SBIR Phase I: Enhanced Biocatalytic Selenium Removal from Water and Wastewater

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project will be the availability of a new low-cost, high performance technology to remove selenium from water, thereby contributing to national goals for protecting public health and maintaining natural ecosystems. While selenium is an essential trace element, excess selenium can lead to hair and skin changes, gastrointestinal symptoms, and damage to nervous, kidney and liver tissue. Selenium levels as low as 1.5 parts-per-billion result in toxic bioaccumulation in aquatic life, endangering the food chain and ecosystem balance. While existing regulations limit selenium concentrations in water to 50 parts-per-billion, industrial effluents (e.g. flue gas desulfurization, mining wastewater, coal power plants) are often required to achieve levels below 10 parts-per-billion. Meeting these very low limits is often unachievable or prohibitively expensive using existing technologies. In preliminary results, the proposed technology shows promise as an intensified, targeted, robust, and high performance biological treatment technology with substantially lower projected costs compared to the state-of-the-art. This is the first time that a technology for selenium removal combines novel methods in microorganism culture development with materials science, which helps further our understanding of how technical innovation along interdisciplinary lines can be applied for alleviating such widespread problems as selenium pollution. This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project is a multidisciplinary approach to respond to a widespread and increasing market demand for more effective, reliable and cost-efficient technologies for removing selenium from water and wastewater. While a variety of chemical, biological, and physical methods exist to remove selenium from water, high costs and increasingly stringent regulation drive an effort for new technologies. This first component of this work investigates selenium biotransformation and applies state-of-the-art techniques in microorganism culture development. Following culture development, novel synthetic biocatalyst composites with specific functionalities are developed as a method for deploying and enhancing the robustness of the technology application. Finally, a prototype of the biocatalytic technology is constructed and thoroughly tested to evaluate industrially- and economically-relevant operating parameters. The proposed Phase I work assesses the feasibility and suitability of the new selenium treatment technology, including determination of microbial characteristics, kinetic parameters, and process design. Overall, this project stands to advance our understanding of microbial selenium reduction, provide an improved process for industrial wastewater treatment, and demonstrate the effectiveness of multidisciplinary collaboration for applied technologies in the water and wastewater treatment sector.