The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has published a report written by Brown and Caldwell’s Thomas Steinwinder, Everett Gill and Matthew Gerhardt.

The team developed a wastewater treatment system for NREL’s Cellulosic Ethanol production process and the paper reports on three main tasks: 1) characterization of the effluent from NREL's ammonia-conditioned hydrolyzate fermentation process; 2) development of the wastewater treatment process design; and 3) development of a capital and operational cost estimate for the treatment concept option. This wastewater treatment design was incorporated into NREL's cellulosic ethanol process design update published in May 2011 (NREL/TP-5100-47764).