bacteria make nitrous oxide, less organic matter is oxidised, so more can be converted into methane - potentially two or three times more than is possible in a typical treatment plant," Criddle said. "That extra methane can be used as fuel to run the plant independent of outside power sources."

Using less oxygen also could reduce costs, Cantwell added. "In a typical treatment plant, aeration is responsible for about half of the operating expenses," he said. "So pumping less oxygen could save a lot of money."

In recent experiments, the researchers demonstrated that under laboratory conditions nitrous oxide gas could be produced from wastewater using a low-oxygen technique. But there's a downside to the process. Nitrous oxide is a significant greenhouse gas that's more than 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. That's where Cantwell's rocket thruster comes in. Designed for use in spacecraft, the thruster runs on nitrous oxide - a surprisingly clean-burning propellant.
"When it decomposes, nitrous oxide breaks down into pure nitrogen and oxygen gas," Cantwell explained. "At the same time, it releases enough energy to heat an engine to almost 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, making it red hot, and it shoots out of the engine at almost 5,000 feet per second, producing enough thrust to propel a rocket."

In 2008, Yaniv Scherson, one of Cantwell's graduate students, was looking for a suitable topic for a doctoral thesis that would incorporate the thruster research. "We wondered whether nitrous oxide could be exploited as an emissions-free source of energy," Cantwell said. "Since the product of the decomposition reaction is simply oxygen-enriched air, energy is generated with zero production of greenhouse gas. But first we needed to find a cheap, plentiful source of nitrous oxide."

Scherson eventually turned to Criddle, who had spent years studying microbial communities in wastewater treatment plants. Criddle explained that wastewater sludge contains bacteria that naturally convert nitrogen wastes into nitrous oxide, providing Scherson a cheap source of the gas.

Soon, Scherson, Criddle and Cantwell joined forces in an experiment bridging space propulsion and environmental biotechnology. The result was a design with the potential for treating wastewater: First, reduce oxygen levels at the treatment plant to encourage the production of nitrous oxide and methane gas. Then use the extra methane to power the plant and a small rocket thruster to break down the nitrous oxide into clean, hot air. "A single thruster about the size of a basketball could potentially consume every ounce of nitrous oxide produced by a typical treatment plant," Cantwell said.

Most treatment plants in the United States are using technology developed in the 1970s and are in dire need of an overhaul, according to Criddle. Cantwell envisions a generation of plants that are energy self-sufficient. "This could be especially important in the Third World, where millions of people live with contaminated water", he said.

Both researchers say that the technology could have other applications beyond wastewater treatment. For example, they also want to explore ways to recover energy from nitrate-contaminated groundwater beneath fertilised agricultural fields.

The world's supply of nitrogen exists in a never-ending loop, moving from the atmosphere to nitrogen-fixing bacteria to plants and animals, then back to bacteria and, eventually, to the air.
Tons of excess nitrogen fertilizer also into groundwater, rivers and out to sea, where it feeds massive algal blooms that can damage marine ecosystems. Nitrogen also impacts human health. Too much nitrate in drinking water can be harmful to infants and pregnant women, according to the Centres for Disease Control.