Water Power R&D

I attended the Corporate WaterVision 2010 Conference in Washington DC June 8-9.The sponsors appeared to be newbies to the water conference circuit–so I didn’t know what to expect.

I was pleasantly surprised.

I came away with two ideas in terms of best practices: One for desalination from Australia and the other for water reuse from Canada.

I’ll only spend a  couple sentences on desal  best practices from Australia because its too big a subject–and wasn’t part of the main theme of the conference–which was water reuse.   On Wednesday morning  Hu Fleming, Global Director of  Hatch Water gave a presentation on Australian desalination.    What I heard was  just amazing. I’d seen the first graph Hu presented in February at the Multi State Salinity Coalition Conference in Las Vegas. That graph contrasts vividly the 15 year conception-to-completion-cycle for Poisden’s Carlsbad desalination plant in southern California …. — to the 3 year conception-to-completion-cycle –  for all the many Aussie desal plants. (page 38)What I didn’t hear the last time was that in several instances the desal plants– during construction– were found to be coming in under time and under budget — so they doubled their capacity on the fly. How did they do that? (and still stay on time and on budget?) The first big one was 3D & 4D modeling (pg 42). The second big one was no fault, no blame, and no dispute commercial framework between the owners and service providers at all stages. (pg 46) There were others.

But that’s a long story. I asked Hu Fleming  if he would be willing to give the presentation again elsewhere.–& so would he mind if I posted  the  pdf (here) for his presentation and his email online. He was agreeable. The pdf is all publicly available info. His shop has had considerable dealings with Australia — so he’s intimately familiar with the story. If you have a conference and  are interested in having a presenter detail  Australia’s big desalination building projects — Hu’s email address is: hfleming@hatch.ca

imho the Australia story needs to be told and retold at every American desalination conference for years to come so that people will get the idea that it might be a good idea to adopt some Australia’s practices.

It took a little more thought to stitch together the second big theme of the conference. I was clued to an interesting Canadian story by an off handed comment  by  the last panelist of the last panel on Tuesday. The panel was entitled Sustainability Leaders II: Assessing Water Reuse and Other Innovative Water Solutions. The guy who made the comment was  Rishi Shukla, Ph.D.,  from the James R. Randall Research Center of Archer Daniels Midland Company.

He said Canada actually does a better job of converting water reuse ideas into profit making companies than the USA does. The way they do it is through a program called Ontario Centre for Environmental Technology Advancement ( OCETA).  According to their website

OCETA was incorporated in 1993 as one of three Canadian Environmental Technology Advancement Centres to strengthen and grow the environmental industry in Canada. OCETA is a private company that operates at arm’s length from government.

The core mandate of OCETA is to provide technical support and business services to entrepreneurs, start-up companies and small to medium-sized enterprises to support the commercialization of new environmental technologies, and to accelerate market adoption of clean technology and environmentally sustainable solutions.

OCETA  provides funding at a rate of 4 to 1 for start ups. That is, for every dollar the start-up invests OCETA provides four dollars.

The USA does have similar programs on the state levelEspecially prominent is Massachusetts.  To augment these programs a  May 2010  Brookings Institute Study recommended more programs by the federal government to provide access to to capital for entrepreneurial start ups. A Wednesday morning panel entitled; Steps Toward a National Reclaimed Water Standard addressed this. Panelist Jon Freedman, Global Government Relations Leader  for  GE mentioned that more federal funds for water reuse start ups would spur development.  As well, he mentioned that a number of GE suggested policy initiatives .

The USA does have small federal agencies that fund start ups for defense and intelligence. Pound for pound probably the best agency in the Federal Government in terms of payback to the economy is DARPA.  Their seed money has been meant to fund technology for DOD related industries — but, curiously, Darpa seed money has been  at the root of many great US companies since its inception in the 1950’s. In recent years DARPA has even funded carbon nanotube membrane research.

The WateReuse Research Foundation might serve a similar purpose as DARPA for the express purpose of channeling federal dollars to start ups that treat waste water –like municipal sewage as a resource–with an eye out to one day turning the waste output of municipalities into profit centers –rather than cost centers.

My favorite storm water idea is to pipe Mississippi flood water west rather than spend billions through FEMA and the Core of Engineer to dike the river.

But practical sewage water solutions are closer than most people currently understand.   Here is a waste lagoon in Utah that’s being converted into an algae biofuel production facility.  A prototype waste treatment plant in Hawaii –being deployed by American Water– promises operating cost savings of up to 70%. This article lists companies that extract various  resources including phosphorous and ammonia from waste treatment plants. In Sept 2009,

At the Water Innovations Alliance in Chicago, Mark Shannon, Director of the NSF STC WaterCAMPWS at the University of Illinois, sketched out a vision for a new type of water purification system that will convert sewage into re-usable water, methane and a sludge of minerals that can be sold to manufacturers or brick makers.

Shannon is currently in the midst of raising funds to build a prototype that would work with 20 liters at a time. The Solara in New York’s Battery Park neighborhood has a 580 water recovery units that work aerobically.

The minerals recovered include magnesium, boron, fly ash and lithium. Simbol Mining, a startup spun out of Lawrence Livermore, has a technique for extracting lithium from water. Right now, cities pay to have the stuff stored. El Paso, for instance, re-injects the salts and minerals from its desalination system back into the ground when it could conceivably sell them.

According to this May 21, 2001 article in Water Online– Biodiesel From Sewage Sludge [Is] Within Pennies A Gallon Of Being Competitive

With the challenges addressed, “Biodiesel production from sludge could be very profitable in the long run,” the report states. “Currently the estimated cost of production is $3.11 per gallon of biodiesel. To be competitive, this cost should be reduced to levels that are at or below [recent] petro diesel costs of $3.00 per gallon.”

Where would WateReuse Research Foundation find promising start ups and how would they vet them? The last speaker of the conference was Paul O’Callaghan, CEO, O2 Environmental Inc. He mentioned that his shop has a list of over 600 start ups in all stages of development. Interestingly their top choice for a company with game changer tech is Emefcy. According to their site:

Emefcy eliminates the energy consumption for wastewater treatment, by applying the principle of microbial fuel cells (MFC) for the direct production of electricity or hydrogen from wastewater.

So in total there are companies looking to turn municipal sewage into gas, oil, electricity and hydrogen.

The WaterReUse Research Foundation already provides money for basic research–so the institute is positioned to find promising technology moving into the start up phase.

Odds are there will be several municipal bankruptcies in the next couple years. Many if not most municipalities are financially challenged these days. As was pointed out by the Water Infrastructure Funding panel on Tuesday–the need for water infrastructure projects is great. There are currently initiatives in various phases of realization inside and outside congress to make municipal bonds more attractive. If municipal waste became a profit center– rather than a cost center–municipal bonds would be an easy sell.

All in all, it was a good conference. Remember for any conference you do– book Hu Fleming for a review of Australia desalination best practices. As well, consider that Canada’s OCETA & the DOD’s Darpa might serve as models for a federally funded water reuse start up initiative.

Back in February the MSSC held a conference in Las Vegas. It would be helpful to recall that five major points were made. The first was made by Marcus G. Faust to the effect that the Republicans would likely take back control of some or all of Congress this November. The second point was made by Patricia Mulroy. She said that desalination was not enough to provide water for the west. There would have to be other sources –like from the East–see my last post. The last two points were made by Wade Miller. He mentioned that desalination required much more research and a champion — like Pete Domeneci of New Mexico–once was.

