Senior scientist, Dr S Venkata Mohan and his group at IICT, Hyderabad have adopted a bio-refinery approach and produced futuristic green fuels, bio-hydrogen and bio-electricity. In the process a value added product that came out is bio-plastics. It is a novel method to produce bio-energy and value-added products through wastewater treatment.    

Dr Mohan, who is carrying out extensive research on renewable energy generation through waste water treatment, said the combustion of fossil fuels was adding about six gigatonne of carbon per year in the form of CO. Several factors have led scientists to look for renewable and carbon-neutral forms of energy.    

With the aim of developing processes that could be adopted by Effluent Treatment Plants (ETPs) and to achieve objectives of treating water, producing energy as well as value-added products, the scientists have been operating a 50-litre capacity reactor to produce bio-hydrogen and bio-plastics under a project funded by the Ministry of Non-Renewable Energy. He said the efficacy of the process for treating wastewater and producing bio-hydrogen in the 50 litre capacity reactor has already been demonstrated.    

Now the plan was to scale up the process for producing bio-hydrogen in a 10,000 litre capacity reactor. He said the reactor was being designed and its efficacy would be demonstrated by the middle of next year. Once that was achieved, he said the ETPs could replace anaerobic reactors to produce the environmentally sustainable bio-hydrogen instead of methane.