When you live with 5 million other people on a relatively small island, finding ways to live more sustainably isn’t so much a luxury as a necessity.

That’s why Singapore—which has the third greatest population density of any sovereign state in the world—has become something of a pioneer in finding ways to live in a more sustainable manner.

Start with water. For years, Singapore has relied on imported water from Malaysia to provide 40 percent of its water supply.

To become more self sufficient, Singapore has invested billions of dollars in membrane filtration technologies that allow wastewater to be reclaimed, filtered, and transformed into high purity potable water called NEWater. This is in addition to heavy investments in desalination plants and rainwater-catching reservoirs that further reduce its reliance on imported water.

Another area where Singapore excels is building efficiency—an area with huge potential impact, given that an astounding 90 percent of the population lives in some form of high-rise condominium. Singapore has set an ambitious target of greening at least 80 percent of its buildings by 2030, including existing stock.

Clean technology advancements are also allowing Singapore to make great strides in transportation, particularly around the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs). Since roughly 85 percent of Singapore’s power supply comes from natural gas, EVs provide a cleaner solution compared with conventional oil burning vehicles.

And while EVs typically travel a shorter distance compared with conventional vehicles, that’s not really a concern on a 26-mile wide island.

Singapore-based clean tech company Greenlots is developing the best way to charge these EVs. Since 2008, the company has been committed to designing and delivering hardware and software to enable utilities, municipalities, electric vehicle manufacturers and distributors and other private businesses to install, own and operate their own EV charging network. Already, Greenlots has established charging stations in major parking lots in the city, including those at Bedok Point Shopping Centre and Kovan Residences.

By investing in clean technology innovations, Singapore is able to tackle multiple areas that impact its future. Its forward-thinking design solutions to environmental problems are sure to yield benefits both today and tomorrow.

Susan Gladwin leads the Autodesk Clean Tech Partner Program, which provides clean tech innovators powerful software and opportunities to help them develop solutions that address our most pressing environmental issues. In North America, Europe, Japan and Singapore, the Autodesk Clean Tech Partner Program offers $150,000 of Autodesk software for $50 (JPY 10,000 in Japan).

Related posts:

• Mandatory Roof Gardens Urged As Solution to Singapore Flooding
• Singapore is Greenest City in Asia, According to New Survey
• Exploring a Flawed Paradigm: Why Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is Not Enough
• Ascent Solar Strikes Profit-Rich International Deals
• Water Management & Conservation — Singapore Sets Another Example

One of the biggest challenges in the water arena is lowering the cost of wastewater purification, which is a heavy consumer of energy. Israeli start-ups Diffusaire and Mapal have developed technologies which bring dramatic cost-savings to wastewater treatment facilities.

Wastewater Treatment – Background

In advertising for home water purification systems we’re used to seeing pure, crystal clear water, but in reality the water only stays looking like this for a very short while, and actually all the water we use quickly turn to sewage water – drinking water, bath water, water used in industry …everything. Wastewater treatment is a very central activity in the water arena. Wastewater treatment uses up 1.5% of all the energy consumption in the U.S., so we’re talking about a big guzzler of energy.

Wastewater that remains untreated goes on to contaminate land and water sources. It is absolutely essential to treat wastewater, and in most of the world wastewater is converted into water for agriculture (Israel holds the #1 position in the world with 75% of wastewater reclaimed).

Wastewater is treated in wastewater treatment facilities which can be divided into two main types: open basins, large and shallow, situated in cheaper land outside residential areas, and the smaller, deep concrete pools, located in urban areas, on more expensive, more crowded land.

The purification of the contaminants that are dissolved in the water is done through bacteria which gobble them up (“biological purification”) and just as in fish tanks there need to be water bubbles so that the fish get oxygen, it’s also necessary to supply the bacteria with oxygen so that they can go on doing their job. Therefore, wastewater treatment facilities include aeration systems, which function is to bring oxygen into the pool. Today, the fine bubbles diffusers systems, which use advanced systems to insert small oxygen bubbles into them facility, are becoming more and more popular.

The diffusers are pipe systems which bring bubbles from the bottom of the facility pool. It’s possible to install such systems only in facilities with a concrete floor and not in open air pools. Open pools usually have a mechanical top layer device installed, and this system uses up a lot more energy, because it necessitates ongoing, costly maintenance. Therefore, the industry prefers bottom pool systems. Either way, we’re talking about an energy guzzler – about 50% of the energy expenditure of the entire facility.

