Turning Wastewater into Ethanol
As the world continues to search for alternative fuels to fuel our cars and heat our homes, many different opportunities are being explored and there has finally been a significant breakthrough in turning wastewater into ethanol as an automobile fuel source. Qteros and Applied Clean Tech have teamed up to create a biofuel that will get us that much closer to having another true “green” energy source. Water treatment systems are expensive to run and have presented communities where they are located with some significant challenges. Most notably, what they can do with the sludge that is left over once the wastewater has been treated. Plant managers may no longer faced with the difficult task of figuring out this problem.
Jeff Hausthor, Senior Project Manager and Qteros Co-founder, is extremely optimistic about the opportunities that turning wastewater into ethanol will present in the very near future. He projects that the future customer base will be “every municipality that has a wastewater treatment plant.” Not only that, but turning wastewater into ethanol will severely cut down on operating costs for each and every water treatment plant that is involved.
This joint venture is a perfect example of what our energy companies need to do to continue advancements in alternative fuels. While it is unlikely that either of these companies could have achieved this task on their own, by combining their technologies and working together, they were able to create a “high yield process” that is technically advanced and will eventually prove to be profitable.
The United States government continues to push for alternative fuels and wants the usage tripled over the next two decades. With more and more research being done on things like turning wastewater into ethanol, the country moves ever closer to being able to achieve that goal.
