The STEPS Seminar Series Welcomes Roland D. Cusick
Identifying opportunities and challenges for phosphorus recovery and reuse from agricultural and municipal waste streams
Author: Roland D. Cusick
Affiliation: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Grain and protein production in the US are reliant on highly interconnected food, energy, and water systems. Grain production practices and subsequent utilization for livestock production, food processing, and ethanol production have pervasive effects on regional and national water quantity and quality. Extracting phosphorus (P) from concentrated agricultural and municipal waste streams through chemical precipitation could reduce point source contribution to regional and national hypoxic zones while providing a renewable supply of slow-release fertilizer to grain producers (roughly 40% of Domestic synthetic P fertilizer demand). While the potential of P recovery is clear, significant challenges remain to realizing the potential benefits of circular P flows. Developing robust process models that can predict system performance and cost in the face of changing solution chemistry and mineral phase composition will be critical to increasing adoption of P recovery systems across agricultural and municipal sectors. This talk will provide an overview of organic and inorganic P mineralization in relevant nutrient rich streams and describe how to leverage plant-wide process models with national inventories of WRRF input flows and corn ethanol biorefinery production data to develop estimates of P recovery potential across the US.
Bio:
Roland (Ro) D. Cusick is currently an associate professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). They earned their B.S. in Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Riverside (2005), and holds an M.S. (2010) and Ph.D. (2013) in Environmental Engineering, both from the Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Cusick has published over 50 scientific papers in high impact peer reviewed journals such as Science, Energy and Environmental Science, Advanced Functional Materials and Environmental Science & Technology. The primary research areas of Dr. Cusick’s lab at UIUC include: (i) Electrochemical separations with energy storage materials – materials, process modeling, and systems analysis; (ii) Nutrient recovery from wastewater and grain processing facilities – Kinetic process modeling and systems analysis; (iii) Bio-electrochemical sensing and data-driven modeling of wastewater treatment systems. Dr. Cusick has received several honors for their research related to resource recovery including the NSF CAREER award in 2022.
