Lockheed Martin, one of the world’s largest military contractors, has developed a process that company officials say significantly reduces the amount of energy needed to desalinate water, an innovation that could help communities worldwide tackle the growing threat of water scarcity. (more…)

Water is always precious. Increased natural gas production is happening ion the US. But natural gas wells have problems: Large volumes of deep water, often heavily laden with salts and minerals, flow out along with the gas. That so-called produced water must be disposed of, or cleaned. Once cleaned it has beneficial reuse in often arid regions. (more…)

Israel NewTech reported that IDE Technologies will take part in the building and maintaining of what will be the largest desalination plant in the U.S., using the company’s reverse osmosis technology, under a deal that totals $650 Million for IDE. As reported in Globes, IDE has signed a $150 million contract with one of the largest desalination ventures in the US to plan and supply (more…)

Israel has always suffered from water deficiency, a fact which has fueled research and development in the field, and brought about a national practice of education regarding water conservation and advanced water management methods. Today, water management has been transferred to water corporations and the water economy is now based on desalination. Water prices (more…)

Solutions to environmental challenges are often laden with paradoxes. Let’s take the case of desalination of sea water to make potable water. It’s becoming more common in some parts of the world, including the Mediterranean region and Australia. But there’s a catch: it’s energy-intensive, therefore carbon (more…)

Energy Recovery Inc. (ERI), a company based in San Leandro, California, has developed technology that reduces the amount of energy required for desalination.

The technology does not directly relate to filtering water, but instead harnesses the pressure in the wastewater stream of reverse osmosis systems and transfers that pressure to the incoming feed stream to reduce the (more…)

More than $88 billion will be invested in desalination technologies worldwide from 2010 to 2016 as regions face dwindling supplies of freshwater and steep population growth, according to a new report. Declining costs associated with several key desalination technologies — including reverse osmosis — will make saltwater- (more…)

Water is the new oil. The $425 billion global water sector remains at the forefront of industrial, geopolitical, and social agendas because of a growing supply/demand imbalance and trends in water scarcity, quality, and safety issues. Only 3% of the world’s water is freshwater available to humans and the environment, and water scarcity is a growing problem. By 2025, it is (more…)

“Water, Water everyone, nor any drop to drink”
-Rime of the ancient mariner by Coleridge

We’ve all heard or read that “water is the new oil”, often as a pundit’s shorthand for some market prediction. Drinking water, we are told by analysts and environmentalists, is a rare, limited resource which the world is (more…)

Dow Chemical Company, a worldwide leader in the global chemical industry, and sponsor of the 2010 Dow Live Earth Run for Water, has entered into agreements with the new Saudi Arabian King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)  for developing cleaner, new routes for producing chemical derivatives.

The two are also looking into ways for carbon capture –a method which proposes to suck up and store greenhouse gas emissions.

Although many of the chemicals produced by the American chemical giant are used in the petroleum distilling and petrochemical industries, with much of the company’s “raw material” is coming from Saudi Arabia.

(more…)