The Engineer Q&A: ALL-Streams HTO – turning waste into resources

David Inman, innovation project manager at Anglian Water, takes The Engineer through the project, highlighting the challenges that lay ahead.

Can you outline the ALL-Streams HTO project?

Our work with Cetogenix is about taking biosolids and turning it into more valuable materials, such as renewable natural gas, biomaterials, and renewable chemicals. Over the next 18 months, our project with Cetogenix and Cranfield University will establish the market opportunities for the output of the hydrothermal oxidation and then develop a pilot site. This is really interesting opportunity because we have to be thinking about how we maximise resource recovery if we are to achieve the net zero targets that Anglian Water has and help develop technologies and markets that can be leveraged by others to do the same, both in the water industry and further afield.

Is an offtake agreement in place?

Once the project is scaled up, the focus is to demonstrate the feasibility of recovering and valorising all resource streams from the HTO effluent (i.e. ammonia, volatile fatty acids, phosphorus etc.) at a scale relevant to the water industry. A market research deliverable within the project is investigating whether those recovered resources are best valued within water companies, or in other industries. Any offtake agreement would involve navigating end-of-waste regulations, which adds an additional layer of risk so would need to be evaluated in terms of the trade-off between end-point value, market resilience, and regulatory risks.