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Industry Focus: R&I


HOW CAN R&I HELP THE AD INDUSTRY REACH ITS FULL POTENTIAL?


equipment worth £5bn every year, creating nearly 60,000 jobs in the process. Furthermore, estimates have shown that with investment in new areas of research, biogas could produce up to 60 per cent of current coal power generation and reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 18-20 per cent.


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This is why the newly proposed Centre for Anaerobic Biotechnology and Bioresources (CABB) Research – led by the Universities of Oxford, Southampton, Reading, Newcastle, Imperial College and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and supported by ADBA – is so important. If we can harness the potential of research and innovation (R&I) to deliver improvements in process efficiency, a greater ability to treat new feedstocks, and make novel uses of the outputs, the UK AD industry could be many times bigger than it is today.


Matching nature – improving reaction efficiencies According to Dr Mike Mason, Chairman of Tropical Power (pictured left), the Centre is essential to take the industry to the next level: “We need the Centre because, at the moment, we have the germ of a technology that hasn’t really advanced since the 1800s – it has the potential to be so much more. It’s chronically


undervalued, and is considered expensive and niche when it really needn’t be.”


At the heart of the proposal is a desire to overcome a technical conundrum. The rate-limiting step in anaerobic digestion – the step that slows everything down – is the first one; hydrolysis. A considerable amount of time and money is spent by developers, operators and researchers in improving the speed of this step with expensive pre-treatment technologies, because it holds the key


36 AD & BIORESOURCES NEWS | SPRING 2017


he international AD economy has the potential to be worth £1 trillion and, thanks to our world class expertise, the UK is poised be a major player. We have the potential to export knowledge and


to unlocking AD’s potential. “We know that a cow’s stomach is able to complete this rate-limiting step 30 times faster than we can in our digesters,” says Mike. “Improving the speed of this step alone would transform the AD process and the economics of the industry. All of the exciting possibilities that are being discussed could then become really achievable, because the increase in speed will make the technology so much more affordable.”


Working together – strategic research goals Getting to the heart of this conundrum has been slow to date because of the way in which research traditionally happens. Research funding is typically allocated on a project-based approach: chipping away at a problem or an idea,


Increasing the speed of the first stage of the AD process – hydrolysis – is the key to bringing down costs


www.adbioresources.org adbioresources.org


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