Turning fat to fuel
John Oliver sewer plant to become source of diesel
DANBURY — Comedian John Oliver was mistaken if he thought all he was getting was a run-of-the-mill sewer plant when he agreed in October to lend his name to the facility for a laugh and a donation to local charities.
The city has broken ground on the nation’s first grease-to-diesel conversion facility at the John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant — a project that promises not only a remedy for the plague of sewer grease that has terrorized Oliver’s native England with airliner-size fatbergs, but a revenue source for Danbury in the form of biodiesel sales.
“We’re so damn excited about this,” said Antonio Iadarola, the city engineer and its director of public works. “It’s one of the most fascinating projects I have ever worked on or will ever work on in my life.”
Iadarola is referring to the city’s partnership with a research professor from University of Connecticut to harvest sewer grease from the waste stream and produce hundreds of thousands
of gallons of biodiesel and heating fuel — enough to run Danbury’s truck fleet for a year, and have 90,000 gallons left over to sell.
Construction of the $5.5 million grease-to-diesel conversion facility is part of a larger $100 million wastewater treatment plant upgrade that began last year.
In July, the city expects to receive a prefabricated 5,000-square-foot building that will house the technology to convert one of life’s most disgusting waste products into liquid gold. In doing so, Danburyis poised to become the first city in the nation to produce its own fuel from the frying pan fat that gets dumped down the drain.
Danbury’s partners are REA Resource Recovery Systems and Richard Parnas, professor emeritus in UConn’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, whose patented reactor mixes refined brown grease with methanol to produce the biodiesel.
Production could begin late this year.
It’s the biggest news to hit this eight-acre sewer plant on Newtown Road since October, when the trash-talking host of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” ended months of profane fun with thenMayor Mark Boughton and visited Danbury to mark the renaming of the wastewater treatment facility.
At the time, Boughton said renaming the sewer plant after Oliver was the perfect fit “Because it’s full of [expletive], just like you, John.”
Oliver not only agreed but insisted on making $55,000 in donations to the Connecticut Food Bank, ALS Connecticut and a Donors Choose fund for Danbury teachers.
Meanwhile, the city will try to leverage its highprofile treatment plant to compete for federal money. The city’s grease-to-fuel partners will submit a research paper to vie for a federal grant that would pay for photovoltaic technology strong enough to run the biodiesel plant on solar energy.
Earlier this month, the City Council backed the application to the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. If the city is successful, the grant could lead to a larger award for a solar power system capable of meeting the electrical needs of the entire John Oliver Sewer Plant.
“It would take our treatment plant completely off the grid,” Iadarola said. “It’s exciting because we’re talking about green energy and figuring out how to deal with the deficiency in generating energy that we know is coming, it’s just a matter of when.”