What should we make of Marcus Faust’s point that republicans would storm back into Congress come the fall?  imho it would be prudent for research administrators to assume that when/if the republicans return this fall — that they will be cutting everyone’s budgets. The easiest targets will be R&D. So any money’s for R&D not committed this year are easy targets for budget cutting next year. Consider Patricia Mulroy’s point about pulling fresh water from — say– my words–the Mississippi at spring flood or east Texas rivers during hurricane floods.  When/if the republicans come back to congress the likelihood of the feds sponsoring big water capital projects any time soon diminishes significantly.

Which brings us to the last two points made by Wade Miller: the importance of a water champion and the importance of research. There is no champion for water desalination on the horizon currently but curiously the National Geographic has outlined three areas for desalination R&D: Forward Osmosis, Carbon Nanotubes, Biomimetics.  They are all the major areas I have discussed on this blog. National Geographic also gives the time frame for when these research areas become ready for prime time. This sort of popularization of the big desalination R&D issues makes it easier for federal desalination R&D admins to pitch joint funding research programs with universities, private foundations and companies–and vice versa. My vote for the most important piece of federal funding for desalination R&D would be for redirecting toward desalination membrane research –the Princeton University Math solution which Makes Computer Modeling 100,000 Times Faster.

A new formula allows computers to simulate how new materials behave up to 100,000 times faster than previously possible, and could drastically speed up innovation relating to electronic devices and energy-efficient cars. Princeton engineers came up with the model based on an 80-year-old quantum physics puzzle.

It could also drastically speed up innovation related to desalination research.  Remember we are in the Golden Age of Math

Computer modeling programs played a significant part of the original work 4-5 years ago done on carbon nanotubes at LLNL that created the carbon nanotube tech mentioned in the National Geographic article above. Similarly, an appropriate role for federal labs might be to develop the membrane modeling programs, provide programmers and computing time at federal labs. Their role might be  to create models for membranes requested by government, university and corporate membrane materials researchers–who will in turn–based on the models–create new membranes in  their labs. That’s the way they did it with the carbon  nanotubes at LLNL. That’s the way they can do it with other materials. Only this time the whole process can be accelerated significantly.

My point is not new or original. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, also makes the point that better, faster, smarter computer modeling is the way to accelerate innovation

There’s lots of places to go for funding –but why not dream big? Currently the deepest pockets are at the DOE. The article above mentions energy as being a significant beneficiary of their computer modeling innovation.  DOE funding pools will come under the scrutiny of the long knives come November.  Desalination membrane separation issues are closely related to hydrogen membrane separation issues. Why not pitch to DOE funding a greatly expanded computer modeling program –using the Princeton University’s Math solution  mentioned above. There might be 20 teams. 10 for energy 10 for water desalination–modeling for 20 different energy and desalination projects around the country. Really, the USA could reinvent the whole civilized world  in five years.

If for whatever reason the DOE can’t do it then you might get some combination of the DOD, WateReUse Research Foundation and Bureau Of Rec funding to pay for 1-5 computer modeling teams. Or if the DOE could do it but just not in DOE labs then federal funds might be appropriated to Universities to fund the modeling programs for university and corporate research. Finally, if the feds are just too somnolent — an ingenious soul close to the players could get rights to the math formula, plug it into an algorithm, hand it to a couple of big iron–or massively distributed– programmers and get the software written for two million or less of programming time. Then open up shop or lease copies of the software out. Think there might be a market for a material research modeling program that’s up to 500,000 faster than brand X? That is, a materials research modeling program that would instantly obsolete every materials research modeling program in the world? Maybe both the feds and private investors could get into the act. Actually, this has been done before. In 1990, NIH launched the human genome project which they predicted would take 30 years to complete. In 1996 Craig Ventor jumped in and said he could get the job done in two years. He did. How did he do it. He developed faster software.

The important thing is that someone needs to be sure that Princeton University Math solution is re purposed–and funded– for desalination  modeling research. Now. What kinds of desal projects would be helped by better/faster/smarter modeling?  Well lets go back to the National Geographic Article. You may only be able to see two out of three areas for research: Forward Osmosis and Carbon Nanotubes but not BioMimetics. So click on the National Geographic Article to open the graphic in a new browser: Modeling for both Carbon Nanotube and BioMemetics would yield better material to create an electrical charge at the front of the membranes, better fillers for the membranes, perhaps better carbon nanotubes and protein channels–as well as numerous small details which researchers would be familiar with. As they say, the secret is in the sauce. For forward osmosis, computer modeling might create a better salt in the draw solution. That is, a salt that “draws” more water and evaporates at a lower temperature. Now understand, that carbon nanotubes and protein channels are just two of many kinds of semipermeable membranes. Researchers will want to bring others to the table. For example, I’ve mentioned from time to time that membranes of the future will need to be tunable–so as to resist different kinds of biofouling. That’s just what UCLA researchers have developed

.

Researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have unveiled a new class of reverse-osmosis membranes for desalination that resist the clogging which typically occurs when seawater, brackish water and waste water are purified. The highly permeable, surface-structured membrane can easily be incorporated into today’s commercial production system, the researchers say, and could help to significantly reduce desalination operating costs. Their findings appear in the current issue of the Journal of Materials Chemistry.

The new development here is the “tethered brush layer” which is “brushed” on the membrane. This layer is in constant molecular motion. The constant motion of this layer “makes it difficult for bacteria and other colloidal matter to anchor to the surface of the membrane”.

“If you’ve ever snorkeled, you’ll know that sea kelp move back and forth with the current or water flow,” Cohen said. “So imagine that you have this varied structure with continuous movement. Protein or bacteria need to be able to anchor to multiple spots on the membrane to attach themselves to the surface — a task which is extremely difficult to attain due to the constant motion of the brush layer. The polymer chains protect and screen the membrane surface underneath.” Another factor in preventing adhesion is the surface charge of the membrane. Cohen’s team is able to choose the chemistry of the brush layer to impart the desired surface charge, enabling the membrane to repel molecules of an opposite charge.

This is a first generation success. Princeton’s computer modeling might well speed the researchers work at UCLA–so that the “tethered brush layer” of membranes would be tunable to any kinds of bacteria byo topography and chemistry and charge.

The team’s next step is to expand the membrane synthesis into a much larger, continuous process and to optimize the new membrane’s performance for different water sources.

Perhaps advanced modeling would be an appropriate way for the feds to help the the folk at UCLA. That said, it would be appropriate to check in with various research universities like UCLA before proceeding. It looks to me like their attitude is a winner.

“We work directly with industry and water agencies on everything that we’re doing here in water technology,” Cohen said. “The reason for this is simple: If we are to accelerate the transfer of knowledge technology from the university to the real world, where those solutions are needed, we have to make sure we address the real issues. This also provides our students with a tremendous opportunity to work with industry, government and local agencies.”

Finally one last question should be asked and answered.

What does accelerated membrane development have to do with, say, pumping rivers of water out of the Mississippi during spring flood. Likely nothing. But it may well be that 5-10 years from now public policy experts will start saying that the big rivers are hopelessly polluted with farm and human medicines and household cleaners. That will come because the deformities in fish and amphibians that one sees reported from time to time to time –will have moved up the food chain. We don’t currently have the tools to remedy this problem. Work in desalination separations will also provide answers to these other molecular separations–that in turn will make it possible to tap the big river at flood. Right now this is a fanciful solution to a fanciful problem but probably less so on both counts than current worries over carbon dioxide. When you have a material research modeling program that’s up to 100,000 times faster than current generation material research modeling program–you’re positioned to get solutions to even the most fanciful problems in real time.

The crises in Haiti has an interesting desalination story. The  aircraft carrier U.S.S. Carl Vinson is currently offshore of Haiti sending supplies ashore and picking up the wounded. Its onboard nuclear powered desalination plant   makes some 400,000 gallons of its own fresh water every day, and much of it will soon be going ashore.

