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Every wastewater treatment plant spends money getting rid of ammonia. At Severn Trent Water alone, aeration to oxidise ammonia to nitrate costs around £1 million a year, burning through 10 GWh of electricity and generating roughly 5,000 tonnes of CO2 in the process....
Ammonia production accounts for between 3% and 5% of the world's natural gas production. This consumption equates to between 1% and 2% of the world’s energy supply. Here on earth, it requires a great deal of effort to produce ammonia. The following article,...
The problem SBI Group runs a landfill site in Victoria, Australia, and needed to deal with residual odour from its landfill gas stream. The gas doesn't arrive clean: it's a lean, wet mixture — 25% to 50% methane by volume, saturated with moisture, carrying 0% to 5%...
A new palm oil mill in Kutai Timur, East Kalimantan, is processing 60 tonnes of fresh fruit bunches an hour and with them, up to 600 cubic metres a day of palm oil mill effluent (POME) carrying a chemical oxygen demand (COD) of roughly 100,000 g/m³. That’s an enormous organic load. Left in an open pond, it breaks down anaerobically anyway and vents methane straight into the atmosphere. PT. Bumi Mas Agro is instead building a biogas facility in parallel with the mill itself, so the wastewater problem becomes a power source from day one. UK-based Organics Ltd, working through its Indonesian arm PT Organics Bali, has proposed the technology to capture this opportunity via a Covered Lagoon Anaerobic Reactor (CLAR).
The proposal is explicit about the alternative it’s arguing against. The UASB (Upflow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket) reactor is a more compact, higher-rate digester common in wastewater treatment.
A UASB needs continuous parameter adjustment and regular readings to stay stable and it’s less tolerant of feedstock spikes. A sudden surge in incoming POME can upset or fail a short retention time digester like this. The covered lagoon takes the opposite trade-off: it needs far more land, but in return it’s far more forgiving. Retention time is long enough that even recalcitrant COD gets converted and the system can keep functioning through feedstock interruptions of several days without operator intervention. Organics also makes the operating skill trade-off explicit: a UASB effectively wants a biochemist or process engineer on shift. Whereas a covered lagoon can be run by a mill technician trained for one to two weeks.
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| FFB processed | 60 tonnes/hour |
| Wastewater flow (design average) | 30 m³/hour (600 m³/day) |
| Influent COD | 100,000 g/m³ (60 tn/day) |
| COD removal rate | 90% (54 tn/day removed) |
| Methane production | 18,908 Nm³/day |
| Biogas production | ~34,370 Nm³/day |
| Minimum methane content | 55% |
| Gas engine efficiency assumed | 37% |
| Electrical power capacity | 2.9 MW |
| Lagoon parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Required wetted volume | 21,600 m³ |
| Dimensions (H × W × B) | 8.5 m × 51 m × 81 m |
| Freeboard | 0.5 m |
| Total volume | 23,330 m³ |
| Lagoon footprint | 4,276 m² |
| COD removal rate | 2.5 kg/m³/day |
Gas cleaning has its own spec sheet. The bioscrubber pulls hydrogen sulphide down from 3,000 ppm at inlet to 50 ppm at outlet (a 200 ppm option is offered as a cheaper alternative, at lower gas quality). The chiller drops the gas to a 10°C dewpoint before it’s compressed. A duty-standby blower pair delivers up to 1,500 Nm³/hour at 300 mbar and the standby flare is rated for the same 1,500 Nm³/hour with an 8,204 kW maximum thermal capacity and a 10:1 turndown ratio sized to burn the full gas stream safely if the powerhouse ever can’t take it.
Following the material from intake to output:
The power demand schedule in the proposal totals 261 kW of connected electrical load, with roughly 155 kW normally operating and 106 kW held as standby (duty/standby pairs throughout blowers, feed pumps, recirculation pumps). The two largest single loads are the H₂S bioscrubber blowers at 37 kW each (one duty, one standby) and the four recirculation pumps at 22 kW apiece. That’s the real parasitic load a mill needs to budget against the 2.9 MW the plant can generate.
Organics’ scope runs from the wastewater pumping into the lagoon through to export-ready biogas at the powerhouse fence. The lagoon, liner and cover, bioscrubber, dewatering, blower skid, standby flare, controls and one year of Organics-supervised commissioning support.
What’s excluded are gas engines (offered separately), all electricity/water/utilities during construction and commissioning, the PLN grid substation, wastewater pipework from the mill to the biogas plant boundary, seed material for starting the digester, soil investigation, spare parts and all routine operating personnel. This is a complete gas-production system, not a complete power plant. The client still has to bring the site, the utilities, the seed sludge and the generation hardware.
The proposal states the package normally takes twelve months from order to commissioning. Contract award in January 2020, design and procurement running through October 2020, delivery into November 2020, site construction and lagoon works running into March 2021 and commissioning, performance testing and handover not completing until July 2021, roughly seventeen months from contract award to project completion. The twelve-month figure is a fair number for equipment design-to-commissioning; it doesn’t include the earlier procurement lead time or the civil works that have to happen in parallel.
Organics isn’t offering an unproven concept. The company’s project reference list runs to over 300 installations dating back to 1989, spanning landfill gas flaring and utilisation, biogas-to-energy schemes across the UK and a growing string of palm oil and cassava waste-to-energy projects across Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand since the early 2010s, several registered under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
A covered lagoon CLAR makes sense when a mill has land to spare, wants a system that a locally trained technician can run without a chemical engineering background and can tolerate the operational lag of a long-retention-time process. It makes less sense where land is at a premium, where faster COD turnaround is the priority, or where the client wants a single contract that includes power generation rather than gas production up to the fence line. For a greenfield mill like this, with space available and a twelve-to-seventeen-month runway before first production, it’s a reasonable fit.
Note: unit pricing, payment terms have been intentionally left out of this piece available on request via contact form.
Organics has designed thermal ammonia stripping systems since 1997
Every wastewater treatment plant spends money getting rid of ammonia. At Severn Trent Water alone, aeration to oxidise ammonia to nitrate costs around £1 million a year, burning through 10 GWh of electricity and generating roughly 5,000 tonnes of CO2 in the process....
Ammonia production accounts for between 3% and 5% of the world's natural gas production. This consumption equates to between 1% and 2% of the world’s energy supply. Here on earth, it requires a great deal of effort to produce ammonia. The following article,...
The problem SBI Group runs a landfill site in Victoria, Australia, and needed to deal with residual odour from its landfill gas stream. The gas doesn't arrive clean: it's a lean, wet mixture — 25% to 50% methane by volume, saturated with moisture, carrying 0% to 5%...
Hong Kong's NENT landfill already runs two ammonia stripping lines to treat leachate — the liquid that percolates through buried waste. Growing volumes meant those two lines needed a third, independent treatment train, sized to handle up to 1,500 m³/day of leachate...
Veolia's NENTX landfill extension near Fanling, Hong Kong needed an ammonia stripping plant (ASP) capable of handling 2,000 m³/day of leachate, cutting ammonium (NH4) from 4,500 mg/l down to under 200 mg/l, on a site where land is expensive and the climate swings from...
