Electrochemical nutrient recovery from wastewater: creating circular nutrient economies

Team: William Tarpeh, William Mitch, Sharon Bone, Johanna Nelson Weker
Mid-range (Developing)

The goal of this project was to accelerate development and deployment of the team’s electrochemical stripping (ECS) technology to recover valuable nitrogen fertilizer from wastewaters. The team conducted 70+ interviews with stakeholders, conducted online market research, and built techno-economic and financial models. The team learned that nutrient emission regulations are the key to technology deployment, since the team’s ECS approach already costs substantially less than the most common approach (nitrification-denitrification, or N/DN) and no more than other emerging technologies. The best use case for the new technology is to remediate nitrogen pollution from concentrated waste streams such as anaerobic digestate or reverse osmosis concentrate (ROC) from municipal or animal feed operations. 

The team built an ECS pilot reactor and extended its maximum operating time to 40 days. In that work, researchers discovered and overcame many process issues. The team also designed a full-scale pilot reactor to deploy at the Codiga Resource Recovery Center and filed intellectual property IP disclosures to protect its innovations in process geometry. Three cities and one company have expressed interest in pilot deployments. The team has secured $373,000 in additional funding from Laboratory Directed Research and Development funding at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to mitigate fouling during ECS operation. The team has applied for follow-on, scale-up funding from the Pitch to Pilot program through the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and published multiple papers about the work.

This project also contributes toward the Industry flagship destination.