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 intensive, and for that reason it ends up contributing to the climate change cycle.

The fact is that water factories, as desalination plants are also called, will become a more prominent feature of utility services in the future. Water scarcity is a growing global problem which will require local solutions. The figures vary but more than one billion people have inadequate access to potable water and the figure doubles in relation to sanitation. This will have a worrying impact on food production as the population grows. So why are we not doing more to tackle the problem?

“There’s a perception that water is omnipresent and free. But people are starting to realize it’s becoming a progressive problem”, said Thomas Rooney, CEO of energy-efficient desalination company Energy Recovery, during an interview to Energy Refuge at the Ontario Global Water Leadership Summit that took place on May 17 -18 in Toronto. “All too often we get a reprieve from the droughts. But one winter of rain doesn’t mean the range of water consumption is done with.”

Rooney, who also has vast experience in the renewable energy industries, knows well the issues related to the water/energy nexus. “Our product makes desalination more energy efficient. If you used inverted osmosis and didn’t use our device, the amount of energy required would be 2.5 times higher. 60% of the energy costs go away with our product”, he said.

Their product is called Pressure Exchanger (PX), and it takes all the water that doesn’t go through a membrane, which is 60%, and recovers all the pressure and energy that it stores. “You can let it go back to sea and lose all the potential energy, or try to recover it. We circulate the energy back in”, Mr. Rooney explained.

The Pressure Exchanger is a ceramic pump based on a rotary positive displacement pump that does the energy recovery work Mr. Rooney described above. The reduced cost of desalination has created a boom for the industry worldwide.

Energy Water Nexus
As the water issue becomes increasingly important, and investments in the sector are expected to parallel renewable energy financing, one question that arises is: how can the two sectors work together to create sustainability for both of them? In fact, are they attempting to do that?

“On one side we have a lot of smart people trying to solve the energy crisis. Separately we have an equally smart group trying to solve the global water crisis. And all too often you’ll find people fixing one side of the equation doing harm to the other”, Mr. Rooney said.

“A few years ago people thought ethanol would be great as an energy solution. Now we understand the water footprint for ethanol is unacceptably high. Conversely, you could look at certain water solutions such as thermal desalination, which is done in the Middle East, and it’s got a huge energy footprint. More and more the smart money is looking at where the two overlap. If it’s an energy solution it has to have a benign water footprint and if it’s a water solution it has to have a benign energy footprint”, he said.

Now that desalination has become more energy efficient, is it possible that it could one day become energy neutral or even energy positive? “If you’re trying to create potable water it’s impossible to be energy neutral because you’re trying to overcome one of the principles of physics and chemistry and that is osmotic pressure. But in places like Australia and Southern California people build a like amount of renewable energy in the form of solar and wind. For every MW of power it takes to run a desalination facility, you go out in the California desert and build a MW of power generation”, he said.

But there is, in fact, one way of creating energy with osmosis. “You can run reverse osmosis backwards and create osmotic power. You can take the exact same pressures you have to overcome when you desalinate water to actually create clean renewable energy. You look at the point where a fresh water river runs into an ocean. You can put fresh water with sea water and generate power because the salt wants to migrate from one to the other. So the reverse of desalination is actually energy creation. But you can’t have energy creation and desalination at the same time.

So there you go, as far as desalination and energy creation go, you can’t have the cake and eat it too. “No”, Mr. Rooney said. “But it would be wonderful if you could.”

Watch excerpt of interview with Thomas Rooney:

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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 energy required to run the desal process.

According to ERI’s web site, the technology in its PX device (pictured above) has led to seven U.S. patents and international patents.

Tim Dyer, the company’s CTO, commented on ERI’s IP. ”We innovate and create intellectual property along the way to address existing and emerging industrial energy recovery needs. Our strategy drives our IP, and our IP drives our strategy.”