The nuclear-powered vessel, which had been heading to its new home port in San Diego when it was diverted to Haiti hours after the quake, has massive desalination capacity - purifying the same ocean saltwater it traverses - and the Vinson has a daily excess of 200,000 gallons “that we can give away,” says Cmdr. William McKinley, who oversees the desalination process.

Nuclear powered aircraft carriers have been desalinating their own water for 30 years and submarines have been nuclear powered for 50 years without incident.

The reason I mention this is that two inventions in the last several years or so will make it readily possible–later  this decade to assemble a portable nuclear powered desalination plants in  fairly short order. The first is  the portable desalination plant. The second is the portable nuclear power plant.  As part of disaster relief it might become a part of FEMA’s tools to have portable nuclear power plants and portable desalination plants in storage ready to be rolled out on short notice.

There are a number of portable desalination systems developed in the last couple years that might scale.

UCLA has developed a portable desalination system that can desalinate any kind of salty feed water.

The M3 demonstrated its effectiveness in a recent field study in California’s San Joaquin Valley in which it desalted agricultural drainage water that was nearly saturated with calcium sulfate salts, accomplishing the desalination with just one reverse osmosis stage.

M3 could also be deployed to produce fresh water in emergency situations for up to 6,000 to 12,000 people daily.

There is another portable desalination plant developed at San Dia National Labs

When the research plant opened in August of 2007, Zero Discharge Desalination, a high-tech portable laboratory designed by Dr. Tom Davis with Dow Water Solutions and Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, was brought in for dignitaries to tour during the opening celebration.

ZDD is a state-of-the-art technology for removing the salt solids dissolved in brackish water and managing the concentrated wastes.

Already emergency tested is the portable desalination unit from the Tularosa Basin National Desalination Research Facility.

When Gulf Coast residents were left without a drinking water source in the aftermath of Katrina, Tularosa Basin National Desalination Research Facility sent its portable reverse osmosis (RO) membrane purification system to Biloxi, Miss., to provide drinking water to 40,000 local inhabitants. The unit can produce over 100,000 gallons per day of drinkable water from contaminated river water or from seawater.

In fact, for anyone wishing to do further research on the latest portable desalination units available today a visit to the Tularosa Basin National Desalination Research Facility is order. They have set up a test site for anyone interested in testing out their new desalination designs.

What about portable nuclear power plants?

The World Nuclear Association has an international list of   small nuclear power plant designs. The list is small. However, there may be as many as 90 portable nuclear power designs worldwide. Given that scale and variety  of design innovation–its likely that portable nuclear power plants will be one of the great technology stories of this decade

Two early American entries in the field are still 3-8 years away.

The first, Hyperion Power Generation has thus far hogged the mini nuclear reactor spotlight, but NuScale Power claims that it can cut nuclear plant construction costs and increase safety with its Lego-like 45 megawatt modular reactors. For disaster relief Hyperion might be best because their model is designed for off grid use.  Besides, NuScale Plants would need refueling every two years.

There are many other American companies that will come on stream in the next couple years. I’ll mention two.   TerraPower “runs primarily on natural or depleted uranium, rather than enriched uranium. With un-enriched fuel, the reactors could be loaded up with fuel and sealed for 30 to 60 years. ” Their product is further away from being completed.  A fourth company  “Babcock & Wilcox, a large energy management company, is getting into the market for small nuclear reactors.”

While TerraPower and Hyperion are staffed and run by experienced nuclear executives, Babcock & Wilson can brag about something else. Namely, that they’ve been in the nuclear reactor construction business for 50 years. That, and they have lots of money.

Since Babcock & Wilson have been providing small nuclear power plants for the navy for decades — you would think they would be first to market for portable nuclear power plants for the civilian field– but maybe not.
Therefor Hyperion may well be the first to market:

Hyperion Power Generation’s Power Module is a modular, hot tub-sized nuclear reactor that delivers 70 megawatts of thermal power or 25 megawatts of electric power for seven to 10 years. Hyperion expects to sell 4,000 of the $30 million reactors when they go on sale in 2013. The company has already received 70 pre-orders, proving that there is a market for small nuclear devices.

Mark Campagna, representing Hyperion, explained that the firm’s 25 MW “nuclear battery” (slides) is a spin-off from Los Alamos National Laboratory. The firm continues to rely on expertise from the federal science facility with a cooperative R&D agreement.

Unlike B&W and NuScale, both of which emphasized hooking up their reactors to existing electrical grids, Campagna said the competitive advantage of Hyperion’s design is that it is focused on providing local, or “distributed power,” where there is no grid. Key export markets will include remote oil and gas fields, mining, and military installations. A target use for developing nations will be to power potable water treatment facilities.

Hyperion’s focus on off grid power generation might make them best for FEMA type disaster relief operations.

But– and here’s the kicker. If you can drop a power plant with this much free standing power anywhere–more interesting things become possible. One of the uses for an off grid power plant mentioned above is to cook oil from oil shale (at +600 degrees) in places like Colorado and Wyoming. But as I mentioned in a blog a while back –this same technique might be used to cook water out of gypsum at 212 degrees.

Now here is where it gets fun.

Portable nuclear power plants collapse the complexity of providing energy for pumps to pump rivers of water in pipes 1000’s of miles. All you need is pipes,  pumps and off grid portable nuclear power generators to push water 1000’s of miles inland from any coast.

So?

The main point of this blog is that the 21st century will kick off in earnest when the cost desalination and bulk water transport collapses. Thereby making it cost effective to pump fresh water from the American coast inland 1000 miles  to various places out west  where crops can be grown. Deserts would be turned green, the habitable size of the US would be enlarged by 1/3. Just as the Hoover dam created the model for water policy around the world– the US model could be replicated world wide –thereby doubling the size of the habitable earth.

If their costs come down sufficiently –portable nuclear power plants may just make this possible.But even in the near term …in the next ten years portable nuclear power plants just collapse the complexity of pumping bulk water long distances. So while the cost of shipping water might be high–it still can be accomplished without too much difficulty.

There is one other thing that portable nuclear power plants make possible.

It becomes  technically easy to do bulk water transfers on the fly.

What does that mean?

With a portable nuclear power plant it would be technically easy to build a pipeline, line it with pumps powered by portable nuclear power plants and pump vast volumes of water 1000 miles for 2 months of the year. And then the rest of the year, either move the portable nuclear power plants, shut them down or send their electricity elsewhere.

Hmm what 2 months of the year are we talking about?

Well currently everyone hates bulk water transfers–that is the people in the great lakes and Canada. but what if  you could pull rivers of water out of the Mississippi for two months of the year while the river was at flood stage–thereby lowering water flows below that of flood stage. There’s a lot of people along the Mississippi would think this a good idea. So instead of paying the army corps of engineers a billion annually for Mississippi flood control and FEMA another billion for flood managment– you spend the money on pumping a river of water over the South Pass in Wyoming and then letting it run down into the Colorado basin (& maybe use the downslope over the great divide to power generators for electrical production) –or pump flood water to the sinks of eastern Colorado to refill the Ogallala aquifer. or further south, send the water to west Texas.

Nobody dams the Mississippi. But if you pumped a lot of water away from the Missippi at just the right time–there would be no more need for vast expensive flood control projects.

Just a thought.

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Recently,   a Minnesota company announced plans to use a oil derrick off the Texas coast to site  wave power energy production devices to power a desalination plant. It would serve as demonstration pilot. Desalination has never been done quite this way before. They started work in August. They’re interested in producing bottled water from shallower depths than the water harvested off the Big Island in Hawaii–where water is first pumped ashore –before its desalinated.

I think something like  an oil derrick platform would be the model that DVX Technologies should use whenever they go out to sea. The platform would house the maintenance crew– while the desalination work was done 850-900 feet below.

