Despite the water companies’ AMP7 business plans showing that the blossoming bioresources market is set to for significant growth over the next five years, a number of practical and operational obstacles remain, according to long-established pump and mixer manufacturer, Landia.

Typical of a smaller company that has found itself largely frozen out of frameworks, Landia is nonetheless working closely with the likes of Scottish Water, Severn Trent (via MWH Treatment) and Yorkshire Water (via Murphy), where its mixing system is ticking all of those industry must-have boxes for maximising existing assets (greatly enhanced biogas yields) and reducing operational costs (far less maintenance and energy consumption).

Water companies have to deliver on some very tough performance targets in AMP7, but with such a huge resource in biogas-rich sludge at their disposal, Landia’s Paul Davies says that many in the supply chain can’t quite understand the reluctance to push forward with equipment that will maximise potential income.

“Not surprisingly”, he comments, “the levels of grit that have built up year upon year are considerable. It is very common for an old digester to be one third full of grit that simply isn’t being mixed properly. Perhaps this wasn’t considered a major issue in the days when sludge was treated as a ‘waste product’, but now it is a very valuable energy resource”.

He added:

“Everyone knows how costly it would be to halt biogas production and drain everything down to remove all the accumulated grit. Instead, a retrofit with tough, resilient mixing equipment can and will get all that legacy sludge moving. It is a simple upgrade with proven results, yet time and time again, we and many others in the supply chain are told that we don’t meet certain criteria.

“It then adds salt to the wound when we are bombarded with emails inviting us to pay large sums of money to attend conferences where water industry ‘experts’ want us to listen about the importance of innovation!”.