Create Electricity With Microbes and Wastewater

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are using a combination of beer,wastewater and microbes to demonstrate fuel-cell technology.

Lars Angenent, Ph.D., assistant professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering, has received a $400,000 Career grant from the National Science Foundation to develop microbial fuel cell (MFC) kits and an accompanying booklet of physics, chemistry and biology lessons that pertain to the cell. In addition, Angenent will make the kits available to high school science teachers everywhere as an exciting, visual, hands-on way to teach science.

Using MFC technology, Angenent is treating wastewater donated by local brewery Anheuser-Busch, and in so doing creating electricity in a six-liter device a bit bigger than a large thermos. He uses a mixed medium containing thousands of organisms and optimizes environmental conditions to select for a bacterial community with improved electron transfer in anode biofilms, thereby increasing the electron transfer rate. In addition, he plans to work with a single-culture biofilm to allow a full understanding of how to use operating conditions to manipulate electron transfer in anode chambers.

Producing energy from wastewater should be a high international priority because of population growth and worldwide depletion of energy resources. Wastewater, with its high-content organic matter, also can produce methane and hydrogen fuels, however, that theoretically more readily usable energy can be produced when electricity is produced directly in a microbial fuel cell. A bioelectricity generating wastewater treatment system in just one large food-processing plant could power as much as 900 American single-family households.

I bet they do - beer-making is energy intensive and produces a lot of wastewater. Research like this might one day lead to a “greener” beer.