U.S. Patent No. 7,201,557 (’557 Patent) relates to some of ERI’s fundamental innovations. Entitled “Rotary pressure exchanger,” the ’557 Patent is directed to a pressure exchange apparatus for transferring the pressure of a high pressure fluid stream to a lower pressure fluid stream.

The rotary pressure exchanger (11) has a housing (13) containing a rotor (15) with a plurality of channels (16). A low pressure seawater feed stream from a reverse osmosis system is pumped through a straight inlet conduit (39) and fills an inlet passageway (41).

At the same time, high pressure brine from the reverse osmosis system is pumped through an elbow conduit (51), fills a plenum chamber (53) and enters axial channels (16), causing the rotor (15) to spin.

As the rotor (15) spins, there is periodic alignment of each channel (16) with the opening to a discharge seawater passageway (65) in an upper end cover (19). According to the ’557 Patent, whenever this alignment occurs the seawater in the channels is instantly pressurized.

Thus, the pressurized seawater is caused to flow out of the channels, fill an upper plenum chamber (45) and exit through an elbow discharge conduit (43).

Similarly, when a rotor channel (16) is aligned with the opening to the seawater inlet passageway (63) and the opening to the brine discharge passageway in the lower end cover (21), the seawater forces the low pressure brine out of the pressure exchanger (11) through the straight discharge conduit (49).

ERI’s pressure exchanger has the advantage of simplicity, with the rotor being the only moving part. The rotor and associated components seal the high pressure portion of the reverse osmosis process by keeping high and low pressure separate without the need for pistons.

According to ERI’s web site, the PX device makes desalination more economical and less energy intensive by reducing the amount of energy required by up to 60%.

Eric Lane is a patent attorney at Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps in San Diego and the author of Green Patent Blog. Mr. Lane can be reached at elane@luce.com.

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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-to-freshwater treatment a more affordable option, according to the report by Pike Research.

“Desalination is becoming more affordable; thus, an increased number of people can benefit from an almost unlimited resource — seawater,” the report says. The global installed capacity is expected to grow by about 55 million cubic meters per day during that period, representing a 9-percent annual growth rate. About 54 percent of that growth will occur in the Middle East and North Africa.

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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 estimated that 1.8 billion will be living in water scarce regions. There is a need to better manage our global freshwater resources, and some argue – even create new water supplies.

Saltwater desalination, a process by which the salt is removed from saltwater, has historically been very energy and capital intensive. However, due to advances in technology, the equipment and systems for producing fresh water from salt water could be a compelling answer to the worry as to whether the world could ever run out of fresh water. Desalination is a $5-$10 billion market that is poised to grow at 10%+.

In Southern California, where water is a treasured resource, a desalination plant is taking shape in Carlsbad, just north of the City of San Diego. When completed in 2012, the $350 million plant will provide enough drinking water for 300,000 residents.

Beginning on December 2nd, the Berkeley Energy & Resources Collaborative will be hosting a conference to highlight the desalination industry. The conference, entitled “Innovation in Desalination: An Answer to Our Water Woes?” will provide thought provoking discussion on what conditions are ripe for desalination solutions as well as technology innovation in the industry.

You can register for the conference here.

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“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 rapidly running out of. It’s just like oil.

Well, it’s not.

Water, water everywhere

1. Oil gets used up, but water is inherently reusable.
We burn oil to make our cars go, or we make it into plastics, which will never change back into oil. Water, on the other hand, spends just a few hours in our bodies before we return it, unchanged molecularly, to the environment. In most cases, agricultural or industrial use, which are far greater than personal comsumption, return water similarly. . Water is inherently reusable; it’s up to us, as a species, to ensure we don’t return it in such a polluted state, that reusing the water becomes impractical.

2. Unlike oil, our planet has a huge stock of water, at mostly known locations.
Most of our planet’s surface is covered in water. Deep sea drilling and exploration are not required for water. True, most of that is seawater, but current desalination technology can already convert that to drinkable water at a commercially reasonable price (several times less than what many consumers already pay for their drinking water).

