Vinasse, an agro-industrial wastewater, may represent a cost effective and low carbon-footprint alternative to commercial fertilizers. However, when applied to the field plantation in natura, vinasse may cause environmental and economic issues associate with water quality degradation, greenhouse gas emissions and transport logistics.
Concentrating vinasse is a suitable way to overcome such issues, where thermal processes have been proposed, though hardly implemented in practice due to cost constrains associated with a high heat demand, without creating ways to pay off for this.
The present project proposes to explore the potentialities of a novel idea, that is the development of an electrolytic concentrator of vinasse, which generates concentrated vinasse and goes beyond, by producing valuable by-products, namely oxygen and hydrogen, which creates a novel value chain to the agroindustry.
This value chain may more than pay off for the novel electrochemical technology and further promotes ways towards negative GHG emissions (i.e. CCU and/or CCS), potentially amounting to more than 1% of the annual global GHG emissions.
Furthermore, a life cycle analysis of the “electrochemical concentrator” of vinasse and its value chain will also be assessed. Complementary and in parallel, there is the development of a bioelectrochemical system, i.e. a microbial fuel cell, tailored to produce electricity from vinasse and air, which can provide a fraction of the electricity demand of the electrolytic concentrator of vinasse in addition to reducing the chemical oxygen demand of this wastewater.