Brian Hemphill

Transcription

♫MUSIC♫ MILES O'BRIEN: Do you enjoy an occasional sip of the grape? Bet you didn't know that on average, it takes 5-7 gallons of water to make one bottle of wine. And water is a pricey commodity. Cleaning and recycling all the waste-water is no bargain either. Wineries typically use aeration pumps - which drink-up tons of energy - and profits. MATT SILVER: They're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars every year just to power the pumps to push air through their wastewater to treat it. MILES O'BRIEN: The Clos Du Bois Winery in Sonoma, California wants to reverse that trend – and is testing a new system that not only cleans the water, but generates energy too. JUSTIN BUCK: And, we're leading the efforts to be commercializing this and getting it deployed at a commercial scale for industrial customers. MILES O'BRIEN: With support from the National Science Foundation, engineers and co-founders Matt Silver and Justin Buck at Cambrian Innovation are bringing this research from the lab to the market. One system - called "EcoVolt" - generates methane gas from the waste-water. MATT SILVER: EcoVolt leverages what's called electromethanogenesis... MILES O'BRIEN: Here's how it works: A wireless signal allows the process to be monitored remotely. The Cambrian system sends waste-water through what's called a bio-electrochemical reactor. As water filters through it, special bacteria in the reactor eat the organic waste in the water and release electrons as a byproduct. Those electrons travel through a circuit – to generate methane or CH4. MATT SILVER: We're actually generating a very high-quality methane which will be used to power what's called combined heat and power system. MILES O'BRIEN: The gas is piped out of the system to an engine - where it's burned with a small amount of natural gas to generate heat and electricity for the vineyard. BRIAN HEMPHILL: It helped us realize that waste water is a potential source of energy... and using the right treatment methods with minimal energy input, we can receive quite a bit of benefit. MATT SILVER: Overall we have a huge reduction in the carbon footprint for the winery as well as savings of upwards of over two-hundred thousand dollars a year. MILES O'BRIEN: Sensor systems built by Cambrian Innovation can also monitor pollutant levels in real time – fertilizer run-off, for example, or pollution levels in lakes and rivers. JUSTIN BUCK: The goal would be to monitor and to be able to identify if a spike in a contaminant has occurred and to try to address it before it becomes a larger problem. MILES O'BRIEN: Silver expects many industries to benefit from systems like the EcoVolt - from fisheries to waste water treatment plants. Making water that was once wasted.... into a valuable source of energy. For Science Nation, I'm Miles O'Brien.