GE announced on July 1 that it will acquire Monsal, a private U.K.-based water, waste, advanced anaerobic digestion and integrated biogas-to-energy business.
GE’s interest in Monsal is its advanced anaerobic digestion technology and industry knowledge. The acquisition will put GE in the position of helping municipalities and industrial manufacturers shift from disposing wastewater treatment byproducts to generating renewable energy and other value from their streams.
“For many years, GE has been working to further the development of water reuse, wastewater and tough-to-treat water technologies,” said Heiner Markhoff, CEO—water and process technologies for GE Power & Water. “Now our wastewater treatment solutions can be combined with new, advanced anaerobic digestion technologies to convert biosolids to renewable sources of energy for our customers.”
Monsal, based in Mansfield, U.K., provides advanced technology to treat biosolids and biowaste and convert it into renewable energy and saleable byproducts. Anaerobic digestion is a biological process in which microorganisms break down biodegradable material in the absence of oxygen. One of the end products is biogas, which can be combusted to generate electricity and heat—a feature that GE Power & Water’s Distributed Power business can achieve with Jenbacher gas engines.
“Joining the GE family will allow Monsal to bring our technologies to a significantly broader audience as well as give us R&D capabilities at a much larger scale than we have now,” said Aidan Cumiskey, managing director, Monsal.
Monsal has over 200 installed anaerobic digestion systems.
