De-risking Complex Effluents and Recovering Energy from Fermentation

Biotech and pharmaceutical plants generate complex, inhibitor-rich wastewater from fermentation, media preparation and cleaning. These streams often contain solvents, antibiotics or high salinity, which can disrupt conventional biological treatment and create compliance risk. Aquature’s inhibitor-tolerant BASE technology is designed to treat these challenging effluents while recovering energy from fermentation byproducts.

A growing international biotech company producing short chain organic molecules through precision fermentation was facing high costs and regulatory pressure from their liquid waste produced from their fermentation processes. Trucking the downstream processed broth off involved high costs and operational hassle while proving difficult to maintain as strategy for their scaled up production facilities. On-site aerobic treatment offered a viable scale-up strategy and regulatory compliance, but remained a large cost. Aquature offered to deploy an on-site plugin solution to generate revenue from their concentrated liquid waste instead.

At a Glance

The Challenge

• Complex effluents containing feedstock, biomass, solvents, salts and metabolites
• Conventional biological systems are sensitive to inhibitors and prone to upsets
• Strict discharge limits and reputational risk around environmental compliance

For this biotech operator, wastewater is a critical compliance hotspot, with limited options beyond overdimensioned, conservative treatment.

Aquature’s Solution

Aquature implements an BASE polishing step tailored to biotech and pharma wastewater:

• Treat fermentation and process effluents by converting them into hydrogen and cleaning chemicals
• Handle highly concentrated streams without destabilising the process
• Integrate as a compact, modular, mobile skid, able to expand operations and continue to deliver on compliance needs

The system’s electrochemical control should operate robustly under shifting loads and compositions that would typically stress a biological reactor.

Results

• >90% treatment efficiency
  Effective removal of COD and key organics in highly concentrated wastewater, supporting reliable permit compliance.
• Up to 5.7 GWh/year of energy recovery
  From fermentation-rich streams, providing a meaningful offset to the site’s energy use.
• Improved process robustness
  Less sensitivity to toxic peaks and batch-to-batch variation compared to purely biological systems.
• Lower overall energy demand
  Compared to energy-intensive advanced oxidation or oversized aerobic systems.

Business Impact

For biotech and pharmaceutical facilities, Aquature’s BASE platform:

• Reduces compliance risk in one of the most scrutinised parts of the operation
• Creates a new energy stream from fermentation byproducts that were previously just a disposal cost
• Offers a compact, upgrade-friendly solution that can be added without re-designing the entire wastewater plant and site plan

By combining inhibitor tolerance with energy recovery, Aquature helps biotech and pharma players turn a complex liability into a controlled, value-generating process step.