February 10, 2009

Beer? Is There Anything It Can't Do?

Apparently, some true heroes have discovered a way to tie in beer after products and saving fish hatcheries.

Logan and fellow PhD, Seth Terry, began doing some brainstorming on how they could use their training at the School of Mines to solve the problem.They created a company called 'Oberon FMR'. The FMR stands for 'fish meal replacement'.

"It was just back-of-an-envelope brainstorming. What we've done is come up with a way to make a high protein fish meal using sludge that comes from breweries," Logan said.

Breweries have long faced a problem in properly disposing of waste materials that come from brewing hops and barley. Much like a sewage plant, breweries have to have large settling ponds to treat the sludge.

"Large brewers spend $200 a ton to dispose of this material. We can get that material for free, and using a new bacterial process, we can process 18,000 tons a year of fish food. Nothing like that has ever been done before," Logan said.

"A large facility, a large brewery for example, might put 40 to 50,000 pounds of waste beer down their drain every day. So we can convert that to 30 to 35,000 pounds of bacterial protein everyday. Regular fish feed has 25 to 50 percent protein. Our ingredient has 65 percent protein."

The two scientists proposed developing a pilot project using a waste stream from New Belgium Brewery.

"They loved the idea. They're very green-minded," Logan said.

The beauty of the idea, according to Logan, is that they don't have to build much new equipment to create large quantities of the new fish food.

They say with the addition of a commercial centrifuge and an oven, they can retrofit existing sludge treatment plants for a small amount of money.

The project has gotten the attention of some venture capital, and a much larger facility will be built this year someplace in the eastern part of the country.

"We have three places we're looking at right now," said Logan. "We can have a large scale operation up and running in six months."

"We are in the testing phase in Hawaii and Peru right now, and the University of Idaho is going to be testing our fish food next year," he said.

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