3. Even fresh water, almost ready to drink, is quite abundant.
Freshwater resources account for just one or two percent of Earth’s water (depending on what you count as a potential resource), but that’s still a huge amount, many times greater than what mankind consumes yearly. The best indicator of how much fresh water we can sustainably use is the rate at which freshwater resources are replenished by precipitation (any freshwater sources, like lakes, rivers, or aquifers, are just buffers we can draw from, but are ultimately refilled from precipitation, or channels passing precipitation water back to the ocean). That figure is around 4 times mankind’s current water use. That’s not so big as to make human consumption “a drop in the ocean”, but it does mean any water stress we have is not because “there isn’t enough to go around”.

4. No substitution
There’s no “renewable energy” analog in the water market. You can use water more efficiently, but you can’t really phase it out in favour of some alternative. Our bodies, our food crops, and often our industrial uses, just can’t go without water. On the plus side, water does not pollute the environment, and is returned to it in the same molecular form (although we frequently discharge it with a whole lot of pollutants inside).

5. Water is a local market
Like energy, water is consumed everywhere. But whereas energy sources, such as oil, can profitably be traded across the world, from oil-rich nations to oil-poor nations, water is just too bulky (or, equivalently, too cheap per volume) to be transported cost-effectively, and thus be a truly global commodity. In some water-stressed areas, transboundary water trade is emerging and makes sense, but this is nothing like global trade on the intercontinental scale seen in oil markets. Water technology and methodology still can (and should) be global, but water markets will remain local.

Nor any drop to drink

So, is water scarcity not a problem? Of course it is. In much of the developing world, access to safe drinking water is one of life’s great difficulties; this will soon threaten most of the world’s population. Even in many European and US cities, water resources are stressed, and depletion of aquifers and other “buffer” sources indicates an expected shortage within a couple of decades. But to say that we are “running out of water” is a dangerous oversimplification, and the oil analogy makes it sound like we now need to go prospecting for new (and expensive) sources of water.

The real reasons much of the world is now or is in danger of becoming water-stressed are more subtle. Many water sources are difficult to access, tap, and transport water from. Water withdrawal is multiplied many times by wasteful consumption, inefficient transport and distribution (water loss in distribution systems, e.g. through leaky and burst pipes, is estimated at 25% worldwide to 50% or more in the developing world), poor reuse/recharging strategies, and indiscriminate pollution of water sources.

Every drop counts

So, what can we do? We need to keep the total water withdrawal rate down. More often than not, the answers are simple, but require smart solutions to implement.

1. Use less water.
The US consumes twice as much water per capita as Europe does, for a similar standard of living. Consumers in the US and some other countries are typically charged an unrealistically low price marginal price for their excess water use (often far below the total cost to procure more water sustainably), so there is no disincentive to such waste. The issue of raising those prices is often a political minefield, and the local nature of the water market means that tenfold differences in water prices between countries are neither surprising, nor a transient condition, although the best-practice cost to supply that water may be identical. The AWE is fighting hard to promote efficient water use in the US, and other, more efficient countries could still do much better. If we used half as much water, it would be as good (or better!) as doubling our water resources.

2. Reuse water.
By polluting less water, treating, and recycling it, the same water can be reused several times along the water cycle, either directly, or indirectly by being recharged into groundwater or river water, from where it is eventually pumped out and used. This is like multiplying the water available from precipitation. Reuse can often require little or no water treatment, e.g. when greywater is used for irrigation. The vast majority of water is used for agriculture and industry, which can often use lower quality water. If we reused every litre of water even once, that would be like doubling our water resources.

3. Tap more sources.
OK, that’s the obvious one. The important thing, perhaps, is to add the adjective “responsibly”. Pumping water from lakes and aquifers faster than they are naturally replenished may at best be considered a loan from the environment. Sustained withdrawal from such sources can lower water levels, causing dangerous pollution, and of course can only be a time-limited solution until the stored water buffer is depleted. Freshwater sources must also supply sufficient water for existing ecosystems, after net human consumption.

