It seems to come around more quickly every year, but we are delighted to confirm that we have received funding for four projects from the Ofwat Innovation Fund (OIF).

Each year, the funding competition sees a range of inspirational, innovative new projects designed to tackle key issues that the industry is facing.  This year, we have been successful in securing a total of £17 million of funding for four projects - how great is that!  We’d like to thank all our partners and the OIF and we look forward to getting cracking on these great projects. 

At the centre of our approach to innovation is a desire to look beyond existing solutions to issues that the industry is facing today and focus on how we can support the industry as a whole on wider-ranging topics with new approaches and ideas.

There’s no greater demonstration of this than our Net Zero Hub at Strongford in Staffordshire, which was itself the recipient of OIF funding! At Strongford, we are exploring how to reduce process emissions in waste treatment and are sharing our findings from the trials we’re running there with partners in the UK water sector and internationally.

It’s in this spirit that we’ve made submission this year, with our successful projects each indicative of a key issue that the sector is facing, both in the UK and internationally.

While we currently have a small pilot running out at our R2IC testbed, we have secured funding to scale-up the PRIME (Power Resilience trough Integrated Microbial Electrolysis) technology. PRIME turns wastewater into hydrogen, representing a potentially game-changing innovation, as wastewater derived hydrogen is a source of sustainable energy that we can use to support our power resilience.

Likewise, our PyroPlas bid, which is all about ultra rapid pyrolysis developed in collaboration with partners including Hybrid Gasification. This solution produces a stable form of carbon called biochar from sewage sludge.  It also produces renewable energy and during the trial we will also be creating sustainable aviation fuel.

Carbon is likely to become increasingly widespread within the water treatment process; we’ve installed a granular activated carbon system at our brand new Witches Oak water treatment works in Derbyshire to help support the treatment of water from the River Trent and while there is optimism around the use of this material, one issue has been its relatively short operational life and demand across the sector.

So we’ll be trialling a microwave-based method to reactivate GAC that will provide a faster, cheaper and sustainable alternative to extending the life of GAC.

Finally, a new water quality rapid detection technology will streamline the current, complex monitoring processes, reducing the time to analyse water samples from two days to just a few hours using an automated online system.

We’re working with some truly amazing partners on these projects, and we look forward to sharing more details about each one in the coming weeks.

ENDS

Our partners in these projects are:

·       Ofwat

·       FluIDect

·       Welsh Water

·       South West Water

·       United Utilities

·       Scottish Water

·       Hafren Dyfrdwy

·       Wastewater Fuels

·       Durham University

·       Warwick University

·       Anglian Water

·       CPL-Puragen

·       University of Nottingham

·       Cranfield University

·       Hybrid Gasification Ltd

·       Jacobs U.K. Limited

·       Thames Water

·       Yorkshire Water