ABSTRACT
Innovative technologies for sludge reuse stretch the boundaries of what is traditionally considered to be beneficial reuse. If a process requires a reasonable input of energy and creates a usable sludge product, than it can be considered by some definitions to be a beneficial reuse. In the 1930s, German researchers discovered that heating biomass and treating it with alkali produced a charred material they called artificial coal. In the early 1980s scientists from the Columbus, OH-based Battelle research facility at the Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory in Richland, WA focused on this old German work using sludge as the feedstock. The primary differences between the oil from sludge (OFS) process and the Sludge-to-oil reactor system (STORS) process is that OFS uses dried sludge pellets as the feedstock while STORS uses dewatered sludge, and OFS is a low temperature-atmospheric pressure process while STORS is a high pressure-high temperature process.
