If there’s one thing you should know about Dr Haoran Duan, it’s that he really, really loves water. But it wasn’t until a chance introduction to wastewater research that he realised he could make water his career.
“I did a student exchange to Australia in the last year of my undergraduate study and enrolled in a thesis project about water treatment — specifically water separation to deal with oil spills,” he says.
Dr Duan was entranced by the opportunity to “turn dirty water into clean water”, he says, and his research career was born. Today, his work is focused on three key areas of interest:
“The big questions I’m trying to answer are, can we achieve net zero wastewater management? And how do we reduce the impact of wastewater waste management to make a meaningful contribution to the global crisis of climate change?” he says.
These are pressing issues in a world where greenhouse gas emissions are putting the planet in increasing peril. Globally, the wastewater sector is the third-largest source of nitrous oxide emissions and fifth-largest source of methane emissions1. Water researchers are now focusing on not only how to reduce the environmental impact of wastewater treatment processes, but also how to reverse engineer them to produce — rather than consume — energy.
In the five years since completing his PhD at the University of Queensland, Dr Duan has already contributed to series of breakthrough findings in pursuit of net zero. Among his many achievements is a collaboration with the Queensland Urban Utilities (UU) that uses new biotechnology to remove nitrogen from wastewater. The resulting process, which is more efficient and consumes 50% less energy than traditional nitrogen removal pathways, has now been demonstrated at pilot scale at one of UU’s wastewater treatment plants.
In another project, Dr Duan contributed to a novel biotechnology that provides a more effective way of removing microorganisms from wastewater sludge — this, too, has been piloted at UU. More recently, he’s been involved in an ARC Linkage project in collaboration with over 10 major Australian water utilities to develop a new national framework to measure and mitigate their greenhouse gas emissions from wastewater treatment.
“Measuring the direct emissions from wastewater treatment and sludge treatment itself is tricky — how much greenhouse gas is being produced is actually highly uncertain and dynamic,” Dr Duan says.
While a handful of water utilities have had their greenhouse gas emissions calculated, usually by university researchers, the process is incredibly complex. Dr Duan and his team are trying to develop a more straightforward, low-cost and easy-to-implement solution that will support future emissions reduction activity.
It’s an impressive program of research for someone so young; for his efforts, Dr Duan was named a 2023 ARC Early Career Industry Fellow. And he’s showing no signs of slowing down: since starting at UNSW in mid 2024, he has quickly established his own research group and is now looking for new collaborations within the diversity of expertise that populates the WRC.
“We have so many excellent, top-notch scientists working on all aspects of water research,” he says.
“At UNSW Water Research Centre, I get exposed to many different areas, like hydraulics and flood management and sanitation and humanitarian engineering. I’m now trying to do more interesting research that leverages all these opportunities.”
1 Song, C., Zhu, J.-J., Yuan, Z., van Loosdrecht, M.C.M. and Ren, Z.J. 2024. Defining and achieving net-zero emissions in the wastewater sector. Nature Water 2(10), 927-935.