I have written a number of blogs about DVX Technologies in the last year or so on the idea of  using ocean pressures to desalinate water. On several occasions I have mentioned that one way to bring water ashore would be to drill a slant well from onshore (or offshore–whichever is cheaper) so that the water runs down hill toward shore. On shore, then, the fresh water could be pumped up as from a well. What’s the cost/benefit of this procedure amortized over, say, 30 years? Beats me. A good water–or more likely an oil — consultant would have the tools to figure  out the capital energy and maintenance costs.

How do you evaluate the costs?  You’d do that by comparing the costs of comparable procedures for getting water ashore.

As far as I can see, the other procedures involve various technologies for pumping water in pipes along the ocean bottom up hill to shore.

So this time I’ll discuss various power sources to pump fresh water ashore uphill along the ocean bottom from the underwater desalination plant . I’ll make the assumption that the oil companies will already have optimized the best way to lay and maintain pipe. Further, I’ll assume that the oil companies will already have optimized the best practices for installing & maintaining an offshore platform–and that their crews would be best suited for installing and maintaining a water platform. Finally I’ll assume that the rough cost of oil or gas generators to pump water ahsore is already known; that this can also be used as a baseline against which to evaluate  other  ways to power the pumps.

Oil rigs have desalinized ocean water for years– but they have done so for their own use. They don’t produce fresh water on a commercial scale. (However, except for the membrane plants themselves, the oil companies have all the skills/tools necessary to do offshore commercial grade desalination.)

Most off shore drilling rigs have diesel or  gas powered generators.

If a desal plant on the ocean floor was sited over a natural gas deposit below the ocean floor being drilled by  an oil rig…then the natural gas could be used to power the pumps that pumped fresh water ashore from the underwater desalination plant. Did you get that? This won’t happen very often–especially not in the waters off southern california where more coastal drilling is frowned on.

So how else could you power big offshore pumps onsite?  That is, without importing power to the platform by means of oil or gas.

Another way to power pumps — to send desalinized water ashore–would be with wind generators on rigs. Something like this is currently in planning in the north sea. If you read the article you’ll notice that they have all the attendant construction and installation issues resolved. However, the waters off southern California are not as world famous for wind as is the north sea.

I should also mention that it would be easy to drop a portable nuclear reactor onshore opposite the oil rig desalination plant–and run a power cable out to sea. Here’s another company. At present  its unlikely  that any kind of nuclear plant would be built in Southern California. But that could change.

So what other sources of power might be used to drive a pump?

Four properties of salt water can be exploited for energy to power pumps.

1.)The most esoteric/furthest from commercialization/expensive is R&D by which the navy is looking for  ways to turn salt water into diesal and jet fuel.

2.)Another exploitable power source is thermal conversion power plants. These are  big on shore because of new technologies especially in Utah. However, offshore the temperature differences are narrower and the opportunities fewer. But they exist. In 2008 Hawaii entered into an agreement to develop thermal conversion power plant off the Big Island.

November 20, 2008 (ENS) - Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle Tuesday announced a new energy partnership to develop a 10 megawatt ocean thermal energy conversion pilot plant in Hawaii. Electricity will be generated from the difference in temperature between the ocean’s warm surface and its colder depths.
During the Governor’s official state visit to Taiwan, she came to an agreement with the Taiwan Industrial Technology Research Institute and the Lockheed Martin Corporation to build the initial pilot plant in Hawaii.

The energy produced is used to desalinize bottled water for export to Japan. The water depths they are talking about +-2000 feet. It would take more research to know whether the same technology could be used for 850-900 feet ie shallower depths and lower temperature differences. For now, I don’t think the temperature differences are great enough for commercial grade energy production. But I could be wrong about that because Oasys they can exploit only 20 degree differences to produce power. The jury is still out on this.

3. Osmotic power plant might be developed to take advantage of the  salinity differences between the desalinized water and seawater to produce energy to pump  water ashore. The Norwegians are currently trying to develop this technology. Its a pilot. IBM is looking into it as well.  The technology isn’t anywhere near mature. Moreover the volumes of water needed to make energy are too large. However, this technology can be reversed. As I first mentioned in this piece from 2007 on Forward Osmosis and again this year, Oasys promises to desalinate water for US$ 0.37-0.44/m³ once fully scaled up. (That was in the Spring of 2009. By the Fall, Oasys was promising much cheaper costs.) Oasys promises to use the use the same process as the Norwegians to produce electricity only much more efficiently. Their procedures for producing desalinated water looks more mature than their electrical generation idea.

4.  Ocean pressures at 900 feet should convert  to electrical power. Trouble is I have not seen any examples of companies actually doing this.

This technology developed by Energy Recovery Inc. might  be adapted to convert the waste stream from a deep water desalination plant– into energy to drive a pump. According to this Forbes Magazine article

Competing pressure exchangers work by capturing energy in the exit water via a turbine (analogous to a waterwheel), then transferring that shaft power to a pump (waterwheel in reverse) for the entering seawater.

It shouldn’t be too tough to create an exit stream. (Think WWII sea war movie. The submarine has just been hit by a depth charge. Water hisses into the hold through the cracked hull.) You convert that water to shaft power to power a pump — to pump water ashore.

5. As used on the Texas oil derrick, wave power could be harnessed to pump water ashore. This article about wave power generation in San Francisco lists the companies under consideration.  All are in various stages of prototype. They could be used to either generate electricity to run the pumps that pump the water ashore… or pump the water ashore directly. Here is another article about wave power being used to generate power for the  small scale desalination plant for bottled water on a platform in the gulf of Mexico

Of the choices mentioned above, I think the best ie cheapest– would be  4.)Energy Recovery’s tool. It could be adapted to convert 850 ft depth ocean pressures into electricity to drive a pump to push water onshore. imho it would cost +-400k to make the adaption.

DVX  about whom I’ve done several blogs on deep water desalination currently has a ” small installation of the technology in the San Joaquin Reservoir near Newport Beach.”  (Here’s a diagram.)They’re looking to set up another test site in the near future.  They experienced biofouling problems at the first site. Now they are looking into pretreatement technologies. Here is one. They expect to license out their technology in 2010.

Finally, I should mention again that NanoH2O has a much more efficient membrane coming out in the next couple months. However, its not likely that they’ll have the membrane configured to the specs for DVX Technologies. It would be helpful if someone could find the ways/means to get some prototype NanoH2O membranes for the DVX Technologies work.

Back in 2005 reports started coming out that detailed the progress of oil seeps in the Santa Barbara channel. They’d been around for years but likely it wasn’t PC to mention them. Trouble was — because the seeps were natural — no hue and cry could be raised. Still too many birds were turning up dead. So scientists quietly studied the problem. Recently a study of the seeps has been completed. According to this article
new research shows that natural oil seeps into the Santa Barbara channel dwarf the oil spill of the Exxon Valdez. Remember all the grief Exxon took for the Valdez spill? Well, much much more oil is sitting on the sea floor just offshore of Santa Barbara. Considering that modern oil rigs have taken 20 years of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico–without an incident — its not clear to me what all the fuss about drilling off the coasts — is about–especially off Santa Barbara.

Consider that Santa Barbara was the cause of the US being the only country in the world with coastal drilling bans. By drilling — oil companies might take some of the pressure off the under water oil and gas deposits in the Santa Barbara Channel and lessen the seeps. They might also take the some of the pressure off California’s state budget. Might help the feds too.

Funny how this sort of thing doesn’t get out of the science journals.

How does this bear on water desalination? Well readers of this blog know that I’ve advocated doing a test site for underwater desalination off Santa Barbara — by way of a slant well for water drilled alongside a slant well for oil drilled from shore now being negotiated in the area. But if the sea floor just off the beaches in of Santa Barbara is rank with oil –that area might not be best for desalination trials.