Two Israeli start-ups are showing excellent progress in the race to develop winning solutions to make airing of wastewater facilities less costly: Diffusaire and Mapal. Diffusaire has developed a next generation diffuser, an innovative under-floor airing system for wastewater facilities with a concrete floor, and Mapal developed a technology for covering and upgrading existing diffusers, in order to utilize them in places where before it was impossible to do so (open air basins without a concrete floor). The bottom line is that both companies’ solutions bring dramatic reductions in operational costs.

First steps in the market:

Diffusaire works out of the water incubator Kinrot Ventures. The technology that the Company developed multiplies the length of time that the bubbles stay in the wastewater, thus significantly increasing the oxygen supply in the process. According to the Company, this creates a 25% reduction in costs in comparison with other diffusers.

According to Yuval Suskind, Diffusaire’s CEO, the Company has completed testing and is now signing first agreements with two Israeli water utilities – the “Tkua” utility in the Judean area, and the “Mei Reket” utility in Tiberius. Up until this point the Israeli government has invested about half a million dollars in the Company, which is entering its third year of activity in the Kinrot incubator and is seeking out private investment of $2 million. The objective of the investment is to finance the projects in Israel, as well as to market the solution in Europe, North America and India.

The second Israeli company active in this sphere, Mapal, targets a different kind of wastewater treatment facility, the open air basins, in which as mentioned, it’s not possible to install under-floor systems. Mapal enables use of diffusers in open air basins, using a patented covering of the basin. Its solution makes it unnecessary to build pools with a concrete floor in order to use the gentle bubbles system, thus enabling dramatic cost-savings.

“In this way we reduce energy consumption by almost 70% in comparison to top layer airing systems,” says Zeev Fisher, one of the founders and the VP Business Development of Mapal. The Company’s technology is installed in the wastewater treatment facility in Israel’s Ramat Hasharon, which treats 10,000 cube meters of wastewater every day, “And there we achieved an energy saving of almost 40%,” says Fisher. Additionally, the Company has systems installed in Netanya, which treats 40,000 cube meters per day, and is in the final stages of an agreement with a large water utility in the UK, as well as in negotiations with a facility which treats 200,000 cube meters per day, and negotiations for the upgrading of 18 facilities in Lima, Peru.
Up to date, Mapal has raised about $3 million in investments, more then half a million of which was invested by the founders, and is today entering a third round of investment, of $5 million, in order to fund projects.
Both of these companies target different segments in the wastewater purification arena, but they have an important common ground. For one thing, both claim that their solutions can be implemented on working facilities, without the need to suspend activity, and with the existing systems staying on as backup for some time.

The second thing they have in common is the method of financing. Both companies have selected a financing system in which the companies themselves fund the system for the facility, getting their pay through the savings that the new solution brings to the facility. In this way the facility is saved having to raise funds to upgrade its system.

These two approaches make entry into agreements with water utilities, which are often conservative and risk-averse, much easier and smoother.

Article appearing courtesy Israel NewTech.

Related posts:

• Israel NewTech Forecasts Cleantech for 2012
• Clean Tech is all wet
• Universities Partner on Water Purification Research
• Can Water Treatment Technology Offer the Fracking Industry a New Face?
• Trash and Bacteria Remain Supreme in Biofuel Manufacturing

This is the second part of my blog on produced water (you can read the first part here) which will look at the market – the players and technologies – in some more detail.

Produced water is a term used to describe the wastewater that’s brought to the surface during the oil and gas production process. For conventional oil and gas (onshore and offshore), it refers to the water that already exists in the oil reservoir and the water that’s been injected to force more oil to the surface. In unconventional oil and gas projects, such as hydraulic fracturing (fracking), coal bed methane (CBM) and oil sands, it refers to the wastewater produced by the fracking process (flowback water) and the process water used to recover bitumen from the oil sands.

Produced water is a hazardous waste stream. Broadly, it’s highly saline and contains hydrocarbons and other chemicals and it must be managed in line with local regulations which can differ greatly between states and countries. But its exact nature differs depending on the type of oil and gas field it has come from.
Most produced water has typically been disposed of (after treatment) through reinjection into deep aquifers because that’s been the cheapest and easiest option. But a number of factors including technological innovation, water scarcity and rising costs of disposal (if the water needs to be disposed of offsite), mean that for many projects, it’s becoming increasingly cost effective to treat it to a level where it can be reused or recycled.

The treatment market can be categorized into three main sectors: primary, secondary and tertiary.
The technologies used in the primary stage separate the oil from the water. Those used in the second stage remove smaller droplets of oil. Tertiary filtration reduces the amount of oil in the water even further.
These first two markets are well established and, unsurprisingly, mostly dominated by a handful of big companies, such as Cameron, GLR/Exterran, Veolia and Siemens. (Processes used at these stages are not overly complex though so smaller, local players, particularly in emerging markets such as Brazil, are gaining traction.)

