Expected Results

LIFE-ECOdigestion 2.0 aims to avoid the loss of resources and energy contained in wastes & sludge from WWTP by developing a control, managing and decision-making tool for optimizing the co-digestion of waste in digesters of WWTPs. Environmental and economic benefits will be achieved by greater and better controlled biogas production, as well as optimum waste exploitation.

Main Results

The main expected results are the followings:

  • Scale-up the tool for automatic co-digestion in WWTP of with agri-food and manure to obtain energy on demand feeding the digesters recipes that will be generated and updated every 15 min.
  • Adjust of 98% between target (production desired by the end user) and simulated biogas production
  • Obtaining an adjust of 90% between target and produced biogas after the automated dosage of co-substrates.
  • Increase in 192% the amount of manure and agri-food waste that can be treated in each WWTP being studied, which means 85,191 t during the demonstration at real-scale.
  • Obtaining 14% more biogas with the co-digestion compared to digestion of each substrate separately.
  • Improve the stability of the co-digestion process under different operational conditions with various co-substrates, established by reference of stability the acidity/alkalinity ratio.
  • Valorise 27,375 t/y of agri-food waste and 102,200 t/y of manure by changing their destination from incineration, agriculture, compost and landfill disposal to co-digestion. This implies: i) avoiding the emission of GHG, about 7,900 and 16,442 t CO2-eq in agri-food and manure co-digestion demonstration respectively; ii) total annual methane production with agri-food waste of 2,729,471 Nm3 and 951,400 Nm3 with manure, which means 14,571 MWh and 7,540 MWh, respectively.
  • 4 qualities and qualified full-time employments will be consolidated and 1 will be created during the execution of the project (specialized technicians).
  • Regarding the impact to EU, the implementation of the tool in all WWTP with anaerobic processes (5,477 WWTPs) will imply an energy production of 58,330 GWh/y in EU-28. In addition to this, an annual reduction of GHG of 66.2 Mt CO2and 17.1 t NOX, and in of gases that promote acid rain in 23.7 t SO2 will be achieved.
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