Illinois Helps Drive Nutrient Recovery for the Bioeconomy
A $3 million project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) is reimagining how wastewater can be transformed into a source of essential nutrients for agriculture and industry.
Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are partnering with Stanford University to recover valuable nutrients from waste streams and return them to productive use in agriculture and manufacturing.
The Stanford-led team is developing a process called electrochemical stripping, adsorption, and precipitation (ESAP) to recover ammonia, phosphorus, and magnesium from concentrated waste streams, including those from food industries. These nutrients are essential for crop production and industrial applications, but often end up polluting waterways. ESAP captures and refines them into commercial-grade fertilizers, disinfectants, and other marketable products, using electricity rather than chemical additives.
At Illinois, Jeremy Guest, the Levenick Professor and Director of the Levenick Center for a Climate-Smart Circular Bioeconomy, leads modeling and systems analysis to guide the design, testing, and scaling of ESAP. Guest is also a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering and Associate Director for Research at the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE).
Guest’s group uses two open-source software platforms, QSDsan and BioSTEAM, to simulate performance, costs, emissions, and energy use under real-world conditions. Their work helps identify which designs are most sustainable and cost-effective. The team has also built more than 30 benchmark wastewater treatment plant models representing over 70 percent of U.S. treatment capacity, giving ESAP developers a realistic baseline for comparison.
“Our work connects lab-scale innovation to real-world deployment,” Guest said. “By modeling how these systems perform under uncertainty, we can help design solutions that are both sustainable and financially viable.”
The project also involves Recovered Potential, a Stanford-affiliated startup that will test and commercialize the technology. This close collaboration between research and industry is designed to accelerate ESAP from concept to application.
By combining advanced electrochemistry, open-source modeling, and market-driven design, the Illinois–Stanford collaboration is redefining how wastewater can serve as a renewable source of nutrients, powering a more sustainable, circular bioeconomy.
How BioSTEAM and QSDsan speed scale-up
Before any new wastewater technology is built, researchers can test it virtually. BioSTEAM, an open-source Python platform developed by Jeremy Guest’s team, simulates how biorefineries and treatment systems would be scaled up and operated, from the detailed design and dynamic simulations of unit operations to energy use, costs, and environmental impacts under uncertainty.
QSDsan, also created by Guest’s team, builds on that foundation for sanitation and resource recovery systems. It combines process modeling with techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life cycle assessment (LCA), incorporates uncertainty, and accounts for local context to support quantitative sustainable design and decision making.
Together, these tools let teams explore many design options and site conditions in software, then focus on real-world testing where the technology can deliver the most impact and scale for commercial use.