4. Transport and distribute water more efficiently.
Leaky pipes lose tens of percent of the total water withdrawn globally. Just cutting down that lost water would save us – among other things – a significant fraction of total water demand, which today is simply lost and returned to the environment. In much of the developing world, this could more than halve the demand on freshwater resources.

5. Desalinate.
Earth’s water cycle imposes a hard limit on the fresh water we can sustainably abstract from the environment. As mentioned, mankind already appropriates a sizeable fraction of that. With the actions listed above, we may improve that ratio five- or tenfold. But with the combination of population growth, and the need to close today’s water gap in much of the developing world, not to mention the unequal geographical distribution of easily accessible freshwater sources, that hard limit will remain too close for comfort for anyone taking the longer view. 100% efficient closed-loop water recycling is still a long way off, and may never be economically viable. Cheap desalination (as Israel has realized, for instance) is the only way to increase our total water sources, and seems like an eventual necessity.

Oil and water

It’s not so much access to water sources or ownership of those sources that will prove crucial (and make big business, the way ownership of oil has), but the technology and methods we use to ensure adequate water supply. We can move away from oil and oil technology – and we’ll have to, quite soon – but water is here to stay. For all the wrong reasons, water stress is felt or is beginning to be felt throughout the world. “New oil” or not, we should be giving it our very best effort.

Article by Haggai Scolnicov, appearing courtesy TaKaDu

photo: fox_kiyo

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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.

Both Dow executives and the Saudi Arabian government know they need to become involved in projects that are  more environmentally friendly; especially in the energy market.

KAUST is a new graduate level academic institution that just opened its doors in September, and whose campus has been designed to be more eco-sustainable and better adapted to being located in the harsh, hot climate of the Arabia Peninsula.

Read a previous Green Prophet article about its unique architectural and environmentally friendly designs.

In addition to the joint chemical derivatives projects, Dow also plans to explore being involved in ecological projects which will be carried out at KAUST’s Research Park and Innovations Cluster. Some of these projects include CO2 capture, enhanced oil recovery, water desalination, solar energy and wind energy.

CO2 capture and storage or CCS, sequesters carbon dioxide gas that is present during the petroleum distillation process to prevent it from escaping into the atmosphere and contributing to global warming.

Dow for its part, appears to be getting more involved in areas dealing with the environment and the company’s social responsibility towards helping the planet after so many years of being heavily connected with the petroleum industry and its effect on the world environment.

Trying to find solutions to the water resource problems that many countries face, including Saudi Arabia, is now an important part of Dow’s environmental responsibility goals. Dow was part of August’s World Water Week, held in Stockholm, where delegates from nations all over the world met to explore ways in which  countries can work together to find solutions to preserving present fresh water resources, recycling waste water, and producing fresh water from desalination and other means.

For its part, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia now has what is said to be the world’s largest desalination plant and is now able to produce 70% of its fresh water from reverse osmosis and other methods of desalination.

These will be some of the projects that both Dow and KAUST research teams will be jointly involved in within the framework of this agreement, as well as the chemical derivatives research, which hopefully will not be dedicated to the long term continuation and dependence on fossil fuels.

Article by Maurice Picow appearing courtesy of Green Prophet

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It sits in the middle of a harsh, barren desert, sweltering in searing heat. It has no clean water, its sea is polluted and there is no topsoil, just a covering of sand. It is also the biggest per capita consumer of fuel, massively reliant on cars, power-hungry desalination and air-conditioning. And with all this, can the United Arab Emirate state of Abu Dhabi really succeed in building a new “green city” in the Middle East?

If you can believe visionary people like architect Gerard Evenden (his words above), from the British architectural firm Foster & Partners, yes it can. Billions of dollars are riding on the assumption

Masdar City is the project Evenden is referring to. Masdar City is a $22 billion USD project being financed by the  Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company and is largely designed and planned by Foster & Partners.

