Antec Biogas

Description

About Antec Biogas

Antec Biogas is a Norwegian company, established in 2014. They have implemented an idea of a plug-flow reactor concept into a working and proven solution by developing our unique Biofilm AD Reactors. They are certain that they are bringing a truly disruptive solution to the market, being in a strong need for process optimization, which will help boosting up biogas production, whilst reducing costs and the construction time of the future biogas plants.

Antec has already built several plants and research installations and have a technology that provides new opportunities for biogas production: fiberglass tanks with rapid digestion, better energy extraction (gas) and profitability in waste, being a new major energy source.

Antec has now fully commercialized its biofilm reactor technology and is ready for introducing solutions globally. Several projects are already being planned in Europe as well as in Asia. We can provide both the AD reactor systems and build turn-key biogas plants.

They aim is to bring the safe and profitable solutions to the market, which will help develop biogas plants with highest biogas production efficiency and profitability, as well as the opportunity of scaling up the capacity at marginal costs.

The Solution

In its technology Antec have replicated the natural process of biomass digestion. They have built a compact system, containing large surface for efficient biofilm- and bacteria growth, and chambers, allowing for all stages of biogas generation (hydrolysis, acid production and methane generation) – in a closed system.

The Benefits and Applications

This way they manage to reduce the digestion time down to 3-7 days, depending on the type of substrate being used, and extract up to 98% of biogas potential within this period. This creates a totally new economic rationale behind the biogas plant developments: together with lower CAPEX, the efficiency of production increases dramatically, which requires smaller size infrastructure to process the same amount of waste. The economics improves even further with very low OPEX: less energy is needed for production, as no large tanks are needed to be heated up anymore, and there are much lower maintenance and manpower costs.

Their systems offer high flexibility and scalability. Reactors are designed in standard sizes, and the capacity of the plant depends on the number of reactors being installed. This allows for constructing the biogas plants of various sizes – from very small to large (managing more than 100,000 tons of waste). Since the reactors are built at the factory and not on site, this brings several benefits: economy of scale will allow to construct the tanks with lower cost and more integrity control. The time of the plant construction is also reduced.

It is also easy and cost-efficient to increase the capacity of the biogas plant, would the future biomass streams require this. The cost of adding one or several reactors is marginal, compared to building a new traditional digester, and allows for full flexibility.

They dare to declare that they have finally made the digester part of the AD industry to be one of the most important differentiators, allowing for high efficiency of the production. The math is simple when you have your reactors producing up to 80% more gas in the same time span. This may allow the developers to look at the calculations of the production efficiency from a new angle.

Another important strength is that their reactors are self-cleaning and do not require maintenance the same way as CSTRs do there is virtually no downtime to the plants to expect. The patented solution for substrate handling inside the reactor, prevents the sediments from occurring in the reactors, and therefore there is no need for stopping the process for cleaning of the hard sediment layers anymore.

What comes into the reactor, simply results in high amount of biogas and ready-to-use fertilizer, not requiring further treatment. As their reactors support both mesophilic and thermophilic process, there may be even further reduction to investments, as no hygienization is required to treat the digestate.

The plants are very compact and can be operated by a small number of staff, since the process is fully automated and is controlled by their proprietary software solution – for most optimal production. Some important features are controlling the substrate feed and allowing for remote access possibilities for monitoring of the process.

Another interesting aspect is that their biogas facilities can be easily established in an urban environment. The process is odor free, and small footprint of the reactors may allow for building visually compelling plants – for example in smart city developments. There are virtually no limits in the areas of use for Antec reactors, and it may make great sense to build the biogas facilities near the sources of waste: city developments, isolated microgrids, farms and even perhaps cruise ships in the future!