Where the real growth is forecast is in an emerging fourth category – advanced treatment and desalination.
By reducing salinity, the water can be reused in fracking fluid or customized to enhance oil recovery (EOR). Customizing it for EOR means creating a specially formulated water which is injected into a maturing well. The water peels oil away from the clay, further increasing the recovery rate. In both cases it reduces the amount of fresh water that needs to be taken from local sources. And it means this wastewater becomes a valuable resource to be recycled and reused, rather than disposed of.

Desalination is a highly energy intensive process though (and therefore expensive). To be viable, it must be competitive with costs of disposal. Technology providers need to deliver solutions which offer superior water recovery rates (little or no waste liquid), but at the lowest capital and operational cost. Leading technologies include reverse osmosis (RO), forward osmosis (FO), High Efficiency Reverse Osmosis (HERO™), Optimized Pretreatment and Separation (OPUS™), thermal distillation, crystallizers and brine concentrators,. Brine concentrators are used to concentrate the reject produced water following RO, FO or HERO™ (as OPUS produces very little reject water) treatment.

As a less established market, there are no clear leaders yet. Several of the larger players, Veolia, GE Water and Siemens have entered the market through acquisition rather than organic growth. Smaller companies are developing and providing innovative and competitive solutions alongside the larger players. There’s not yet a one-stop shop provider of treatment services at all levels. And as a market that’s projected to grow at more than 20% annually, and with a host of new technologies on the market, it’s one of the most promising areas for investors and corporations operating in the oil services sector to expand their service offering and secure a piece of the action.

As far as the big players go in produced water treatment, Cameron is the largest as a result of an aggressive consolidation strategy, but it doesn’t have a lot to offer in tertiary and advanced treatment technologies.

Veolia and Siemens on the other hand are stronger in tertiary and advanced treatment with good technology portfolios but they offer little in the way of primary and secondary treatment services. Veolia is the developer of one of the leading desalination systems, OPUS. OPUS has low energy consumption, produces low waste volumes and can handle variations in feed water quality.

The main competing tech to OPUS is HERO, which is provided exclusively by GE Water outside the US, and mid market player, Aquatech, in the US. HERO is another highly efficient technology which can handle the nature of produced water much better than standard Reverse Osmosis. Though it is saline, produced water differs greatly from seawater. This is one of the reasons why companies with seawater desalination methods won’t always have an easy route into a new market such as produced water.

Heckmann Corporation is an industry consolidator with deep pockets looking to buy produced water disposal operations and reducing costs by introducing pipelines, recycling and reuse.

Nalco is a leader in water chemistry as well as oil field chemistry, Nalco is well positioned to take advantage of the growing volumes of produced water and the challenges of new, unconventional resources.
There are also a host of smaller private and quoted companies.

The aforementioned Aquatech, the exclusive holder of the HERO license in the massive North American market, also has other relevant thermal and membrane expertise and has made external tech investments of its own. It also has operations outside the US.

212 Resources uses a patented vapour compression flash evaporation systems to recover clean water and other valuable byproducts from produced water. The system is mobile and claims to be cost effective.

Filterboxx is a Canadian packaged water treatment company offering relevant technologies to oil sands operators on and equipment sale or rental/design-build-own-operate basis.

Aqua Pure, listed on the TSX venture exchange, owns Fountain Quail which has a strong technology and service portfolio. The company offers patented evaporator technology to recycle flowback and produced water into fresh water for re-use.

Hydration Technologies Inc manufactures forward osmosis membranes for produced water, desalination and industrial applications.

Water Standard Company is a start-up which is probably the only treatment specialist to have locked on to the opportunities in desalination for enhanced oil recovery.

Altela uses a new energy-reuse water desalination product that operates unattended in remote locations, such as oil and gas wells.

WaterTectonics uses a technology known as ‘electrocoagulation’. It passes pressurized water through a tank where electricity is applied, separating contaminants into a sludge that can be filtered away.
Fundamentally, water is crucial to the oil and gas industry and how it manages its water will be central to future production. These companies will be ones to watch as the market heats up.

Article by Tom Whitehouse. Tom is the Chairman of the London Environmental Investment Forum (LEIF), a conference platform which connects environmental innovation with capital, and the Founder and CEO of LEIF’s Initiating Partner, Carbon International, a corporate finance and investor communications consultancy for environmental and cleantech industries.

Thanks to our partner and industry expert Global Water Intelligence for providing us with its report on Produced Water. We will be holding our ‘Investing in Water’ conference on 25 May 2012 which will explore this topic in more depth through industry insight and discussions with leaders and innovators. If you’re interested in partnering with us for this event, please contact us. Find out more about LEIF at www.london-eif.com.