Here’s the deal.

These days it seems that no sooner do you mention an idea — than someone’s got a company all set up and with the designs and technologies to implement it. That’s what - DXV Water Technologies has done. They have designed an a desalination process that uses deep water to provide pressure for their membranes.

Now before you close the browser — I think its important to state that everyone has heard of this kind of thing before. The argument against deep water desalination was that you’d need to go down about 1700 or so feet to get the right pressures for the membranes. At those depths — whatever reduction you managed in energy costs would be made up for in maintenance costs. And what the hey–just pumping the fresh water ashore.

So why bother?

I never saw these studies. I only heard about them second and third hand. I’ve been watching the desal research flow for 15 years or so. So I think those studies are old. New technology comes up. According to Forbes

Nikolay Voutchkov of Water Globe Consulting says membranes have gotten 2.5 to 3 times more efficient in the last decade

So its worth taking a second look. DXV Desalination claims they can do the desalination at 850-900 feet. That looks like it tracks membrane efficiency improvements in the last 10 years or so. (ie double the membrane efficiency and half the depth for desalination pressures to work.)Further there are several places off the coast of southern California where you can hit 850-900 feet depths within a mile of shore. The inventor is Diem X. Vuong, He has set up a two-stage nanofiltration process for seawater desalination. Vuong, who retired from the Long Beach Water Department in 2005, developed the ‘depth exposed membrane for water extraction’ (DEMWAX) process now being tested by DXV Water Technologies. Vuong is familiar with the neighborhood and familiar with the technology. DXV produces almost no brine as it has a 50:1 yield — i.e., 50 gal of seawater for 1 gal of fresh water — AND it occurs underwater, so higher salt dissipates within 1-2m. Makes sense. All they’re doing is pulling a little fresh water out of the vast deep.

They claim their process will desalinate sea water for $0.50/m^3 (616@acre foot). Considering water rates are going as high as 900@acre foot — $0.50/m^3 or 616@acre foot — looks cheap to me.
According to the articles –here’s the money quote:

We can get 50MGD (56TAF/year) from an 11 acre installation. Given a SoCal urban demand of 3MAF, that means that 54 of these systems could supply all of urban SoCal [ignore price for now] — in an area of about one square mile in the ocean.

As well, when you desalinate in the deep dark ocean — the amount of bio fouling declines significantly. Oh and one other thing. It may sound counter intuitive– but desalinated water that comes from these depths is very pure and fwiw — rich in healthy trace elements.

How do you say hmm. Consider. Next year NanoH20 and UCLA Engineering’s Eric Hoek will come out with a membrane that improves efficiencies of current generation membranes.

NanoH20’s Green says the company has modified Hoek’s work substantially to improve and perfect the nanoparticle membrane, but he won’t say how. He says the company is targeting nearly 100% improvement in water production, from 6,000 to 7,500 gallons per day per eight-inch area of membrane to 12,000 gallons per day. The membrane will be the same size and shape as current membranes, so plants won’t have to be retrofitted. The company is building enough capacity to produce “tens of thousands” of membranes–a big plant incorporates 10,000 to 20,000. The first membranes will go on sale early next year.

With those kinds of efficiencies–they might cut costs significantly by cutting the distance to shore or provide all of southern California with water with a half mile square installation at 850-900 feet of water. But more importantly NanoH20 gives DVX cost estimates plenty of room for error–while remaining in the 600@ acre foot range.
For more detail on the DVX project, check out this pdf calledA new approach to Deep sea RO If you have the time and a a more granular interest in the project listen to this mp3 interview with the DVX CEO

The company already has some street creds in the water desalination community. DVX was a finalist –along with Oasys and Aquaporin — at this years Global Water Intelligence and the International Desalination Association awards in Zurich Switzerland.

The prestigious Water Technology Idol award, sponsored by Norit, is particularly poignant as its award is based on votes cast by the delegates present, experts in the field of water and desalination, after a short ‘show and tell’ by each finalist company.

DXV Water Technologies is interested in doing some tests in fresh water. I don’t think this is really the way to go. There is a very simple way to prove their technology. All you do is bring in the oil companies from off the coast of California. Their shops will already have a very good idea of the capital, maintenance and energy costs of an underwater operation. They’ll know the best materials and processes for every part of the operation except the membranes. They will have streamlined their procedures significantly in the last 15 years. They will already have a detailed understanding of the underwater topography of the area in house–including areass where minor seismic activity might threaten underwater operations.

My wag would be that Maintenance would be the biggest expense.

Energy would still be a significant cost because of the cost of pumping water to shore. I don’t know what would be the cheapest way to bring water ashore from a mile away. For example a slant well drill drilled from onshore — that goes out a mile would be much more expensive than laying a pipeline on the ocean floor. The oil industry can lay 3 kilometers a day of pipeline along the ocean bed. However, a slant well could make the water run downhill to shore. How does that happen? The drill would be onshore. It would drill down say 1500 ft and then slope upward gradually to a point out in the ocean at 850-900 feet. The water from the desalination modules would run down hill to shore arriving at depth of 1500 feet. Equalizing pressure would bring it to 850-900 ft. How would you bring it the rest of the way to the surface naturally. Beats me. The point of having such a steep slope to shore would be to create a lot of forward momentum for the water. You wouldn’t want to lose that momentum at the up elbow onshore with a joint that turns at a sharp angle. They might be able to narrow the diameter of the pipe as it comes shoreward so as to increase the column pressure on the water as it comes ashore. Materials advances in the surface of the pipe might help reduce the friction and drag on the water as it moves forward. The net effect would be increase the pressure on the water as it comes ashore to cut the cost of pumping water ashore over time. If you must still pump the water to the surface you might site the pump down in the well on land to push the water up. Presumably the maintenance and energy costs of such a pump on land would be cheaper than a pump out at sea.

Permitting for the project would be fairly simple since the site would be at sea. There wouldn’t be any disposal issues. If onshore delivery were not energy intensive — there would be no worries about cracking an already strained grid.

Actuallly building a small scale experimental installation would consist of of a set of procedures about which the oil companies have decades of experience: One ship lowers a prefab desal plant & pump to the ocean floor. One ship runs a pipe to shore. One ship runs an electrical line from shore to to pump. An underwater crew attaches everything. Yr done. So instead of taking 10 years from permitting to building–the actual process from permitting to project completion could take one year.

As it happens the oil companies have decades of experience with each one of the procedures listed above.

Likely the oil companies wouldn’t be too interested in going out on their own to fund an experimental project outside of their field. Funding for the experiment might come from Title XVI funding for the DOI. This is the sort of project that might answer the 21st Century Bureau of Reclamation question….how do you top the Hoover Dam.

Or funding could come from the vast pools of dollars for R&D controlled by DOE that nobody in the desalination industry knows how to tap–or from a utility funding authority set up this year. No matter where the dollars came from–they would be federal dollars well spent.

Update: Science Daily is calling a UCLA based company a big breakthrough desalination testing.

With these critical issues looming large, researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science are working hard to help alleviate the state’s water deficit with their new mini-mobile-modular (M3) “smart” water desalination and filtration system.

In designing and constructing new desalination plants, creating and testing pilot facilities is one of the most expensive and time-consuming steps. Traditionally, small yet very expensive stationary pilot plants are constructed to determine the feasibility of using available water as a source for a large-scale desalination plant. The M3 system helps cut both costs and time.

“Our M3 water desalination system provides an all-in-one mobile testing plant that can be used to test almost any water source,” said Alex Bartman, a graduate student on the M3 team who helped to design the sensor networks and data acquisition computer hardware in the system. “The advantages of this type of system are that it can cut costs, and because it is mobile, only one M3 system needs to be built to test multiple sources. Also, it will give an extensive amount of information that can be used to design the larger-scale desalination plant.”

