We Could Make Fuel And Fertiliser By Recycling Wastewater

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Wastewater, which is full of pollutants that contain nitrogen, can be directly fed into a new chemical reactor that converts it into ammonia, with purified water and oxygen as by-products

An environmentally friendly technique turns wastewater into ammonia and harmless by-products using a multi-chambered chemical reactor. The sustainable alternative requires much less energy than the conventional method for producing this crucial chemical.

Agriculture, refrigeration systems, paper, cleaning supplies and other industries use hundreds of millions of tonnes of ammonia every year. Making that much of the chemical uses about 2 per cent of energy total energy consumption and contributes 1.4 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Some of this environmental price is due to the conventional way of producing ammonia, which requires high temperatures and pressures. To make ammonia production more sustainable, Feng-Yang Chen at Rice University in Texas and his colleagues wanted to replace that technique with a room-temperature reactor.

Their reactor takes in water mixed with nitrates - nitrogen compounds often found in wastewater, such as industrial sewage or agricultural runoff contaminated with nitrogen-based fertilisers. After the nitrate water enters the first of three chambers, electrodes, similar to those found in batteries, create an electrochemical reaction that transforms the liquid into three components: only ammonia remains in the first chamber of the reactor, while purified water flows out through the second one and oxygen goes to the third.

Because ammonia contains only nitrogen and hydrogen, this electrochemical reaction does not require any ingredients other than the wastewater. And the purified water it produces is clean enough to meet the World Health Organization (WHO) regulations for drinking water.

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