BioLargo Spotlight: Update on the AOS Poultry Pilot

Blog Post Update on AOS Poultry Pilot

Today we bring you an important and very positive update on our poultry wastewater demonstration pilot for our clean water technology – the AOS. In May we announced that our Water Technology division (www.biolargowater.ca) had designed, built, and delivered a sophisticated pilot water treatment train featuring our Advanced Oxidation System (AOS) at a poultry and livestock farm near Edmonton, AB called Sunworks Farm. You can see the pictures from the install at our blog post here. This demonstration pilot is a full treatment train containing everything a client needs to treat their wastewater to discharge standards set by regulators (in the US these are set by the US EPA) and even treat that water to water reuse standards that would allow the poultry farm to re-purpose the treated water for use in equipment and facility cleaning, thereby reducing the operation’s water usage and reduce the contaminants commonly found in their waste water. This is the first of our demonstration pilots, and we have another running right now at a Southern Californian microbrewery, with two more committed on the horizon.

We’re proud to say that our pilot AOS is operational now, and we have collected data showing that the AOS performs as predicted – eliminating contaminants from the poultry wastewater to the required standards. This is a critical milestone: we have real proof that BioLargo’s AOS delivers high performance poultry wastewater treatment in a real industry setting. As you can see in the picture below, treatment by the AOS train also results in a visible improvement to the water’s color! This is thanks to the multiple components in the AOS treatment train including the CFS system (coagulation, flocculation, sedimentation) spec'ed and installed by the BioLargo Water team - see a little video about this system HERE.

This picture (below) indicates the success of the AOS’ disinfection performance in treating this highly contaminated wastewater. For those uninitiated in microbiology, the petri dish on the left is speckled with bacterial colonies, each of which came from a single bacterial cell in the water sample being tested. The science and engineering team collected countless samples to generate statistically significant data showing the AOS exceeded expectations in disinfection performance.

We are often asked, what does the pilot work look like on a week-to-week basis for our scientists and engineers? Wastewater is produced from operations every Tuesday and remains in a holding tank within the facility. The wastewater is then drawn from the plant and treated over the course of the next 12 hours. Depending on the flowrate being tested this process may be completed in between 5 to 12 hours. Because this is a research pilot, every week new conditions are being tested, including different flowrates to optimize operational conditions. In the end, the goal is for the water that is treated by the AOS and the treatment train to be sufficiently clean to discharge and potentially reuse. This demonstration pilot represents a pivotal moment both for the AOS technology itself, and for the hardworking BioLargo Water R&D team developing this technology. For those unaware, a pre-commercial demonstration pilot is a crucial step in developing a new technology – especially one as complex as an advanced water treatment system. In this pilot our team is refining the technical offering of the AOS in a real commercial/industrial setting and refining the technology’s business model – wherein the AOS is offered as a portable, modular treatment train that solves a customer’s wastewater problems.

The BioLargo Water team has been dedicated to advancing the development of the AOS since the subsidiary’s inception in 2014, and this pilot is also the first field test not only of the AOS, but also of the team’s ability to deliver high performance water treatment results in a real field setting. In the pilot so far, they’ve certainly delivered, and we know they’ll exceed expectations. And as a reminder, our team is also currently executing on a demonstration pilot at a microbrewery in Southern California, and the technology is also being pulled by industry stakeholders for more pilots in areas like stormwater, food & beverage, and petrochemical.