Boosting The Value of Digestate with Recovered Energy

Southern Europe has huge potential to expand its use of anaerobic digestion (AD) and biogas, and in the process reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the reliance on imported natural gas, as well as preventing environmental pollution, dealing with organic wastes and producing a valuable agricultural input in the form of digestate.

The key to maximising the adoption and profitability of AD is to maximise efficiency at every stage of the process, and this includes maximising the efficient use of the high quality digestate biofertiliser produced during the anaerobic digestion (AD) process, as well as maximising biogas production. One way of maximising process efficiency is to utilise heat regeneration (or heat recovery), where heat from a process which would otherwise be lost or wasted is recaptured and used for useful heating purposes. Heat regeneration should not be confused with ‘regenerative heat exchangers,’ which are a specific type of heat exchanger in which the product and service fluids flow alternately and the heat is stored in the structure of the heat exchanger.