PFI-TT: Pilot-scale demonstration of an advanced biotechnology to treat toxic wastewater produced in the biofuel industry

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation - Technology Translation (PFI-TT) project is to address the challenge - of cleaning toxic wastewater produced during biofuel production. In recent years, the production of transportation fuels from wet biomass has received increasing attention due to its promising potential to shift society’s dependence away from petroleum to renewable resources for the development of a sustainable industrial society, which is also an effective way to manage the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The technology demonstrates with the potential to enable biofuel commercialization and position U.S. renewable energy at the global forefront. This technology will advance scientific discovery of a transformative platform to enable sustainable bioenergy production, train the next generation of entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers in bioenergy engineering, and environmental engineering/science. Such an industry-university collaborative project will deliver research outcomes useful for industrial partners to adopt in practice, offer complementary student (graduate, undergraduate, and K-12 students) trainings in entrepreneurship, and student internships. The proposed project seeks to demonstrate an innovative biotechnology pilot treatment specifically tailored for the valorization of wastewater generated during the biofuel production. A bottleneck that limits the economic and technical scalability of biorefineries is the production of toxic wastewater that cannot be reclaimed by conventional wastewater treatment systems. The team’s prior bench-scale study has shown that a special type of marine microorganism can be used an innovative bioprocess to reduce or remove the toxins in this wastewater. However, the scalability of the technology remains to be evaluated. To this end, the objectives of this project are to: 1) deliver a pilot-scale bioprocess specifically tailored for the marine microorganism; 2) optimize the productivity of this bioprocess; and 3) assess the economic viability of the technology. It is expected that the outcome from this project will overcome difficulties impeding the commercialization of the biofuel production. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.