Biomethane recovery from olive mill residues through anaerobic digestion: A review of the state of the art technology

Residues from production of olive oil are generated yearly in great amounts, both in liquid and solid forms. Different waste treatment systems were proposed in literature, to minimize environmental pollution while raising the energy recovery. Anaerobic digestion is one of the available routes to recover energy from waste via production of biogas while reducing organic load and pollutants to the environment. The use of farming and agro industrial wastes as co-substrate in anaerobic digestion can induce benefits related to the simultaneous treatment of different wastes. In particular, co-digestion can significantly enhance the process stability as well as the bio-methane generation. This work aims at reviewing the latest achievements in anaerobic digestion of olive mill residues, focusing on the aspects that can mostly favor the process, principally from a technical but also from an economical point of view. For the mono-digestion processes, methane yields up to 419 LCH4 kgVS−1 were reported for olive mill wastewaters (Calabrò et al. 2018), while a production of 740 LCH4 kgVS−1 was achieved when digesting olive mill solid waste together with olive mill wastewater and milk whey (Battista et al. 2015). An increase up to 143% in the methane yield was also reported when the feedstock was subjected to a 5 days aeration before digesting it in a semi-continuous stirred tank reactor (González-González and Cuadros 2015).