A team of researchers coordinated by Professor Cynthia Canedo, from the Applied Environmental Microbiology Laboratory, has just won the Petrobras Inventor Award 2023 for creating a process capable of removing ammonia from effluents with high salinity. The technique developed by Cynthia, with the support of Petrobras itself, over more than a decade, has been patented and is already being applied in state-owned Effluent Treatment Plants.

The work began as a result of a demand brought about by the discovery of the pre-salt layer in Brazil. In accordance with Brazilian legislation on the use of water resources (CONAMA No 430/2011), Petrobras needed to treat the effluents generated by the oil extraction process, but the high salinity of the mixture posed a new challenge. “Salt inhibits the microorganisms previously used to remove ammonia. So what was our solution? Adapt the microorganisms to remove ammonia in high salt concentrations,” explains the professor.

To do this, Cynthia and her team focused on autotrophic nitrifying and heterotrophic denitrifying bacteria, a group that until now had not been explored for this purpose. “We decided to change the operating parameters for treating this ammonia in high saline concentrations in the laboratory first, and then we started working with pilot bioreactors. And it worked.” The patent was granted this year, consolidating work begun when Cynthia was still a post-doc at Unicamp. “It’s been a long time, two theses, two dissertations, a lot of research, a lot of collaborators!” In addition to the professor, the authors of the patent are Larissa Quartaroli and Lívia Carneiro Fidelis Silva (a graduate of the Graduate Program in Agricultural Microbiology), and Petrobras researchers Rodrigo Suhett de Souza, Haline Bachmann Pinto, Ricardo de Araújo Cid da Silva and Maíra Paula de Sousa.

This is the second time that a team related to PPGMBA has received this award from the state-owned company. In 2021, Professor Sérgio de Paula and his team won the same award for a project aimed at using bacteriophages to control sulfate-reducing bacteria, which are microorganisms that cause corrosion (rust) on oil platforms and pipelines. “It’s a joy to see our work recognized and to see it being applied and helping to solve a real problem,” says Cynthia. “This is priceless for us: to know that the Petrobras Effluent Treatment Plant in São Sebastião/SP and another in Angra dos Reis/RJ are applying the parameters that we standardized here in our laboratory. That’s our purpose. ”