The challenge
The water and wastewater industry currently accounts for 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
United Utilities’ Davyhulme Treatment Works is one of the biggest wastewater treatment works in the UK, serving 1.2 million people each and every day. The treatment process captures sludge, which is then transported to a bioresources facility where digestion technologies are used to produce biogas (a mix of biomethane and carbon dioxide) that can be used to generate renewable energy and biosolids for onward use.
The partnership
We’re working with United Utilities on a pioneering project which will see this biogas, created within the wastewater treatment process, used as a fully sustainable feedstock to produce hydrogen and graphene via the Levidian LOOP.
This project has been designed to tackle a common problem in the wastewater industry; that is how to capture and process water in a way that a) reduces emissions and supports decarbonisation, and b) minimises the financial burden of waste treatment.
The goal
We estimate that this project alone will save the emission of almost 50 tonnes of methane and produce around 10 tonnes of hydrogen each year.
Moving forward, our ambition is to work with United Utilities to scale up the programme, with the potential to roll out up to 47 commercial LOOP units at wastewater treatment sites across the North West of England. This would allow us to clean up all of the biogas produced, drive down the emission of almost 6,500 tons of methane and produce almost 7,000 tonnes of clean hydrogen each year.
United Utilities is also interested in exploring the use of hydrogen to eliminate emissions from its fleet of heavy duty vehicles, and the opportunity to drive down the carbon footprint of its future capital investment programme through the introduction of graphene into cement, which has the potential to reduce the amount of material required by around 50%.
We believe that once one water company successfully installs the technology, others will quickly follow. In this case, we could conceivably deploy 489 units to treatment sites across the UK to achieve an annual reduction of over 360,000 tonnes of carbon and the production of more than 72,000 tonnes of hydrogen.
“This is a hugely exciting project for us, and the wider water sector, transforming something that has previously been a waste product into two high value products in the form of hydrogen and graphene. We’re looking forward to running our trial at our Manchester Bioresources Centre in order to prove the potential of the technology. If successful, we could then look to apply it at wastewater treatment sites across the North West.”
Related news