Related posts:

• Investment Opportunities in Water: Produced Water – Part I
• Investment Opportunities in Water
• Chile Launches Initiative to Measure Water Footprint of Companies
• Water Sector Startups Innovate Efficient Use And Supply
• Tiny Bubbles Used to Clean Oil-Contaminated Water and Soil

The water industry is renowned for being risk averse and conservative. It’s understandable. No one wants people to experiment with their water.

But as fresh water becomes more and more precious and the cost of energy to get fresh water keeps on rising, the challenges of the water-energy nexus are getting bigger. The industry needs innovative solutions but with innovation comes risk. This blog series will put the spotlight on technologies addressing some of the challenges and take a closer look at their markets and growth prospects ahead of our next water conference.

The water industry and the energy industry are fundamental to one another. The water industry needs large amounts of energy to transport, store and treat water. The energy industry needs large amounts of water (for boilers and cooling) to generate and distribute power. Head upstream to the oil and gas industry and the problem is there too – the industry is producing increasing amounts of wastewater, and needing more and more energy to treat it.

This last area – the treatment of wastewater produced by the oil and gas industry (known as ‘produced water’) – is one we think has particularly strong growth prospects, especially at the high level end of the process. Using advanced desalination technologies, water can be treated to a standard whereby it’s no longer a waste product to be disposed of, but a resource which can be used again. But treating water to this level is expensive. It can only work if it’s cheaper than the alternative or if the water can be sold on at the right price. Technologies that can deliver the quality of water required while driving down energy costs are on the money.

This market looks set for strong growth for several reasons. Conventional oil and gas extraction – which refers to the resources we have typically produced using onshore and offshore vertical wells – has likely peaked in some regions, North America being one of them. Large quantities of water are present in oil reservoirs and are brought to the surface along with the oil during the extraction process. As an oil field matures, there is more water in the reservoir and less oil, which means even more water is brought to the surface as the water to oil ratio increases.

Alongside the growing maturity of conventional onshore oil fields, we’re also seeing sharp growth in ‘unconventional’ energy – shale gas and tight oil, oil sands and coal bed methane. Once too difficult and too expensive to exploit, widespread adoption of technological innovations such as hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) and horizontal drilling means these ‘new’ sources of energy are now very much commercially viable. They might be providing a real boost to supplies but they are using a lot more fresh water, and therefore generating a lot more wastewater, often in regions that are already water stressed. Shale projects use large quantities of water in the fracking fluid and oil sands also use huge amounts in processing.

This water from both conventional and unconventional processes isn’t lost, but it does become a highly varied, and growing, waste stream. On average, for every barrel of oil currently recovered, eight barrels of wastewater are also generated. That’s quite a statistic, and probably one not many people outside the sector are aware of. Over the next 15 years, this oil-to-water ratio is forecast to increase from 1:8 to 1:12 and the size of the market (in the US) is set to double to $10 billion. So it’s not hard to see that this is an industry which is becoming as much about water as it is about energy. On top of all that there’s the global issue of water scarcity. If all this produced water can be treated to a level where it can be reused – either within the industry, or sold to another, such as agriculture, that’s a big opportunity.

“The gas associated with CBM is one of the major players at the moment for future gas supply. There are a lot of these activities at the moment where you get a lot of water on the surface, which is on the one hand a waste but if you look at it could be used as a resource and that is a big opportunity.”
Joppe Cramwinckel, Shell

Part 2 of this blog will look at the technologies in more detail and some of the key players.

Article by Tom Whitehouse. Tom is the Chairman of the London Environmental Investment Forum (LEIF), a conference platform which connects environmental innovation with capital, and the Founder and CEO of LEIF’s Initiating Partner, Carbon International, a corporate finance and investor communications consultancy for environmental and cleantech industries.

Thanks to our partner and industry expert Global Water Intelligence for providing us with its excellent report on Produced Water. We will be holding our ‘Investing in Water’ conference in Q2 2012 which will explore this topic, among others, in more depth. The event will feature industry insight, presentations from tech innovators and panel discussions. If you’re interested in partnering with us for this event, please contact us. Find out more about LEIF at www.london-eif.com.

Related posts:

• Investment Opportunities in Water
• Investment Opportunities in Water: Produced Water – Part 2
• Chile Launches Initiative to Measure Water Footprint of Companies
• Water Sector Startups Innovate Efficient Use And Supply
• Tiny Bubbles Used to Clean Oil-Contaminated Water and Soil

Water is one of the most exciting sectors at the moment in terms of cleantech innovation. The industry has a huge variety of investment opportunities but at Carbon International we focus on identifying the areas that we believe are the most exciting within broad industries such as this, and uncover the companies and investors leading and innovating.

