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 (more…)

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 (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (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…)

“Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.” Often attributed to Mark Twain, whoever said that seemed to have quite a bit of foresight, something the mainstream cleantech community is only recently warming up to.

The fights over water use facing utility scale solar thermal projects in the desert Southwest may have a lot to do with opening the eyes of the clean-tech community, but the sector’s challenges and opportunities are much broader than that, as scores of Californians, Middle Easterners, and Australians will attest.  So why, with the problems so immediate and demand remaining strong in the $58 billion annual market for water technologies, has water investment as a percentage of venture investment declined since 2005?

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As environmental concerns threaten to derail natural gas drilling projects across the country, the energy industry has developed innovative ways to make it easier to exploit the nation’s reserves without polluting air and drinking water.

Energy companies have figured out how to drill wells with fewer toxic chemicals, enclose wastewater so it can’t contaminate streams and groundwater, and sharply curb emissions from everything from truck traffic to leaky gas well valves. Some of their techniques also make good business sense because they boost productivity and ultimately save the industry money — $10,000 per well in some cases.

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Even small amounts of oil leave a fluorescent sheen on polluted water. This oil sheen is difficult to remove—until now. According to a recently published article in the journal Chemosphere, an inexpensive new method has been developed to remove oil sheen by repeatedly pressurizing and depressurizing ozone gas, creating microscopic bubbles that attack the oil so it can be removed by sand filters.

“We are not trying to treat the entire hydrocarbon content in the water — to turn it into carbon dioxide and water — but we are converting it into a form that can be retained by sand filtration, which is a conventional and economical process,” says lead author Andy Hong, University of Utah professor of civil and environmental engineering.

Hong says the technology — for which patents are pending — could be used to clean a variety of pollutants in water and soil, including:

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Even the CEO was initially skeptical about BioPetroClean’s simple and effective solution for cleaning up industrial wastewater, but it works; and now Dow Chemicals is onboard.

The idea that microscopic bacteria could cheaply and efficiently cleanse oceans of industrial wastewater may seem far-fetched. But it is just this premise that launched BioPetroClean, a Texas-based cleantech company with research-and-development facilities in Tel Aviv.

In fact, the technology is so effective that $57.5 billion industry giant Dow Chemical just announced a global commercial agreement whereby it will market and distribute the Dow-BPC Water Treatment System internationally. The agreement includes exclusivity across significant oil drilling and refining markets.

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Supreme Court watchers are hitting the refresh button often as the term wraps up and decisions are released in bunches.

Monday saw a significant ruling for the clean-tech observer as the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to uphold an Army Corps of Engineers ruling that allowed an Alaskan mining company to dump slurry waste into a nearby lake as a permanent disposal method.

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