Nitrous oxide remediation: Prototype development to support scale-up of novel biotech approach

Lux Biotech aims to use microbiology to positively impact our environment. By using circular approaches towards the production of its technology, it aims to reduce the economic costs of environmental biotechnologies, enabling greater access to a broader spectrum of users.

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a potent greenhouse gas with a global warming potential 298 times higher than CO2\. It is a major contributor to climate change, persisting for over 114-years within the atmosphere and has the potential to deplete ozone. Although often overlooked in climate policies, its abatement and control are gaining traction due to the pressures of net-zero.

Within the UK, over 70% of N2O emissions come from biological sources related to agriculture and wastewater treatment. Where microorganisms responding to nitrogen sources such as ammonia in either fertilisers or wastewater produce N2O as a by-product. The scale and complexity of systems in these industries create barriers that make the mass deployment of current solutions economically or logistically inappropriate.

In response to this, Lux have created a simple, deployable technology that uses waste effluents from local industrial partners to create a product that can be dosed into terrestrial and aquatic systems to tackle nitrogenous pollutants and the subsequent production of the N2O. This is achieved by encapsulating specialised microbes into a novel hydrogel composite which enables normally unstable bacteria to persist within systems for months at a time.

These bacteria are then able to enhance both the nitrification and denitrification processes within biological based system to facilitate the conversion of ammonia and nitrate through to nitrogen gas rather than N2O.

The company currently has a small-scale production system to produce this technology, however, in order to target larger wastewater and agricultural opportunities, it needs to scale-up its production capabilities. Current commercial offerings to do this use too much energy and impart too much stress upon the specialised bacterial strains, impacting the environmental and economic credentials of the technology.

In order to address this bottleneck, Lux shall develop and validate a range of prototypes of a low energy, low stress encapsulation approach that shall act as an enabling technology for full scale-up.

Upon successful scale-up, Lux aims to create a hub within the South-West Wales region that can take the effluents from a range of industries to produce its technology, facilitating the net-zero and clean growth ambitions of the region. We aim to treat pollution by using waste.