Industry Focus: R&I
The Centre aims to bring together competitive and novel research groups and interests
slowly increasing our knowledge about how this bit of the process works or what happens when we remove this piece of the puzzle. Gradually, these small building blocks of knowledge are pieced together to make up a much bigger picture. In some instances, this works well, but it can make it difficult to deliver long term strategic research goals.
“The AD research to date has been tactical and narrow, with people tending to focus on their own research group. This isn’t anyone’s fault; it’s perfectly understandable and simply the nature of how all research is funded. However, it causes problems in fields like AD that need lots of expertise to be brought together for it to work,” argues Mike. “To solve big, complex problems for society we need to embrace a strategic goal and rethink our attitudes to how we can work together to solve them. We need to bring competitive and novel research groups and interests together – working at the edges of the problem in an unfocused way, without thinking across disciplines, is just going to take too long.”
As well as providing a strategic focal point, the proposed Centre will also provide gravitas, says Professor David Stuckey of Imperial College (pictured left): “It’s really important for the sector to be taken seriously, and with a substantial amount of money comes real belief that problems can be solved and work can be done. AD’s technical challenges aren’t insurmountable,
but they do need addressing. And to answer or solve them we need to bring together academics from different fields and backgrounds. This goal of drawing people together is achieved naturally when there is money on the table. Not only that, but access to this kind of funding allows for larger scale feasibility studies and brings both clout and credibility.”
Professor Stuckey also believes that the Centre can help to bridge the gap from primary research to real world innovation. “In my experience, technology transfer only really seems to happen for ideas which have ‘champions’. Without these champions, the energy needed to get ideas from one place to another is too great, so another of the Centre’s roles will be to act as a conduit for commercialisation.”
Delivering more than just energy It’s also important that the Centre helps to dispel the myth that AD is merely a renewable energy generator. In fact, AD has the potential to support four of the five UK Government global challenges: secure and resilient food systems supported by sustainable agriculture; sustainable health and well-being; clean water and sanitation; and renewable energy and materials. It also supports at least five of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals that the countries of the
United Nations have agreed must be achieved by 2030. This makes AD unique, delivering exceptional value for money.
According to Dr Mason, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what could be achieved: “There is so much more land in the world than that which is currently used for commercial agriculture. We absolutely can and should be using this land, and then finding more plants that are suited to growing there – or that are better at converting the energy from sunshine into fixed carbon in biomass – and feeding them into anaerobic digesters. This is absolutely as important as working out what to do with the end product, whether that be methane or higher value products.”
In fact, Dr Mason believes that we need to start thinking much, much bigger when it comes to what AD could deliver: “AD isn’t the start and end of the process; there are huge opportunities when we think holistically. This is why the technology requires fluency across a number of fields. So far it has been governed by a fairly narrow number of researchers focusing on a particular aspect of the process. It seems to be that people only think about their part of the chain, but AD has the potential to produce products or be a part of solutions that work on multiple levels. AD isn’t just about energy or electricity, it could do all kinds of other things, both here in the UK and across the world.”
Professor Stuckey agrees that it’s time we started thinking beyond the conventional ideas of what AD can deliver: “The biorefinery idea, for example, is a relatively new concept for AD. It centres around the principle that, while methane is a convenient end-product from an energy perspective, it is actually low value – instead, we could be producing any number of higher value chemicals and compounds. The AD process actually produces many compounds, including hydrogen, methane, water, ammonium, phosphorus, some heavy metals and long chain fatty acids. Right now, the direction of biorefinery is unclear but over the next 10 years it will solidify. If we think strategically about what we want from the biomass resource we put into a digester, we could be much more efficient and generate greater value from it by producing food more efficiently than current agricultural models, or by focusing on long chain hydrocarbons and producing bioplastics, for example.”
“Consider that modern industrial agriculture is actually pretty cumbersome and inefficient; it is intensive, requiring lots of costly inputs – fertiliser, water, expensive crops, pesticides – to deliver an increasingly low rate of return on that ‘investment’,” continues Professor Stuckey. “Meat and animals are a very expensive form of protein; with new tools we could make single cell proteins –
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www.adbioresources.org adbioresources.org SPRING 2017 | AD & BIORESOURCES NEWS 37
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