Athéna Recherche et Innovation

At Athéna Recherche et Innovation, we collect wastewater and organic waste from agrifood industries to produce hydrogen with. We do it thanks to... bacteria.

Our goal is to create ecosystems starting from the food processing plant. We recover their waste water and produce hydrogen with it. This hydrogen is then sold back to the manufacturer for use either in heat or steam production or for its logistics. Because we have a 0-waste process, we produce also biogenic CO2 and biochar. The water cleaned can be reused by the client too.

Problem to be solved :

Food and beverage industry has three main problems to solve:

- They produce large quantities of sewage water and organic wastes. This is expensive to treat;

- They consume large amounts of energy for their process and logistics;

- They must reduce their carbon footprint and energy consumption.

Our first customer, the Saint-Père dairy (Agromousquetaire) is convinced that we can help them to solve these problems in part.

How can we help them?

These waste water and waste are actually a great source of energy for the living world. They are composed of organic matter (sugars, proteins, lipids) and minerals, all that is necessary for a microorganism to grow.

At Athéna, we believe that not using these wastes is a waste of material and creates not only unnecessary expenses but also a loss of revenue because these molecules can create value.

We have a strong interest in valuing them.

We specifically selected bacteria that can produce hydrogen from these organic materials. They do it quickly and well since it takes them less than 12 hours to consume the organic materials and thus clean up the water that can then either be released into the natural environment or be reused (agricultural watering, process,...). The other molecules (CO2, biochar) are valorised too.

To be clear, the typical processing time for a SWTP is between 20 and 30 days. Our process's speed allows for more compact installations.

What is the economic model?

During our discussions with different actors, we quickly concluded together that the job of a dairy worker was to produce milk, butter and cheese and not hydrogen. Energy production is also a specialist job. We will therefore be responsible for designing, building and operating the production units.

They also explained that their trades were also in full mutation and that they had important investments to make in their core trades which limited their investment capabilities in this type of tools.

We therefore decided to propose an economic model based on the provision of an integrated service of the type "Energy As A Service".

We process their waste and sell them the hydrogen.

To finance the plants, we will create SPVs, a widely proven model in energy, especially fossil fuels. We will rely on the financial strength of the infrastructure funds that are looking for this type of project.

We have demonstrated that our project is economically viable for both the industrial company, which saves money on its waste water treatment and energy supply (10 to 15%) and the SPV shareholders (high IRR) and Athena, who quickly reaches her point of equilibrium. We generate both spot revenue (sales of factories) and recurring revenue (licencing, team provision, etc.).

Traction market?

We tested many effluents and waste (cooking water, distillery vinasses, grape marc,...) and it works on a wide range of usable materials. Today, we work mainly with the dairy industry because their effluents are particularly suitable for our process (ease of treatment), and also because one of the food industries that consumes the most water and energy.

We have just installed our first pre-industrial demonstrator at the Saint-Père dairy of the Agromousquetaire group (56 factories, 4.7 billion euros), we will install our 30 m3 industrial pilot also at their home in order to build our first plant by the end of 2027.

We are in discussion with several other dairy and malting companies that have either expansion plans or need to improve their processing units. We are thus building our pipeline of future projects.

Environmental gain:

In nature there are no wastes so we don’t want to produce any either. Thus, beyond the production of our biohydrogen, our fermentation musts are transformed into biochar that allow us to make CCS. The biogenic CO2 will substitute the fossil CO2 used today in beverage industry for instance.

Because the sewage water treated can be totally cleaned, we will be capable to reinject it in the process of our partners. They request it as there are more and more tension on water availability.