Two water sectors I’m particularly excited about, because I believe they’ll grow significantly over the next few years and beyond, are the produced water market, in the oil and gas industry, and wastewater from mining. These sectors might not be for purest cleantech investors but fossil fuels aren’t going away anytime soon. So we should focus on how to make them cleaner, cleaner in their use and in their extraction. The mining industry will always be with us. It’s worth remembering that much clean technology requires metals that must be mined, unless they are recovered from waste streams, thought this is not always doable. Companies that provide solutions to clean up these dirty industries will enjoy rapidly growing markets. Key for investors and corporations active in, or looking to enter, the sector, will be to seek out the most promising of these and we aim to provide some scope at least through our free London Environmental Investment Forum conferences.

‘Produced’ water market
‘Produced’ water is the term used to describe the water generated and used by the oil and gas industry. According to Global Water Intelligence, handling and treating this wastewater is an industry currently worth more than $5 billion a year in North America, and it’s growing fast. With conventional oil and gas – that is, onshore and offshore wells – having likely peaked in some regions, North America being one of them, energy companies are now focusing on ‘unconventional’ projects such as shale gas, oil sands and coal bed methane. Once too difficult and too expensive to exploit, widespread adoption of technological innovations such as hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) and horizontal drilling means these projects are now commercially viable – and they’re providing a real boost to supplies.

These ‘unconventional’ projects are highly water intensive however. On average, for every barrel of oil recovered, eight barrels of water are also generated. Over the next 15 years, this oil-to-water ratio is forecast to increase from 1:8 to 1:12. During this time, the size of the produced water market (in the US) is set double to $10 billion.

The main growth sector within this industry is advanced treatment. This refers to treating the produced water to a high level which allows it to be safely recycled or re-injected. Treating water to higher standards can relieve stress on local water supplies, reduce environmental concerns and improve oil recovery rates. The more that can be reused the better. Technologies include filtration, biological treatment and desalination. With the market for the latter projected to grow at more than 20% annually, this is a particularly promising area for investors and corporations operating in the oil services sector. Produced water is highly saline and if it’s to be reused onsite or sold for use offsite, the salinity needs to be reduced to a specific level. The winners will be providers of low cost solutions that offer superior water recovery rates.

Wastewater from mining

The mining industry is a huge consumer of water. As more mines are developed in water stressed regions, such as Australia, Chile and South Africa, the industry is under increasing cost, environmental and social pressures to secure water supplies in challenging environments and treat wastewater to higher levels. Mining projects with water issues are considered high risk investments and will struggle for finance.

This issue is creating a big opportunity for solution providers. The market for water services related to mining stands at $7.7 billion a year and if the industry continues to boom, this could double in the next three years. As mentioned above, one of the main reasons for this is the rising number of mines being developed in countries which already suffer from fresh water scarcity. Other drivers include more stringent government regulation and better corporate social responsibility practices which are leading companies to treat wastewater to higher standards. The mining and processing of great amounts of lower grade ore is also requiring bigger volumes of water.

Consequently, providers of flexible solutions for the supply of desalinated water from ground sources of from the sea, or those that can treat the highly saline wastewater so that it may be reused on or even offsite, look set to benefit. The growing desalination market is also creating opportunities for the disposal of waste brine.

Another interesting growth area is in the recovery of metals from mine tailings. Tailings or ‘slurry’ refers to the leftover ore and wastewater after the metal has been extracted during the processing stage. This waste material, which still contains quantities of valuable metals, is typically left to settle in large dams or tailings ponds before being disposed of. An opportunity exists here for solutions that can selectively recover metals from this waste stream, reducing its volume and providing additional revenue streams for miners.

Article by Tom Whitehouse. Tom is the Chairman of the London Environmental Investment Forum (LEIF), a conference platform which connects environmental innovation with capital, and the Founder and CEO of LEIF’s Initiating Partner, Carbon International, which provides corporate finance services to companies and investment firms operating in environmental and cleantech industries. The next LEIF conference is ‘Investing in water’, on March 16 at the London Stock Exchange. LEIF conferences are free for professional investors, corporations and entrepreneurs.

Related posts:

• Clean Tech Event: Smart Grid Bilateral Trade and Investment Opportunities
• Water Sector Startups Innovate Efficient Use And Supply
• Dispatches from Ontario: Water Is the Next Big Environmental Issue
• Investment Opportunities in Water: Produced Water – Part I
• Imagine H2O Launches X-Prize for Water Innovation

Several global corporations have joined a World Resources Institute project that is developing a new database and mapping tools to help companies manage their water resources and reduce risk.

