QUBE Renewables is a firm that makes ‘flat pack’ anaerobic digestion kits, originally developed in cooperation with the Ministry of Defence for deployment in Basra. Here, the firm’s founder Joanna Clayton offers more detail on the kits
QUBE Renewables is the IKEA of renewable energy. We build ‘flat pack’ renewable energy plants that convert biodegradable waste into energy to provide heat, power and sanitation. Our QUBE’s can provide biogas for cooking, heating, and electricity either in places where energy sources are hard to come by, like remote communities in developing countries, or places where the usual routes of waste disposal are either too difficult or expensive. Our kits come in rapidly deployable units ready to plug and play, you just add waste to get your energy.
Digester origins
QUBE’s first digester was designed after our sister company, Aardvark EM Ltd an agnostic environmental consultancy, was approached by the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) who requested a solution to deal with food and sewage waste generated from their forward operating bases. As a result of this feasibility, our team developed a modular micro AD system which would be able to be easily transported into difficult to reach places and be run ‘off grid’, without the need for any supporting infrastructure.
Built inside a standard 20ft shipping container, our first prototype used horse manure, food waste and spent yeast from a local brewery to power the plant. This initial pilot has been running every day for the last six years powering our house, being used as a demonstration unit for interested parties, as well as being used to trial some very weird and wonderful feedstocks for potential projects, which have ranged from seaweed to bath bombs to biodegradable cutlery to dog poo.
Over the last few years we’ve developed, trialled and are now selling several variations of the original bioQUBE (the AD unit in a shipping container) idea. We focus on three sectors: food and drink, agriculture, and humanitarian. For each sector we’ve designed specialised digesters: lagoonQUBE, quickQUBE, powerQUBE and dryQUBE.
LagoonQUBE is a floating pod which captures the latent biogas produced from existing on farm slurry stores and enables it to be collected and utilised, as well as harvesting rainwater to increase the lagoon’s storage capacity. Our quickQUBE is a digester in a foldable fabric bag but with all the functionality of a bioQUBE. It’s easy to pack up, transport and deploy making it ideal for military or humanitarian use. It can also be run from biodegradable waste streams including human sewage. Finally, the powerQUBE is a combined heat and power biogas generator which will start up and run from biogas alone, producing electricity and hot water.
Game-changing tech?
To see how our tech is truly innovative we can take a closer look at dryQUBE. DryQUBE is a low-cost ‘dry’ AD technology appropriate for developing countries, which enables the digestion of a plentiful waste resource – rice straw.
Dry digestion has in the past typically required permanent structures to be built, requiring significant capital at around £6,000 per kW installed. DryQUBE changes this. It is affordable, mobile and customisable making it practical for energy generation in rural communities, whether that is for heat, power, light, cooking or vehicle fuel.
At present, there are 200 million small scale rice farmers in the world, collectively producing around 600 million tonnes of rice straw. Some of it is used to feed the community or for building materials. But the majority is burned or left to rot in the paddy field releasing GHG’s and air pollution particulate creating smog.
DryQUBE uses a containerised and cost-efficient PSA upgrader to process the biogas into biomethane. This is revolutionary in the AD sector. No other AD unit converts biogas into biomethane at this small scale. With the ability to store the biomethane in gas cylinders, we also improve the handling and delivery of biomethane to the community. DryQUBE is currently being trialled and implemented in the Philippines, in Victoria, Laguna.
The year ahead looks very exciting and busy with lots of projects on the go, both in the UK and overseas. Already this year we’ve had a big deployment of kit to both Canada and the Philippines. In the UK we are looking at a number of interesting new projects in very urban settings where AD would not normally be considered as a waste disposal option. Elsewhere, we also have a neat packaged solution for sanitation and waste for aid camps in disaster-relief situations and are currently bidding for a project to support an NGO on the Bangladesh Myanmar border.
So far, most larger AD has been made affordable through government subsidies out of principal, but if AD is to become a global source of energy it needs to be more available and cost effective at a smaller scale. That’s what the QUBE tech achieves, an innovative form of waste treatment to mitigate expensive disposal costs and production of renewable energy that can be utilised on site.
