Anaerobic treatment of excess yeast and waste ethanol from alcohol free beer production for increase of renewable energy use in brewing industry

In the presented paper we have investigated how large quantities of excess yeast and periodical releases of waste ethanol influence the operation of the anaerobic treatment process in a UASB reactor. The process was tested in a pilot-scale reactor with a design organic load of 16.0 kg/m3/day of COD. Through various stages of the experiment, several possible scenarios were tested, excess yeast was added continuously with concentrations up to 3 vol. %, whereas waste ethanol was added in batches of up to 0.8 % of daily volume load several days a week. The intent was to test real conditions in the treatment process. The whole experiment lasted for 77 days, where the maximum organic load of 24.72 kg/m3/day was successfully achieved with no adverse effects on the efficiency of the reactor performance although it significantly surpassed the design load. The COD efficiency at maximum OLR was 83.1 %, whereas the average was 88.0 %. The average biogas production rate increased from 2,044 m3/m3/day to 4.927 m3/m3/day. The microbial community structure analysis showed significant shifts only in the archaeal community (25 – 30 %) as a good adaptation to the addition of substrates. Monitoring the model brewery in applying the addition of yeast and ethanol to the wastewater treatment showed a 110 % increase in biomethane production. The consequence of the increased biomethane production is that the natural gas substitute ratio could be increased from the current average of 10.7 % to potentially 20.1 %, which is a substantial step towards the goal of renewable energy use