So how is this so-called totally green city going to work in one of the hottest and driest regions on earth? According to Evenden, this futuristic project of 6 million square meters will eventually house around 50,000 people and will be completely environmentally sustainable – in every possible way.

As he noted in a recent Financial Times article The Greening of Arabia, by Edwin Heathcote :

“if you can make it work here, you can make it work anywhere.”

In one of Green Prophet’s previous articles on Masdar City it was noted that: “the project will be one in which commercial and residential entities will blend with each other to create a totally harmonious and ‘zero carbon’ environment, where all lighting and air conditioning systems will be powered by a 40 to 60 megawatt solar power plant, a 20 megawatt wind farm, and geo-thermal and hydrogen based power.”

The construction itself will be such as to shelter the inhabitants from the blistering Arabian sun and will include specially constructed walls, screens and meshes to allow breezes to enter and keep sunlight out as much as possible.

All this sounds absolutely wonderful and almost too good to be true. But as we pointed out earlier, Masdar City could either be a practical community innovation or expensive showcase.

The project has one big drawback – the construction itself.  Any true environmentalist knows that a significant construction project, such as the many that have been going on in various locations of the UAE, can in themselves be very damaging to an environment that is very fragile, to say the least.

Anyone visiting these locations must sometimes wonder at what expense to the environment these projects will cause, including island projects like Abu Dhabi’s planned $27 billion USD Saadiyat Island commercial, residential and leisure time project currently under construction, and mooted to become Abu Dhabi’s cultural center.

But once completed, Masdar City will hopefully prove to be as green and sustainable as its planners and developers say it will;  and will not be just a “showcase” project as Saadiyat Island looks to be by many.

What do you think? Voice your opinion below in our comments.

Article by Maurice Picow appearing courtesy of Green Prophet

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Water agencies facing droughts and shortages of freshwater, such as in coastal California, have been turning increasingly to desalination this year.

However, current desalination methods can be expensive and energy inefficient. Watchdog groups prefer water conservation and efficiency efforts, and charge that tapping the oceans for potable water can pollute waterways and kill marine creatures.

Yet could desalination become more viable and efficient? The Global Cleantech 100 list anointed several companies with that aspiration as technology innovators earlier this month.

Among the varied approaches, NanoH2O of Los Angeles is working on a nanotech membrane to produce fresh water via reverse osmosis, a common water purification method. The company says its technology can cut costs in part by reducing bacterial buildup, fitting within existing desalination systems. NanoH2O projects that its methods could increase a plant’s water output by up to 70 percent while shrinking energy costs by 20 percent.

Danfoss AquaZ of Denmark says it can filter water with a membrane up to 10 times as efficient as with standard desalination technologies. Key to its process are aquaporins, proteins that function like a plumbing system for living cells and that require minimal energy. Danfoss AquaZ plans to integrate aquaporins within artificial nano membranes, filtering out only pure H2O. Aquaporins were discovered relatively recently, leading in part to the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Taking yet a different tack, Oasys Water of Cambridge, Mass., is exploring what it calls engineered osmosis. As Jonathan Fahey of Forbes explains:

Instead of dividing salt water and fresh water, Oasys divides salt water and saltier water. This saltier water is water mixed with a unique type of salt called thermolytic salt… This extremely salty solution draws fresh water from the industrial wastewater or seawater through the membrane, leaving brine behind. Then a small amount of heat is applied to the thermolytic mixture, boiling away the ammonia and carbon dioxide and leaving fresh water…

And Oasys claims its process only requires modest electricity and heat, so it would cost one-tenth of what’s required by reverse osmosis methods for producing drinking water.

Water shortages are expected to increase in the coming decades, becoming a greater burden to businesses and taking an ever higher human toll. More than 1 billion people currently lack access to clean drinking water, according to the World Health Organization. By most accounts, businesses are just beginning to address water woes.

