Portugese Brewery

The biggest beer producer in Portugal located in Leça do Balio, close to the city Oporto in Portugal, operates a beer and softdrinks production facility. Because of the limited amount of space on the brewery's site, anaerobic treatment is a good solution for treatment of the wastewater. The present anaerobic Biobed® EGSB reactor can treat up to 19.800 kg of COD and 12.600 kg of BOD per day, in a reactor with a surface area of only 113m³.

Wastewater arriving from the brewery is passing screens and a tilted plate seperator (TPS) for grains and kieselguhr removal. After pre-treatment, the wastewater is collected in buffer tanks. The wastewater is thus fed to the conditioning tank and the anaerobic Biobed® EGSB reactor, in which a large part of the COD is converted into biogas.

The wastewater is post-treated in an aerobic sequencing batch reactor, to remove residual BOD, COD and nutrients. With a final effluent concentration of TCOD < 150 ppm, the wastewater is discharged to Leça river.

Since its start-up in summer 2007, the Biobed® EGSB reactor removes on average 80% of TCOD from the wastewater.