The Aqueduct project — which so far has enlisted companies such as Coca-Cola, General Electric, and Dow Chemical — will use hydrological modeling and a wide range of data to identify water supplies globally, track water use trends, and provide insights into regions facing potential risks, including physical, regulatory and socioeconomic factors.

So far, the project has developed a water risk atlas that calculates risks associated with the Yellow River Basin in northern China.

Later this year, the project will release similar mapping tools for other high-priority river basins, including the Colorado River in the U.S., the Murray Darling River in Australia, the Orange-Sequ River in Africa, and China’s Yangtze River.

In addition to helping heavily water-dependent companies identify potential supply problems, the tool is expected to assist water and wastewater solutions companies in identifying regions and clients in need of risk mitigation.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

Related posts:

• Strain on Water Supplies Already Affecting Businesses Globally
• Ten Nations Face Extreme Risk Due to Water Shortages
• Clean Energy Investors Don’t Want Technology Risk
• Chile Launches Initiative to Measure Water Footprint of Companies
• Google Satellite Platform Allows Tracking of Environmental Changes

In a move to strengthen its position in water treatment, chemical giant BASF recently announced that it will acquire German water filtration membrane developer inge watertechnologies (inge).

Inge makes ultrafiltration systems used to treat drinking water, wastewater, and seawater and specializes in filtration modules and rack designs for water treatment plants.

Inge owns a couple of international patent applications relating to its water treatment technologies, as well as at least one U.S. application and one European application.

The international applications are WO/2010/121628, entitled “Backflushing filtration module and filtration system for cleaning fluids contaminated by particles” and WO/2009/003887, entitled “Filtration system comprising a plurality of filtration modules connected in parallel.” Inge’s European application is EP2158958, entitled “Device and method for backwashing filter membrane modules.”

U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2010/0051544 (’544 Application) is directed to an apparatus and method for backwashing filter membrane modules.

Module rows (1a-1d) consist of four individual membrane modules, and each individual module includes a bundle of individual filtration modules. The rows (1a-1d) together form a module rack.

Supply/drain lines (7a, 7b) carry raw water, which is supplied to each filter membrane module (2) through supply/drain ports (3a, 3b). After filtration, the filtrate is drained via drain ports (4), flows through control valves (11a-11c) to filtrate collection line (5), and exits the module rack at central filtrate valve (6).

In backwashing mode, control valve (11b) of module row (1a) is closed on the supply side while the associated control valve (11a) on the drain side is open. The supply side control valves in supply/drain line (7b) remain open.

Thus, in the backwashing mode the filtrate produced by module rows (1b-1d) is pressed backwards through first module row (1a) to clean the filter membrane modules in that row. The polluted backwashing water leaves through drain port (10) of the module rack via the other supply/drain line (7a).

Each of the remaining module rows (1b-1d) is subsequently backwashed in succession in the same manner.

According to the ’544 application, this approach reduces the risk of contamination due to water stagnating in a backwash reservoir.

Also, because some module rows continue to produce the filtrate that is used for backwashing while one of the rows is being backwashed, the invention eliminates the need for a backwashing pump:

The advantage of the approach according to the present invention lies in particular in that a backwashing reservoir with the associated backwashing pump can be dispensed with. This is because, during the backwashing mode, with the exception of the module row to be backwashed, the remaining module rows are operated in the filtration mode, so that they produce filtrate which is directly used for backwashing the module row switched in the backwashing mode.

According to the inge press release (inge_release), the acquisition is expected to close in Q3 2011.

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.

Related posts:

• Green Patent Acquisitions Keep on Coming
• Solannex Strikes Again, Accuses Nanosolar of Patent Infringement
• Green Patent Acquisitions: ABB Buys EV Charging Tech Company Epyon
• Canada Launches Green Patent Fast Track Program
• Two-Month Warning for the USPTO Green Patent Fast Track

As soon as gas prices rise, our nation becomes focused on energy. When they drop again, it falls off most consumers’ radar. Yet the importance of energy goes way beyond the cost of filling up your gas tank or paying your electric bill. In often-extraordinary ways, energy is interwoven into absolutely everything that we need to live or that we love to do. One of the most useful tricks I learned in engineering school is that to put any problem in perspective, it helps to ask what if things were at zero or infinity. So, to put things in perspective, let’s ask the question…

“What if energy were free and unlimited?”

