Bioclear earth puts its expertise to use in optimizing biogas production in the European innovation project MICRO4BIOGAS

The European cooperation project MICRO4BIOGAS, part of Horizon 2020/ European Green Deal, aims at identifying, developing and validating bioaugmentation strategies for anaerobic digestion that are technically feasible and economically viable.

Based on our expertise and experience in projects such as Biopulping (pre-treatment of lignin-containing biomass) Swillpower (anaerobic digestion on a small scale), Greenstep (boosting digestion processes), Power 2 Methane (methane production with methanogenic micro-organisms) we have been asked to participate in this project. Within this project, we co-operate with the Universities of Valencia, Dresden and Ghent and companies such as Gasterra and Darwin.

Together we are investigating whether we can improve the production of biogas by:

• Developing a roadmap: what does the future of bio fermentation look like in Europe?
• System optimisation: how can reactors be designed even better so that the microbiology can function optimally?
• Stability: how can we increase the stability of reactors?
• Better yield: how can we increase the biogas yield?
• Higher quality: how can we improve the quality (purity) of the end product?
• Greater production speed: how can the residence time in the reactor be reduced, in other words how can the conversion of the residual substances be accelerated?

Understanding the black box by applying DNA technology

In order to develop a good bioaugmentation strategy, you first need to know what happens in existing reactors. Bioclear Earth is asked to unravel the microbiological processes involved in biogas production. We do this by sampling existing biogas plants and analysing the DNA from the samples. This produces a huge amount of data, which we then process with specially developed bioinformatics tools. This allows us to map microbiological networks of collaborating micro-organisms (consortia). We then look at which consortia produce the best results on a laboratory scale. Subsequently the best performing consortia are tested at full scale.

In addition to the technical content aspect of the project, we are involved in assessing the environmental impact, economic profitability and social impact of these production processes. The ultimate goal is to produce an affordable bioaugmentation kit that can improve the production of existing biogas plants or help start up new plants.

Added value of this project for other sectors

The knowledge we gain in this project in the field of identification and application of microbiological consortia can be very interesting for use in other biological ecosystems in the future, for example in agriculture or for industrial production processes in which microbiology plays an important role.

Read more about the latest discovery.