Higher N₂O production in sequencing batch reactors compared to continuous stirred tank reactors: effect of feast-famine cycles

Highlights

● N₂O emissions from a denitrifying SBR were 23 times higher than that of the CSTR.

● Feast famine conditions in SBR uniquely lead to producing undesirable levels of N₂O.

● An MAG closely related to previously identified Thauera is likely a major N₂O driver.

● Post-transcriptional regulation may be linked to higher N₂O production in SBR.

Abstract

Nitrous oxide (N₂O) is a potent greenhouse gas that can be emitted during the biological treatment of wastewater. In this study, a comparison of the long-term performance characteristics and N₂O production of sequencing batch reactors (SBR) and continuous stirred tank reactors (CSTR) during nitrite-based denitrification was undertaken. It was found that both reactors had NO₂⁻-N removal efficiencies over 99.9 %, but the N₂O-N emissions from the SBR reached ~2.3 % of the removal nitrite-N load, while in the CSTR it never exceeded 0.1 %. High frequency sampling during one operation cycle of the SBR demonstrated that the N₂O accumulation ratio was ~0.1 % during the feast period, increased to ~1.9 % in the first five hours of the famine period, and then gradually reached ~2.3 % at the end of famine. Batch experiments showed that limiting extracellular electron donor is required for N₂O accumulation in cells from the SBR-famine period and that cells from the CSTR do not accumulate N₂O when either nitrite or carbon is limiting. Another notable difference in the two reactor communities was the high level of accumulation of intracellular granules, most likely polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB), in cells during the feast period in the SBR. Metagenome assembly and binning found that one genome (PRO1), which is a Thauera, accounted for over half the metagenomic reads in both reactors. Neither shifts in gene regulation nor community composition explained the observed differences in reactor performance suggesting some post-transcriptional regulation obligatorily linked to antecedent conditions underly increased N₂O production in the SBR.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Denitrifying N₂O mitigation / SBR / CSTR / Meta-omics / PHB

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Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 52170076), the Shanghai Rising-Star Program (China) (No. 20QC1400500), and the State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control and Resource Reuse (China) (No. PCRRF20024).

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-023-1650-z and is accessible for authorized users.

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