DOE's ARPA-E Program Awards $2.7M To Northwestern Engineers For Microbial Wastewater Resource Recovery Technology

George Wells, Keith Tyo, and Jennifer Dunn to develop microbes to recover nutrients from wastewater

A new research project proposed by Northwestern Engineering’s George Wells, Keith Tyo, and Jennifer Dunn has been one of 10 selected for funding by the US Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to develop technologies that recover previously discarded ammonia and critical minerals from United States wastewaters.

Ammonia from fertilizer applications and metals from various industrial processes accumulates in domestic wastewater. This untapped resource has the potential to replace a significant portion of the critical materials the United States currently imports.

The Northwestern-led project, “Nitrogen and Phosphorus Recovery via Intensified Microbial Extraction (N-PRIME): A Biotechnological Approach for Valorization of Municipal Wastewater,” received $2,718,183 in funding as part of the Realize Energy-rich Compound Opportunities Valorizing Extraction from Refuse waters (RECOVER) program, which aims to reduce American dependence on ammonia and phosphorus-based fertilizer imports by establishing new, secure domestic supply chains. Project partners represent both academia and applied engineering. They include the University of Minnesota, Current Innovation NFP, and Hazen and Sawyer.

The collaborative endeavor will use microbes to selectively concentrate nitrogen and phosphorus in wastewater and enable them to be captured as market-valuable products. This N-PRIME technology uses self-replicating, self-assembling, and self-repairing bacteria to enable continuous recovery of high-value amino acids and market-valuable fertilizer at greater productivity and lower cost than state-of-the-art methods.

The technology would be used to decrease energy-related imports of phosphate and ammonia as well as improve resilience, reliability, and security of the supply chain by onshoring production via a scalable approach directly adaptable to existing wastewater treatment infrastructure.

“N-PRIME addresses major challenges: heavy US reliance on imported ammonia and critical minerals, and the significant energy use and pollution linked to both their current production and to wastewater treatment and disposal,” Wells said. “Our approach involves re-envisioning domestic wastewater from a costly liability to a valuable resource that can be mined as a domestic source of ammonia, phosphorus, and other critical materials. The approach has significant potential to strengthen US energy and economic security, protect the environment from nutrient pollution, and cut down on energy consumption and emissions.”

Wells is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering, Tyo is an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering, and Dunn is a professor of chemical and biological engineering.

The project funds, totaling $25M spread around the 10 accepted proposals, were committed earlier in 2025 and additional selections are expected in the future.