Waste breweries could help generate power
Washington, Aug 22 (ANI): A new study suggests that after making beer, the waste from breweries can be used to generate power.
It would now mean a huge relief and an added advantage for brewers who face difficulty in getting rid of thousands of tons of grain left over at the end of the brewing process.
Wolfgang Bengel, the technical director of BMP Biomasse Projekt, a German biomass company, came up with the innovative idea to create power from the leftovers.
"We reached a situation in 2000 where breweries even had to pay to dispose of their spent grain," Live Science quoted him as saying.
The most beneficial part is that the energy could help fuel the breweries themselves.
Bengel explained: "Beer making is energy intensive - you boil stuff, use hot water and steam and then use electric energy for cooling - so if you recover more than 50 percent of your own energy costs from the spent grain, that’s a big saving."
The process to generate power: wet grain and wastewater is put into a fermenter loaded with bacteria that break down organic compounds to generate methane.
Then, the biogas and dried sludge from the fermenter are burned to boil water and produce high-pressure steam, which in turn drives a turbine to generate power.
Bengel said that, "a modern energy efficient brewery may regain 60 percent of their total energy demand". (ANI)