People would be able to travel at bargain-basement rates.
Yes, the cost of land vehicle transportation, which is so much of the focus in the press, would drop by 25%-35%[i]. But, in addition, airline costs would plummet as much as 50%. With this would come increased commerce and maybe even greater worldly understanding, as more people are able to travel.

The world’s growing shortage of fresh water would largely disappear.
A huge amount of energy is expended on the conveyance, pre-treatment, distribution and wastewater treatment. Energy represents 30% or more of a typical municipal water facility’s expenses.[ii] With free energy, water could affordably be produced in abundance through the highly energy-intensive processes of desalination, wastewater purification or even direct extraction of water out of the air.

Few in the world would go hungry.
Today, energy represents roughly 30-45%[iii] of the cost of the food we put in our mouths. Farming, transporting, processing, packaging and retailing all consume tremendous amounts of energy. The price of food would drop and the availability of food would skyrocket. With free and unlimited energy, food could be grown affordably just about anywhere, given that water would be readily available and, where necessary, climate-controlled growing facilities would become inexpensive to operate.

Economic prosperity would reign.
The correlation between energy consumption and standard of living is strong.[iv] Everything that we use consumes energy to be produced and transported. For example, energy represents roughly 50% of ocean shipping cost and 40% of aluminum production cost. Impoverished people would have more food to eat and cleaner water, their homes would become more comfortable, and the price of almost everything they buy would go down instantly, boosting their quality of life.

So, the next time you hear complaints about high gas prices for our cars, remember that energy affects much more than just the cost of your ride to work or trip to the beach. With this perspective in mind, it doesn’t take much to figure out what things would look like in the opposite scenario, where energy becomes extremely expensive and scarce as fossil fuels diminish. It isn’t a matter of whether we will move away from fossil fuel consumption; it’s a matter of over what time period and with how much economic, national security and environmental pain along the way.

The free market will most assuredly create more alternatives as energy prices rise. If we could be confident that future increases in energy prices would be gradual over a long period of time and that global warming was not a concern, there would be little reason to take any particular action. But history has already shown us that changes in fuel prices are unlikely to be gradual. And the growing industrialization of major portions of the world such as China and India mean that world energy consumption is likely to grow roughly 50% over the next 20 years.

This leaves little doubt about the direction of energy prices in a world dependent mostly on fossil fuels. From a venture capital perspective, it is this type of disruption that makes cleantech a compelling area for investment. From a policy perspective, if we are faced with high energy prices for an extended period of time or if global warming creates environmental chaos, the negative impacts could be extraordinary and would impact virtually every part of our lives. But, on the positive side, an expensive gas tank fill up would soon be the least of our concerns!

[i] Transportation:

· Fuel costs alone are roughly 45% of airline operating expenses and that doesn’t include energy costs incurred for ground support vehicles or buildings used by airlines.
· Driving a car would cost 25%-35% less per mile. (@ $3.50/gallon gas cost).

[ii] Water:
· 3% of all energy consumption used to move, treat water. 30% of municipal water agency expenses are energy.
[iii] Food:
· 17% of all energy consumption goes to creating and getting food to the grocery story. http://www.p2pays.org/ref/08/07686.pdf
· As a result, roughly $240B per year is spent in the U.S. on energy costs related to food.
· This equates to roughly $2,000 per family unit per year http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm
· Those same family units spend roughly $6,400 per year on food.
· Thus, if energy were free, food could cost roughly 31% less. Then there is the energy cost of getting the food home, preparing it, clean dishes and disposing of waste.
[iv] World Prosperity
· Correlation to standard of living.
· Shipping costs.
· Aluminum costs.

David Gold heads up cleantech investments for Access Venture Partners. He is also the author of the GreenGoldBlog.

Related posts:

• On-Road Charging Could Allow ‘Unlimited’ EV Driving
• The Promise of Nuclear Fusion Power: Unlimited Energy, No Side Effects
• What Will It Take to Achieve a US Renewable Portfolio Standard?
• Market for Desalination Plants Expected to Grow by $87 Billion by 2016
• Chinese Ban on Free Plastic Bags Has Cut Consumer Use in Half

Natural gas is domestically abundant (2,587 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas in the United States) and it burns cleaner than oil and coal (30% and 50% less carbon dioxide emissions respectively), but removing the hydrocarbons from mile deep shale beds has proven to be a dangerous and environmentally damaging endeavor.

During fracking, a mixture of water, sodium, sand, heavy metals, soap, chemicals and hundreds of other components are injected into cracks in the shale bed at extremely high pressures. Breaking open the rock allows gas and other volatile organic compounds to be released. It can take 6 million gallons of this fluid to frack one well and wells may be fracked multiple times. The DOE approximates 21 billion barrels of produced water is generated each year and as we seek ways to end our dependence on foreign oil, those numbers will rise.

