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Pion­eer­ing power gen­er­a­tion from olive mill waste

16.09.2015
The EU-fun­ded BIO­GAS2PEM-FC pro­ject, com­pleted in Octo­ber 2014, showed that olive oil waste could be sus­tain­ably used as a power source for milling. A fully func­tion­ing demon­stra­tion plant was built at an olive oil farm in Andalusia, Spain. Accord­ing to pro­ject coordin­at­or Per Ekdunge, chief tech­no­logy officer at Power­Cell Sweden, these sys­tems could provide on-site waste man­age­ment and power gen­er­a­tion for thou­sands of olive mills once fully up and run­ning. ​“The pro­ject part­ners are now dis­cuss­ing the pos­sib­il­ity of apply­ing for fund­ing to scale up the oper­a­tion,” explains Ekdunge. ​“The sys­tem has a huge poten­tial mar­ket.” A key attrac­tion is the cost. The pro­ject estim­ates that the price of the over­all solu­tion in com­mer­cial format is expec­ted not to exceed 20.000 euro/​kW, which means that it would achieve a return on invest­ment (ROI) in about 10 years. ​“The tech­no­logy can also be used for oth­er sources of agri­cul­ture waste, which makes the poten­tial mar­ket even big­ger,” adds Ekdunge. ​“We have already been con­tac­ted dir­ectly by poten­tial cus­tom­ers.”

Sus­tain­able rur­al busi­ness practices

The key envir­on­ment­al bene­fit is that the pro­pri­et­ary BIO­GAS2PEM-FC sys­tem enables olive oil waste – which con­tains pesti­cides and tox­ic organ­ic com­pounds – to be used as an energy source, rather than end­ing up as a pol­lut­ant in land­fill or run­ning off into rivers. ​“Olive mill waste has become a crit­ic­al envir­on­ment­al prob­lem,” says Ekdunge. ​“Mil­lions of tonnes are pro­duced every year.” Indeed, it is estim­ated that an aver­age olive oil mill pro­duces up to 30 mil­lion cubic metres of salty wastewa­ter dur­ing the intense annu­al three to four-month pro­duc­tion peri­od. How­ever, instead of hav­ing to dis­pose of this waste product at great cost, BIOGAS2PEM-FC’s solu­tion presents an oppor­tun­ity to turn it into bio­gas and, ulti­mately, elec­tri­city. BIOGAS2PEM-FC’s three-part sub­sys­tem involves microor­gan­isms that break down bio­de­grad­able mater­i­al in the absence of oxy­gen, con­vert bio­gas into a hydro­gen-rich gas and then turn this into elec­tri­city through the use of fuel cells. The team is cur­rently work­ing on over­com­ing some final tech­nic­al and eco­nom­ic bar­ri­ers of on-site power gen­er­a­tion using fuel obtained from olive oil extrac­tion wastes. Once fully com­mer­cial­ised, this innov­a­tion could prove crit­ic­al to the eco­nomy of many regions in the Medi­ter­ranean. Spain, for example, pro­duces 50% of the world’s olive oil, with 73% of that com­ing from Andalusia. In 2013, olive oil exports from Andalusia alone were worth €1.5bn. Spain also recently over­took Italy as the mar­ket lead­er in olive oil in the US and Japan. Meet­ing world­wide demand – while at the same time achiev­ing sus­tain­able pro­duc­tion – is vitally import­ant. The BIO­GAS2PEM-FC project’s goal has been to enable small olive mills to cut waste costs and lim­it envir­on­ment­al dam­age by using their waste products to gen­er­ate power. ​“Through this pro­cess, all waste products return to the olive oil pro­duc­tion cycle, mak­ing it ulti­mately more sus­tain­able,” con­cludes Ekdunge.

Pro­ject details:

  • Pro­ject acronym: BIOGAS2PEM-FC
  • Par­ti­cipants: Sweden (Coordin­at­or), Greece, Spain, UK
  • Pro­ject Ref­er­ence: N° 314940
  • Total cost: €1,495,040
  • EU con­tri­bu­tion: €1,135,999
  • Dur­a­tion: Novem­ber 2011 — Octo­ber 2014
Source: European Commission
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