The M3 demonstrated its effectiveness in a recent field study in the San Joaquin Valley in which it desalted agricultural drainage water that was nearly saturated with calcium sulfate salts, accomplishing this with just one reverse osmosis (RO) stage.

If they can figure out a way to put their mobile testing tools underwater they might merge well with DVX to create a fast pilot.

I

imho the current muddle in the central valley of California lends urgency to the idea of accelerated developed of new deep sea desalination technologies I’ve mentioned in previous posts here and here. Deep sea water desalination looks orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to impliment than say spending 35 billion on a 35 mile long pipeline under the delta. According to this letter to the Congress by the American Petrolium Institute–offshore oil & gas would bring $1.3 trillion in new government revenue over the next two decades. A fraction of that would pay for all the water needs of southern California for the foreseeable future using deep water desalination–with money’s left to pay state officials for what not. Heck California might get the underwater desalination plants for free as a condition allowing oil drillers to drill offshore. Sound too good to be true? Maybe. The Obama administration is willing to fund offshore drilling in Brazil. Someday they may think it in the best American interests to allow more drilling offshore of the USA. At that point a deal might be struck with oil drillers to bring fresh deep desalinized water ashore as part of a deal to water algae onshore or drill for oil offshore or both.

but that’s not what this post is about–except tangentially.

Remember I mentioned that Exxon might be interested in getting into offshore water desalination because of their interest in algae oil and their partnership with Craig Ventor?

Listen to the story below about what going on in genetics field–and how it will affect water & power supplies. If you’re ready to move on — then know the significance of the story below is that commercial very large scale algae oil production is coming sooner –much sooner than is currently anticipated.

In the beginning

On July 24, 2009, a small group of scientists, entrepreneurs, cultural impresarios and journalists that included architects of the some of the leading transformative companies of our time (Microsoft, Google, Facebook, PayPal), arrived at the Andaz Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, to be offered a glimpse, guided by George Church and Craig Venter, of a future far stranger than Mr. Huxley had been able to imagine in 1948.

In this future — whose underpinnings, as Drs. Church and Venter demonstrated, are here already — life as we know it is transformed not by the error catastrophe of radiation damage to our genetic processes, but by the far greater upheaval caused by discovering how to read genetic sequences directly into computers, where the code can be replicated exactly, manipulated freely, and translated back into living organisms by writing the other way. “We can program these cells as if they were an extension of the computer,” George Church announced, and proceeded to explain just how much progress has already been made.

New York Times even talked about the symposium given by Church and Ventor.

Church noted that between 1970 and 2005 gene sequencing had taken place on a Moore’s Law pace, improving at about 1.5 times per year. Since then it has improved at the rate of an order of magnitude, or ten times annually.

Within a week or so of this symposium this article appeared entitled Researchers rapidly turn bacteria into biotech factories.

Led by a pair of researchers in the lab of Harvard Medical School Professor of Genetics George Church, the team rapidly refined the design of a bacterium by editing multiple genes in parallel instead of targeting one gene at a time. They transformed self-serving E. coli cells into efficient factories that produce a desired compound, accomplishing in just three days a feat that would take most biotech companies months or years.

Remember this is the same Church that gave the symposium with Ventor. At the symposium he was talking about improvements in gene sequencing accelerating to ten times annually before his announcement. However, in this case what he’s talking about here is writing genetic sequences. That is, before they were talking about reading genetic sequences into computer programs.  Now they are talking about writing out gentic sequences from computers back into living organisms. And doing so much more quickly.

The following week two companies–one in Cambridge Massachusetts and the other in Washington State — announced that they had quadrupled the yield for algae from ~5000gallons @ acre to ~20,000 @ acre. According to the Cambridge Massachusetts company:

A startup based in Cambridge, MA–Joule Biotechnologies–today revealed details of a process that it says can make 20,000 gallons of biofuel per acre per year. If this yield proves realistic, it could make it practical to replace all fossil fuels used for transportation with biofuels. The company also claims that the fuel can be sold for prices competitive with fossil fuels.

Joule claims that its process will be competitive with crude oil at $50 a barrel.

Seperately a third company called Green Technologies Inc — figured out a way to “massively increase” algae production because “scientists uncovered the elusive and long sought after “lipid trigger” in green algae.”

Escondido, CA, August 04, 2009 –(PR.com)– Sustainable Green Technologies (SGT) a start-up company in Escondido, California announced today that it has discovered a highly effective and low cost way to massively increase algal oil production.

Do they use the new method mentioned by Church? There is no definitive answer to this question. It looks like there might be a relationship but beyond the coincidence of the announcements–there is no proof from the text. But its safe to say that major major advances have been made in both the process and the production of algae oil. That more are likely– are on the way.

Is this just hype? Another article considers this question in a slightly different context.

In terms of methodology used to distinguish viable new technologies from the hype associated with renewables, McDonald said he looked for corroboration. For instance, Aurora Biofuels in Florida announced it had found a way to harvest algae oil using the same methods as waste-water treatment plants. Then a few weeks later the research arm of the Australian government made a similar announcement. “That’s what we are looking for,” McDonald said. “When legitimate organizations make similar discoveries independently that seem to corroborate each other, I think it gives credence to the commercial development and growth of the technology.”

Same could be said when several companies here and there announce radical increases in algae to oil yield –especially when they coincide with broad based technological change mentioned by Church and Ventor.

Remember the crucial take away. Church has created a tool that Ventor will likely use to improve algae to oil yields significantly above the just announced four fold increase to 20,000 gallons@acre. This will be used by Exxon oil to scale commercial quantities of algae oil.

Finally, of note, OriginOil along with Idaho National Laboratory (INL) of the Department of Energy has come out with the first-ever comprehensive algae production model, for the algae oil industry.

Its should be clear that algae oil process will require a lot more water from water scarce places with algae oil ambitions like southern California and New Mexico. What’s not so clear is what kind of water that will be. What’s that? Well, consider, advanced genetics will likely be able to tailor the algae to the kinds of water available.

But the implications of this accelerated genetics go to more than just algae oil’s demands on water.This technology will enable the water reuse industry to create specialized microbes for any water reuse plant.

This article dated July29 from Global Water Intelligence lists the
Top 10 New Water Technologies to Save the World I’m not familiar with some of the companies. But as to the ones that I am familiar with on the list–I would agree. They are world changers. So that reflects well on the rest. These are the technology areas mentioned in the article that would be most affected by Church’s new genetics tools mentioned above. Consider what would happen if you could quickly tailer single cell organisms for a specific waste stream mentioned below in such way as to maximize their yield and minimize any attendant problems.

Bio-polymers from wastewater: bio-polymers are a great natural al ternative to petro-chemical-based plastics; what is more they can be made during the biological digestion of sewage sludge. AnoxKaldnes (www.anoxkaldnes.com) is the leading commercial developer of this technology.

Biogas recovery: the collection of methane from anaerobic wastewater treatment has been a reality for industrial effluents with a high biological load for some years. The challenge is to make it viable for less concentrated municipal wastewater. Leaders in this market are Paques (www.paques.nl) and Biothane (www.biothane.com).

Microbial fuel cells: the next step in energy recovery from wastewater is direct electrical power generation through microbial fuel cells. Emefcy (www.emefcy.com) of Israel is at the forefront of commercialising this technology.

Decentralized wastewater treatment: centralised wastewater systems are expensive to build and use a lot of water. Decentralised systems might remove the need for sewers, and make it easier to recycle the water and energy in the waste. The Lettinga Associates Foundation (www.lettinga-associates.wur.nl) is one of the leading organisations promoting the practical application of decentralized wastewater.