If any of these startups have their way, could desalination become more attractive and less expensive on a grand scale? Which approaches look the most or least promising?

[photo credit: photos8, cipher]

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Chris Tobias recently wrote about waste to energy in Singapore, illustrating the city’s exemplary response to fly ash left over from the incineration process. I just read an interesting French book on water, and one of the most interesting parts of the book was about Singapore.

Written by Erik Orsenna, a member of the prestigious Académie française, L’Avenir de l’eau (Water’s future) enables us to travel all around the world (albeit reading) and gathers facts and figures on how water issues differ from country to country.

Perfectly located between East and West Asia, Singapore is an important local hub for 4,000 international companies. The city’s geostrategic importance led to an important population boom, with the number of inhabitants climbing from 1.5 million at the time of independence in 1965 to more than 4.5 million today.

Despite receiving a lot of rainwater (there are 2,415 mm of precipitations per year, compared to roughly 500 mm for San Francisco and 1,200 mm for New York City), the city lacks water.

The precious liquid comes from four main sources: rain, water treatment, desalination and imports from Malaysia.

Rainwater currently brings about 30 percent of the needed resources thanks to the city’s 15 reservoirs. There will soon be 18. About 40 percent come from Malaysian imports thanks to two deals, one of which will be ending in 2011. The remaining 30 percent of water come from various treatments and desalination.

Water recycling is indeed important since the local utility launched NEWater, which is made of reclaimed water. The results are satisfying. The utility’s Chairman, Mr. Tan Gee Paw, estimates that NEWater responds to more than 15 percent of Singaporean water needs and by 2010 will provide 30 percent of the water through a new factory that will treat 2.5 million cubic meters per day. It is even possible to buy bottles of this reclaimed water. Since its launch six years ago, over ten million bottles of NEWater have been sold.

Singapore is also exemplary as it is estimated that only 12 percent of the total water leaks through the pipes compared to more than 25 percent in many American cities or even 40 to 60 percent in Mexico City.

Conservation measures prove to be successful as the average Singaporean now consumes only 155 liters of water each day, compared to 176 liters in 1994. This has to be compared with the average Canadian ( 330 l ), American (300 l ), Australian (260 l ) Italian (200 l), French (160 l ) and Belgian (120 l ) consumptions.

To conclude: Water management in Singapore could and even should inspire many cities in America, Asia and Europe.

There are numerous business opportunities for water treatment and management companies. The BBC estimates that in Singapore no less than $3.5 billion have been invested in the past five years and that the same sum will be invested in the five years to come.

[photo credit: Flickr]

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The NATO Science for Peace Program and the Middle East Desalination Research Center (MEDRC) recently awarded grants to researchers at Ben Gurion University of the Negev to continue working on a novel desalination method.  In a region where potable water sources are so scarce, these methods are crucial to water independence and reducing reliance upon imported water sources (which require a lot of fossil fuels).

The team, lead by Dr. Jack Gilron (Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research) and Professor Eli Korin (Department of Chemical Engineering), has developed a desalination method by reverse osmosis that exploits “the finite kinetics of membrane fouling processes by periodically changing the conditions leading to membrane fouling before it can occur.”

The Ben Gurion team will be working in collaboration with colleagues at the Hashemite University of Jordan and the University of Colorady in order to further develop the technology and set up pilot desalination sites in Israel and Jordan.

Dr. Gilron has explained that “the process will be tuned to reduce brine volumes to 50%-33% of those generated in conventional RO [reverse osmosis].  This greatly reduces the environmental burden and improves the economics of the inland desalination process… Water scarcity and the need to develop new water resources for populations not on the seacoasts are driving efforts to desalinate brackish water and municipal wastewater with ever-increasing efficiencies.”

In light of the ways in which water issues and environmental problems unbiasedly effect all Middle East inhabitants, it is wonderful to hear of such border-crossing collaborative efforts.

By Karen Chernick, appearing courtesy of Green Prophet.

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