This beer can give you gas — and that’s a good thing, says one pioneering Carleton student

When Seyedomid Ahmadinejad moved to Canada from Iran, he quickly learned that Canadians love beer. 

Fast forward a few years, and he would argue that people don’t realize how much waste the beer brewing industry actually produces. 

A wastewater processing engineer, Ahmadinejad is currently working toward his second master’s of science in environmental engineering at Carleton University. For the past two years, he’s been working on a prototype system to turn beer byproducts into renewable energy.

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“The brewery industry is one of the primary industrial consumers of water and produces a significant amount of wastewater,” he said. “For every litre of beer produced, about three to 10 litres of wastewater is produced. That’s a huge number and that’s the reason we chose breweries. With this technology, we wanted to fill the gap.”

Under the supervision of professors Abid Hussain and Banu Örmeci, Ahmadinejad is advancing a relatively new technology called “bioelectrochemically enhanced anaerobic digestion,” or BEAD, to maximize the amount of energy that can be recovered from brewery wastewater. 

In simple terms, Ahmadinejad said he’s developed an oxygen-less prototype system that contains non-pathogenic microorganisms. When he feeds brewery wastewater into the system, the microorganisms produce biogas with up to 80 per cent methane, which can be used as energy. 

The biogas can be used to generate electricity, heat buildings and fuel cars. Ahmadinejad said it could even be used to power brewing operations themselves. 

It’s an extension of his work in Iran, where he earned his first master’s degree and worked as an engineer developing wastewater processing systems for industrial factories. 

Now he’s taking that experience and applying it to the beer industry. 

“I came here and figured out that beer is very popular and brewing is one of the oldest industries in Canada,” he said. “When wastewater is produced in a brewery facility, they generally have two options. The first is releasing the wastewater into the environment, which is obviously not an environmentally-friendly solution. The second would be releasing the wastewater into the municipal sewer.”

Sending waste to city treatment facilities is what Canadian brewers do, but Ahmadinejad said it comes at a price. The high level of contamination in wastewater makes it more difficult to process and, as a result, brewers have to pay additional fees to release their waste into the system. 

The contaminants pose challenges for Ahmadinejad’s prototype, too. 

“The brewery wastewater is always a challenge,” he said. “Every time, due to the beer processing characteristics, the wastewater was different. Sometimes they use higher cleaning agents, for example. So it’s important to me, whenever I get a sample, to test beforehand to make sure the new sample won’t make the reactor fail. That was the big challenge in the past year.”

The samples used in the testing of the system came from local company Dominion City Brewing, which is known for its beer as well as its line of seltzers. 

Ahmadinejad said the partnership with the company, which was started by Carleton alumni in 2014, has been “the best.”

“When I arrived here at the beginning of the program, I was contacting several local breweries to get my samples,” he said. “None of them responded except Dominion. They were helpful from the first second until now. They never refused a sample.”

As with most breweries, wastewater is a large financial burden due to municipal fees. 

The brewery collects byproduct in a tank, which helps separate solids like yeast, hops and other organics from the water. While the solids are composted, something Dominion also has to pay for, the remaining wastewater is discharged into the city’s sewer system for a fee. The cost of doing this can add up to thousands of dollars every month. 

Ahmadinejad said his system could allow breweries to avoid this expensive and energy-intensive process, while also converting waste into a product that he said would be beneficial for the environment and the bottom line. 

“There’s a huge opportunity for scaling up,” he said. “The next challenge will be to see how the system would perform in a larger-scale brewery. They could use this treatment system to be independent from the energy provided by the government or other sectors. They can use the renewable energy to produce anything they want. It’s a good opportunity to grow more in Canadian brewing facilities.”