Western alum Hisham Hafez, PhD’10, MBA’19, is taking his innovative ‘waste-to-energy’ process from the lab to market as the senior director in charge of renewable natural gas projects at Greenfield Global, a producer of high purity alcohols, solvents, biofuels and bio-processing materials.
Hafez is leading the development and construction of the largest anaerobic digestion facility in Ontario – and the only one using his patented technology to produce renewable natural gas from organic waste.
The facility will be developed in Chatham-Kent, adjacent to Greenfield’s existing ethanol facility, and will be designed to process more than 150,000 tonnes of organic waste each year. The renewable natural gas produced from the organic waste streams will be sold to industrial customers who are driven to reduce the carbon intensity of their manufacturing processes. Unlike fossil natural gas, which is carbon-intensive, renewable natural gas has a low – and sometimes negative – carbon footprint.
Governments at all levels are seeking to divert organic waste from landfills to reduce methane emissions to combat climate change. Greenfield’s facility will enable this by diverting organic waste away from landfill, reduce landfill methane emissions, and extend the lifespan of the landfill.
Concept to creation
WORLDiscoveries – the business development arm of a research partnership between Western, Robarts Research Institute and Lawson – worked with Hafez to patent his technology and exclusively license it to Greenfield. Hafez was then a doctoral student in the civil and environmental engineering department when he was approached by a Greenfield executive interested in his research involving a novel process to convert waste biomass into biological hydrogen and methane.
Within months of graduating, Hafez secured an Industrial Fellowship with the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, which allowed him to work for Greenfield to validate his process and see if it could be grown to an industrial scale while maintaining connections to his lab at Western. After completing his fellowship, Hafez joined Greenfield full-time as a research and development specialist to work on advancing the technology.
From 2012 to the present, Hafez joined the University of Windsor and Western as an adjunct research professor and established a bioenergy lab in Windsor to develop the technology. These efforts have led to an opportunity to build an industrial-scale anaerobic digester facility in Chatham-Kent.
Anerobic digestion is a proven method of converting various organic wastes, such as agricultural residues, food processing waste, household organic waste, into methane-rich biogas. Hafez’s patented technology accelerates this process in a way that improves methane yield by up to 25 per cent while reducing digestion time by up to 30 per cent.
Hafez’s system overcomes the two most important limitations for sustained biological hydrogen production: contamination of the microbial hydrogen-producing bacteria with methane-producing bacteria, and low bacterial yield of hydrogen-producing bacteria. His process uses a novel system of reactors and clarifiers to enhance the hydrolysis of particulate organic material, leading to enhanced anaerobic degradation and higher biogas productivity.
After validating his process at demonstration scale at a Greenfield research and development center in Chatham-Kent, the company and Hafez were able to determine the process was efficient and novel enough to file for additional patents.
Research to reality
Hisham’s success story is an “shining example” of the value of industry partnerships with academia, according to Souzan Armstrong, executive director of WORLDiscoveries.
“Partnerships benefit from fresh perspectives and technical expertise from our students and faculty, which can lead to measurable value in terms of cost savings, product development and talent acquisition,” she said.
“Hisham’s story is a shining example of a partnership that has evolved over a decade between Greenfield, Western Engineering and WORLDiscoveries – working towards a common goal,” she added.
Hafez was encouraged to complete an executive MBA from Ivey Business School when he was promoted to lead the technology into the next phase, with the goal of commercializing it on a global scale.
“The MBA was very helpful for me, I had always been more involved in the technical and engineering side of the business,” Hafez said, “I needed the business skills to address the challenge of moving the technology from the lab to commercial scale to generate revenue.”
Research shows renewable energy technologies can take decades to reach widespread scale. Yet, in 12 years, Hafez has ushered his technology from the lab to industrial scale, and has shown how universities, governments and industry can work together to expedite the technology commercialization process.
“My experience at Western demonstrated there are so many pathways for graduate students to take beyond academia,” Hafez said. “I am often asked by students, ‘What can I do with my graduate research?’ I always tell them, ‘Take it to industry, you can have tremendous impact there.’”