Then there is the kind of experiment you see in many universities that uses microbes to do interesting work. Consider this article about the work of some Penn State Scientists (jointly with Saudi Arabia & China)

Wastewater produces electricity and desalinates water So far the work is just interesting. But what if you could get the microbes mentioned in the article to do a lot more work using the tools mentioned above?

If you find this info to be useful or interesting–kindly ask your webmaster to link to this blog.

The House could start work as early as [Wednesday July 15] on a bill funding energy and water projects in the US. It funds 1,866 earmarks.

Anyone who has read my last post on Deep Water Desalination may want to consider finding a way to get funding for an prototype deep water desalination program. While the source of the funding might come from Title XVI — another source of government funding may be available.

Water–and lots of it– is a necessary precondition for the development of algae oil in bulk.

Places like San Diego want to be major centers for the development of algae oil. However, they don’t have a lot of fresh water. Therefor the DOE might be interested in funding water development as a necessary ingredient for the production of green fuels.

Government funding would attract funding from private sources.

This week July 14, Exxon announced that they are committed to spending 600 million dollars on developing algae oil into a viable energy source. The NY Times said this Exxon move signaled a paradigm shift for the oil industry. As much as 300 million of that may go to Craig Ventors San Diego based company Synthetic Genomics. San Diego has ambitions to be a major algae oil center.

Exxon has gas and oil platforms off the coast of Southern California.

Any federal government commitment to deep water desalination might also draw Exxon funding and expertise as well.

How much? Beats me. But I can suggest what the pieces would be. There should be at least three players at the table. The funding authority like the DOE or the Bureau of Rec, an oil company with a platform off of Southern California already–like Exxon. Finally a company like DVX Water Technologies mentioned int the last post. These players would draw up plans and run a test of the technology off the coast of southern california.

Before I get started let me show you some serious eye candy I found this past month. The noise to signal ratio for the last couple of years on global warming is running about 100/1. Here’s a very good explanation of why. Take a look at this National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) graphic of mean temperatures in the USA. Notice the sudden drop off at the end?

Here’s also a NASA graph of the sunspot cycle along with NASA’s prediction for when the sunspot cycle will turn up again.. It shows we’re at a solar minimum. Here’s something more interesting. Here’s a graphic that shows how NASA’s prediction of the next upturn in the solar cycle has changed since 2004. It keeps being pushed further out into the future. That might help to explain the increasing cacophony in the global warming debate.

It may well turn out to be that carbon dioxide will turn out to be a case of correlation without causation in the global warming debate. Here is the Best Discussion of Global Warming that I’ve ever seen.

I heard that some folks were pretty discouraged after MSSC conference in January. For that reason its kind of encouraging to see a bill introduced to congress that would accelerate the pace of desalination research along the terms discussed by the water energy conference in Janaury.
US bill seeks major desalination research expansion

US Senate hearings began on 10 March 2009 into a bill on the relationship between energy and water which could have wide implications for desalination research, both in the US and internationally.

I like the US part. I’m not sure what to make of the international part.  Right now major US desalination players like GE and IBM have already teamed up with overseas players. IBM has teamed up with Saudi Arabia and a Japanese company called Central Glassto do research. GE has teamed up with Singapore to set up a research facility there. I don’t think that GE or IBM could long play the international game as they have done — without maintaining some control over their IP. But I could be wrong. Right or wong the US is going to need to hold onto IP in order to get competitive advantage to change capital flows so we can pay our bills. The proper question framed appropriately for federal state & local officials up and down the chain of command is this: How do we grow our tax base. This is the way smart state governors think.

The hearings relate to a new bill introduced by the leaders of the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee, Jeff Bingaman and Lisa Murkowski, titled Energy & Water Integration 2009. This seeks to order the Secretary of Energy, in consultation with the Secretary of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency, to arrange with the National Academy of Sciences for an in-depth analysis of the impact of energy development and production on the water resources of the United States.

Sounds good. No? The National Committee of Sciences will have a chance to make up for the disinterested report they put out last year.

However, more importantly for desalination, the bill seeks to authorize funds to enable the Secretary of the Interior to operate and manage the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility in Otero County, New Mexico, as a state-of-the-art desalination research center. The center would develop new water and energy technologies with widespread applicability; and create new supplies of usable water for municipal, agricultural, industrial or environmental purposes.

Somebody got it right. Thank You. Now maybe in two years the US will have a dedicated desal and reuse laboratory on par with Saudi Arabia and Singapore. What’s most amazing about the bill is that the report they want produced is susposed to come out in 90 days:

If the bill is passed the Secretary of Energy would have 90 days to develop an ”Energy-Water Research and Development Roadmap to define the future research, development, demonstration and commercialization efforts that are required to address emerging water-related challenges to future, cost-effective, reliable and sustainable energy generation and production”.

I think this would be a good way to get all interested parties (including but not limited to the GOA, DOI, DOE, EPA)to release funds for various desalination and water reuse projects. The article continues:

As a priority, says the bill, renewable energy technologies should be developed for integration with desalination technologies:
# to reduce the capital and operational costs of desalination;
# to minimize the environmental impacts of desalination; and
# to increase public acceptance of desalination as a viable water supply process.

In addition, the bill wants:
# research regarding various desalination processes, including improvements in reverse and forward osmosis technologies;
# development of innovative methods and technologies to reduce the volume and cost of desalination concentrated wastes in an environmentally sound manner;
# an outreach program to create partnerships with US states, academic institutions, private entities and other appropriate organizations to conduct research, development and demonstration activities;
# an outreach program to educate the public on desalination and renewable energy technologies and the benefits of using water in an efficient manner.

I would add to this list that research be done on energy efficient cheaper to produce and maintain pipelines. The tool set for 3d prototyping is evolving faster than the materials & designs that can be used with it. As well, I would mention the OSTP report entitled “A Strategy for Federal Science and Technology to Support Water Availability and Quality in the United States September, 2007.” on the national challenges to ensure adequate fresh water supplies. The study then outlines a federal strategic plan for addressing these challenges and provides a guide for how federal agencies will be a part of this plan. I give more detail on that from a Jan 2008 MSSC blog.
I think that as part of that a helpful thing to do would be to include efficient reverse and forward osmosis membranes onto the list of strategic material research goals in the already architected NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers. Heck I’d throw in easy to build and maintain energy efficient pipelines too. And don’t forget line item funding so these projects land inbox.
Anyhow, everyone would do well to do their part make this study go through.

I mentioned in a previous desalination post a bunch of ways that renewable energy projects could be integrated with desalination projects. As well, the Oasys forward osmosis project –that I mentioned in the last post — gives a body pause:

Oasys estimates that engineered osmosis will cost US$ 0.37-0.44/m³ once fully scaled up. The startup has so far established a pilot-scale plant to test the technology by producing 1 m³/d.

That’s $431@acre foot to $542.8@acre foot. When you consider that the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is charging $800@acre ft… Oasys numbers take on a whole new meaning. In fact, those meanings cut six ways to Sunday. Oasys mentions California in their press release

The company’s patented EOTM process can produce drinking water at less than half the cost of current desalination methods. This is accomplished by eliminating the need for high-pressures used in modern Reverse Osmosis (RO) systems, thereby reducing the electricity and fuel demands by more than 90%. The result is a reduction in the economics of seawater desalination that will ultimately bring the cost of producing water from our vast oceans below the cost of conventional surface water, such as the aqueduct system used in the California State Water Project

To get those low numbers Oasys forward osmosis system has to use waste heat from sources like coal plants plants near the coast.

Now combine Oasys work with this: (Click) Here’s break through in production costs for algae oil.

A coal plant — that can also produce fresh water and carbon neutral oil…– is golden.

There will be a congressional hearing on algae oil soon — that, I think, will result in algae supplanting sequestration as the carbon capture method of choice.

