We interviewed Sara Giarola about a project to establish Europe’s first industrial size plant able to create clean energy from waste water

In September 2015, you attended the kick off meeting for an innovative important EU-project. Could you tell us briefly what the aim of the project is?

 The project is called DEMOSOFC, which stands for DEMOnstration of large SOFC (solid oxide fuel cells) system.  Basically, it will be the first industrial plant to produce high efficiency energy with solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC) using biogas from wastewater treatment.

It’s an EU-funded Horizon 2020 project that aims to demonstrate the feasibility of operating sub-MW (174 kWe) fuel cells in an integrated way with a waste water treatment plant located in Turin.

The project will build up experience of design and installation of integrated SOFCs as well as evidence of their economic and environmental performance. In this way, it will fill in the gap  between basic technological research and development, bringing solid fuel cells to commercialisation, enabling the reduction of capital costs through scale-up.

Who are the international partners in the project?

The project partners are:

• Politecnico di Torino, project coordinator (Italy)
• CONVION, fuel cell supplier (Finland)
• SMAT, waste water treatment plant owner and fuel cell user (Italy)
• VTT, research centre for data collection and analysis of effluents from the demo plant (Finland)
• Imperial College London, identification of exploitation strategies for integrated SOFCs (UK)

How will Imperial College be contributing to the project?

Imperial College will contribute to the project by creating the exploitation strategy for integrated biogas-fuelled SOFCs. Through developing business analysis scenarios related to the implementation of this technology across Europe, ICL will analyse the market potentials and key opportunities for development.

The plant will use Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) technology. Could you tell us a bit about this technology, and its potential?

A fuel cell produces electricity from the electrochemical oxidation of fuel. Solid fuel cells have a solid ceramic material as an electrolyte at the centre of the device. A solid electrolyte reduces electrolyte management problems compared to other fuel cells. This type of fuel cell operates at high temperatures and are therefore suitable for combined heat and power generation.

SOFCs are also modular systems, which are fuel adaptable and have a low emission profile. They have noise free operations and low maintenance costs and can also operate in areas with no access to public grids for local power generation systems.

Turning waste water into clean energy sounds innovative. Could you explain the process in more detail?

The waste water from Collegno and Pianezza (municipalities located near Turin) is treated in the existing plant where a biological process ultimately degrades the streams into biogas. Currently biogas is burned in a boiler to provide some of the heat required by the plant.

With the DEMOSOFC project, the same biogas, after sulphur is removed and reformed, will be transfered to SOFC modules and will work as a distributed Combined Heat and Power (CHP) unit, supplying both heat and power to the system.

How potentially efficient is this new technological application to others?

The SOFC installation fed with a CO2 neutral fuel, like biogas, will represent a solution for the generation of combined heat and power at the sub-MW scale with the highest electrical efficiency and lowest emissions compared to competitive technologies like internal combustion engines and micro gas turbine. Also, it does not produce harmful gas emissions, like nitrous oxides, sulfur oxides, particulate matters or volatile organic compounds .

Will the future plant also have a low emissions profile?

Yes, it will. That is clear if we consider how the SOFC works. Air enters the cathode side of the cell. At the anode side, the fuel is a mixture of hydrogen, carbon monoxide and methane. The fuel is electrochemically oxidised producing both heat and electrical energy. Waste gases from the system only contain CO2 and water. With the integration of the system with a renewable fuel like biogas, the system will become a CO2-neutral plant.

Are there similar plants in other parts of the world?

Large scale multi-MW installations based on molten carbonate fuel cells and SOFCs have been spreading across US and Korea.

In Europe, projects like the EOS and ENEFIELD, tested and operated large scale fuel cells in industry and micro-CHP in private households, respectively. If we consider just the field of integrated SOFC plants using sewage biogas, then all the applications were small in scale (below 10 kWe). Examples includes projects BIOCELL and SOFCOM. DEMOSOFC is therefore unique as it will lead to the installation of the largest integrated SOFC system using sewage biogas in Europe.

When will the first phase of the project be started?

The project started in September 2015 and will end in August 2020. So far, activities have mainly involved the installation of the first SOFC module integrated in the waste water treatment plant in Turin.