How WASE is bringing next-generation waste-to-energy solutions to the market 

Offering the smallest, smartest, and most efficient biogas technology available, WASE exists to protect the world’s most precious resources – water and energy. The company’s next-generation waste-to-energy tech, based on a modular electro-methanogenic process, helps food and beverage producers unlock the value of their waste by turning byproducts into clean, carbon-neutral energy and cleansed water. 

Compared to traditional anerobic digestion, WASE’s plug-and-play systems enable food and beverage producers to generate more energy by treating waste faster. The modular reactors boost energy production by up to 30 percent, treat water three-to-ten-times faster, and have a 70 percent smaller footprint, offering strategic advantages across four key sectors: food and beverage, dairy and agriculture, brewers and distillers, and anerobic digestion. 

WASE was founded in 2017 by CEO and co-founder, Dr Thomas Fudge, who completed a PhD in Development Of Decentralised Wastewater Treatment And Energy Generation Solutions at Brunel University. He recognized the commercial value of electro-methanogenesis, simply described as a special form of anaerobic digestion. To learn more about this technology, as well as how the company has scaled to its current position, we sit down with David White, WASE’s Vice President of Sales. 

“Over the past few years, we’ve scaled the electro-methanogenic process from laboratory size applications up to 100-meter-cubed volumes in the field, and now we’re working on even larger projects,” David opens. “WASE has the world’s largest commercially operating electro-methanogenic reactor and with each installation we are breaking our own records in terms of size. We’ll start constructing a 180-meter-cubed reactor later this year, for instance, which is nearly four times larger than our first system. 

“We work with organic waste producers like brewers, distillers, cooked food and ingredients manufacturers, and biofuel producers to offer turnkey waste to energy projects. We co-locate our equipment on the customer’s site, turning their organic waste into cleansed water that can be discharged locally or reused on-site along with carbon neutral biogas that can then power their thermal energy processes or be converted into electricity. By turning a waste stream into a product that feeds an energy generation process, we are effectively turning a cost center into a profit center, adding value to their business, with most of our customers achieving a three-to-five-year return on investment.” 

From a technical perspective, electromethanogenesis means growing bacteria on electrodes, which then breaks down organic waste and generates electrons, accelerating the process of methanogenesis to turn organic waste into methane much quicker than traditional anerobic digestion. “While the process of electromethanogenesis has been studied at an academic level for several years, WASE has successfully been able to scale the process to a commercial level that no other business has achieved,” David explains. 

“Over the last eight years, we have conducted a huge amount of field testing and design refinements to identify a novel method of electrode construction and deployment in the anaerobic environment,” he adds. “Not only are our generators around ten times faster than anerobic digesters, but they also generate around 30 percent more usable energy and can be stored in a 70 percent smaller footprint.

“Our installation at a dairy farm in Snowdonia, Wales, was a key project for us, as it wasn’t only our first full-scale commercial installation, but it’s also the world’s largest operational electro-methanogenic reactor, turning cattle slurry into energy to power the farm. We’re now constructing a number of projects in the UK within the food and beverage sector. At Hepworth Brewery, for instance, we’re turning brewery waste into energy, saving them around £150,000 on waste haulage while also cleansing the waste to such a high degree that it can be discharged into a local river ecosystem where a rare and protected snail species lives. 

“We’re also working on some very large and varied applications in the US, with our technology being used to offset very high waste haulage costs and generate high volumes of biomethane. As there is both a high demand for carbon credits and a high market price for biomethane, the US is a very attractive market for our expansion.” 

Another interesting aspect of the WASE IP is biosensing and soft sensing technology. “These technologies use the electrical signals that the biofilms generate to inform our machine learning platform, WASE Intelligence, which in turn optimizes the system operations to reduce down time and maximize energy yields,” David elaborates. “This allows us to interpret the electrical current as a signal for aspects like whether we need more feed or a different temperature. We’ve built thousands of hours of data over the years, and we can build control interventions based on these data points, allowing us to remotely adjust a customer’s operating system to minimize downtime.” 

As our conversation draws to a close, David turns his attention to both the future of the industry and of the business itself. “2025 is an exciting year for WASE, as we’re going to be raising our Series A investment round to help us accelerate our growth and technology deployment in the UK and US,” he reveals. “With this comes a large amount of investment in our science and laboratory capabilities, along with investment in larger manufacturing facilities and a bigger team to support our growth. Commercially, we are going to be starting a few more projects with various companies in the food and beverage space, and we look forward to publishing these case studies and unlocking both cost and carbon savings for these partners. 

“From a wider perspective, I see the biggest challenge to achieving global energy transition as reliance on the short-term nature of our political leadership, as long-term thinking is required for sustainable investments. Also, I believe circularity is a far more powerful message than Net Zero, as many people don’t understand what Net Zero is. However, shifting the focus to a global circular economy where wastewater is eliminated is a much easier message to spread awareness of in the market!” 

Speaking about WASE specifically, David concludes: “We’re planning to expand our technology portfolio over the next few years to offer retrofittable electro-methanogenic reactors for installation into existing anaerobic digestion plants. This could help the global biogas market increase its energy supply by up to 20 percent without having to develop any new sites, and this is something I am personally really excited about bringing to the market. Our vision is that by 2030, WASE will be treating more than 50 million meters cubed of wastewater per year, generating 2.2 terawatt hours of biomethane and saving more than one million tons of CO2 per year.”  

wase.co.uk