It’s bad enough the fracking process is a massive drain on the water supply and even worse when you consider that the chemical-laden wastewater is injected into underground wells around popular fracking sites in places like Texas and Arkansas. The geology around the Marcellus Shale Formation in Pennsylvania (which holds enough natural gas to fuel the U.S. for 2 years) doesn’t lend itself to this bury-and-forget technique.

Currently, flowback and produced water is taken from drill sites to nearby wastewater plants [PDF] unequipped to filter dissolved hydrocarbons, radioactive chemicals, and other volatile organic compounds. The mixture is eventually dumped into the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers-the drinking source for tens of millions of people. Thankfully, Pennsylvania is cracking down on this practice, but they are left with the problem of what to do with all that briny fracking fluid.

The answer is Osorb, a silica (or glass) that swells eight times its size while scavenging dissolved hydrocarbons, polymers, and chemicals. The purification system, developed by ABSMaterials (with funding from the DOE) removes 99% of oil and grease, more than 90% of dissolved hydrocarbons, and “significant amounts of production chemicals”.

Of two pilot-tested systems, one processed 6 gallons every hour and the other could handle 60 gallons in the same time. Not the most efficient solution, but a lot better for local residents than waking up to a cup of hot methane and lemon. The private company has announced that a 72,000 gallon per day, trailer-mounted purification system will be in use (most likely designated to Marcellus) by this summer.

As the natural gas market skyrockets, we hope more fracking sites filter flowback using Osorb’s portable trailer technology, but until regulations are put in place, it is doubtful that all of the wells (1386 were drilled last year) will recover and treat their produced water with such diligence. It is simply too cheap and easy to continue pushing the produced water through municipal systems–that is, until more lawsuits pop-up.

Article by Allison Leahy, appearing courtesy Earth and Industry.

Related posts:

• U.S. Panel Endorses Fracking As Its Members Are Faulted for Industry Ties
• U.S. Company Halts “Fracking” While It Investigates Causes of Blowout
• Investment Opportunities in Water: Produced Water – Part 2
• Drilling Chemicals Found In Drinking Water Near Natural Gas Sites
• A Fracking Mischaracterization

If you’ve been searching for an environmentally friendly excuse to head to the pub for a pint, a group of scientists from Cornell University may be able to help. The scientists looked at over 400,000 gene sequences from brewery wastewater. Uncovered, were the genes of the microbes best suited to converting the wastewater into biofuel.

Anheuser-Busch InBev provided access to wastewater from nine U.S. breweries. Inside million-gallon bioreactor tanks used to process the wastewater, some of the microbes produce methane, not unlike a cow. The methane produced provides for 20% of the heating needs at the breweries, providing significant cost savings for Anheuser-Busch InBev.

Each bioreactor was cultivating both common and unique bacteria. Some of the bacteria were hardy and other populations too small. Like Goldilocks, the scientists found the microbes that were just right.

The communities of microbes best suited to producing methane are being investigated further. The scientists hope to learn more about how changes in environment, such as temperature, affect the microbes. Ultimately the hope is to “shape” the microbial communities to produce, not methane, but the basic building blocks of carbon fuels.

Biofuels suffer from several flaws. While it is not the case here, the use of food crops, such as corn, to produce biofuels is damaging to the global food system and a dubious use of water and other resources. Fossil fuels are used in the production of biofuels, adding to their emissions footprint.

Biofuels are a carbon fuel at their base. When biofuels are burned they produce carbon dioxide. Compared to emissions from fossil fuels biofuels burn clean. Referred to as “carbon neutral”, in a best case scenario, biofuels are the equivalent of treading water. Treading water alone will not save you and biofuels alone will not save the planet.

Brewing beer produces wastewater. By capturing and using the methane produced, Anheuser-Busch InBev uses what would otherwise have gone to waste. Additionally they reduce their consumption of other fuel, which may have been more damaging. The process may not be perfect but it certainly steps in the right direction.

So the next time you sidle up to the watering hole, give some consideration to the wastewater brewing beer produces. Anheuser-Busch InBev is using their wastewater to act sustainably. Regarding the wastewater produced by consuming beer, it appears water conservation would be the central issue, making the adage of “if it’s yellow, let it mellow” seem like a good place to start.

Article by Adrian King, appearing courtesy Justmeans.

Related posts:

• A CleanTechies roof deck Happy Hour this Wednesday….
• Betting on Algae and Big Oil?
• That Shot of Tequila May Come With a Biofuel Chaser
• Second Generation Biofuel at Danish Gas Pumps
• Biofuels Takes Off on Commercial Flights