But Oasys could also work well with a thermal solar power plant like the one in Nevada. So where ever you had plenty of sun above a brackish aquifer — and say –400 acres of relatively cheap land–as is available in New Mexico or West Texas — you could put up a solar thermal plant with a Oasys forward osmosis desalination plant because the internal processes are nearly identical–in fact the flash vaporization used by the thermal solar power plant to drive its electrical generators might also take the salt out of solution in the Oasys forward osmosis solution. Actually, Oasys has already talked about something just like this idea.

Here’s a couple more ideas. It may well be that some of the concentrated salts left over from desalination can be used in this hot salt battery or peak production of solar power/wind/coal could be stored as methane with a bacteria that produces it directly from water and carbon dioxide. Here’s the first paper I’ve seen which discusses how the properties of Na+ and Cl- ion in saltwater could be used to create hydrogen.

There are some cost savings there that might justify the costs of tapping deep brackish aquifers in New Mexico that are currently experiencing a big gold rush.

Finally before I take the long view, I believe that I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my favorite energy and desalting ideas. My favorite energy idea: Its my favorite because I thought of it myself. Ha! Here goes. Here is a high school teacher dropping a lump of pure sodium into a bucket of water. Notice the nice big bang? Here’s a bit calmer explanation. How much energy would it take to convert sodium in solution Na+ to pure sodium Na. Then could you harness profitably the exothermic reaction that results from adding pure sodium to water? Beats me. But sheesh it would be way cool to convert salt water economically into power as well as energy. I mention a wild strategy for converting Na+ to Na here. I’m sure there are many more.

Ok now for my favorite desalting research idea. I first mentioned it here. As I’ve said many times, the chief end of seawater desalination R&D should be a a pipe with a semipermiable membrane on the end. The membrane should be so efficient that the water pressure at 100-300 feet of ocean water is sufficient to drive fresh water through the membrane–while the coastal current carries off the concentrate. Ideally you would have slant drilled from the coast. “Slant well” — means you drill down 200-400 feet or so and then drill sidways and up out into the ocean- +-1000 feet–depending on how steep the drop off –so the up sloping drill hole meets the down sloping ocean bed — at the point where the drill emerges from the ocean bed at 100-300 feet of water. A ship floats over the drill and drops in a passive desalter that looks like an underwater mushroom. The mushroom desalter synches with the drill head just like it would if it were an oil well. Fresh water flows through the membraned mushroom downhill to shore. The oil drilling industry already has the ships, the underwater installation and drilling technology. City of Carpinteria near Santa Barbara in California is negotiating with Venoco over their proposed Paredon Project. Venoco wants to drill down a mile or so and then drill sideways a couple more miles out into the Santa Barbara Channel for oil. A helpful provision for their contract would be a slant well for water purposes. The membranes and mushroom to make this work are not available now. But they will be in two or three years. The job for now would be to drill the well and cap it, spend two years designing the mushroom and the membranes for installation in 2011-12. Funding for the experiment could come from several different players including Venoco, the DOI, EPA & DOE. The design for the underwater mushroom would go the the firms that supply underwater oil equipment for Venoco working in conjunction with some American membrane plant designer.

Ok now for the view from eight miles high.

As I mentioned at the MSSC conference in January — everyone knows about great works of the water guys in the early 20th century. Everyone has seen the discovery channel pictures of salt water on Mars–so its not too tough to figure what will be the work of water men in the 22nd century–(or earlier if the rate of change keeps accelerating.) What’s hard to figure is the big plan for the 21st century–on the scale that dam building was for the 20th century–or desalination on Mars. The reason for this is that on the one hand we have legacy ideology from the 1960’s that holds that there are too many people, growth is bad, but it won’t matter anyway because the oceans are rising and they will drown the coastal cities. On the other hand, because of fast tracking technolgical change–perhaps more powerful than that in the early 20th century –there is a rebirth of early 20th century thinking that holds there is plenty of room for more people, growth is good and the way you enable more room for more people is to bring water and power to waterless and powerless places. Take southern california. Whether you believe rising sea levels will drown the coastal cities or whether you believe that future growth is inland over the coastal mountains to the deserts–the answer to providing water and power for the future is the same–because people will either be pushed inland by rising sea levels or pulled inland by new water and power resources. That is, prudent water managers have to either plan for disaster by providing water and energy for the day the population has to move inland to escape rising sea levels OR prudent managers will have to believe there is a better brighter future ahead and plan for it as Hoover did. Actually Herbert Hoover’s thinking involved both propositions above. He wanted to make a silk purse out of a sows ear. The genesis for the colorado river project and the hoover dam was the terrible flooding of the Colorado that just wiped whole communities in the early 20th century. When Hoover wrote the initial enabling legislation in 1922 for the Hoover dam, a lot of the technology to build the dam and create the hydropower had not been invented. We are in the midst of just such a period of extraordinary scientific and technological development. A good thing too though the problem this time is not floods but drought.

Regular readers of this blog know that while I advocate all kinds of desalination techniques–I believe the big water solution for the 21 century comes from the ocean. Therefor the goal of water desalination R&D should be to collapse the cost of desalination and transport so that water delivered from the gulf of Mexico to New Mexico or water delivered from the pacific to arizona or utah –even desalted water delivered over the cascades to eastern Oregon and Washington–is cheap enough for agricultural uses that is < than 100@acre foot. Instead of 100 million dollar desalination plants there should be just a 4 million dollar pipe you stick in the ocean. Water flows downhill to shore by way of slant well drilling. Cheap to manufacture and maintain pipelines with minimum energy pipe the water inland. What energy is needed is drawn from the sun/wind/heat or the water itself. The goal is to turn the deserts green, and increase the potential habitable size of the USA by 1/3. The USA having then created the technology could export it to the rest of the world profitably and double the size of habitable planet. Anyone who follows — not just the research–but the development of new research tools — knows that this is what’s implied by the work in the labs.

In January, 2008 I mentioned that all the candidates both Republican and Democratic mentioned the need for energy independence. The republicans, especially, made the comparison between the the call for energy independence today and the race to moon in the 1960’s and the Manhattan project in the 1940’s.

According to this article dated 3/8/09 the Obama administration takes a similiar tack.

Now energy experts and officials in the Obama administration see a similar “Sputnik moment,” urgent and global in scope, over energy use and climate change. And they want to try some new ventures, similar to efforts in the Cold War, to stimulate technological advances in energy and shift the economy away from oil and coal.

Deep in the $787 billion stimulus bill that became law two weeks ago is $400 million to launch ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Authority for Energy. It’s modeled after the Pentagon’s DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which took on Soviet technology and gave us online shopping in the process.

Needless to say, typically, it takes water to make energy and you need energy to make clean water.

On the second day of the MSSC conference back in January something that was billed as a Town Hall Meeting was held. I was reminded of that meeting in the past week because of the flood of dire water news coming out the Southwest and southeast. As well, the very interesting news that has emerged from Yale.

The point of the second day’s discussion at the MSSC conference was the relative roles of government and industry in desalination going forward. But that was overshadowed by events. That desalination got no explicit funding in the midst of the biggest government spending splurg in generations–gave people pause. What happened? imho one problem was the National Committee of Sciences Desalination Report. It was the kind of scholarly report that public policy college students might read. Or GAO officials. More likely the latter. The report recommended that government funding for desalination related research remain at current levels or about 25 million annually. This is on the level of Australia or Singapore. People generally agreed that these funding levels were not appropriate given the rising urgency of water solutions needed for the southwest in particular but also in the California and the southeast.

The Drying of the American West does a good job of telling how the west is in the midst of a long drought while population there grows. The article has a good video.Patricia Mulroy mentions that if current trends of less than 70% normal rainfall remain in effect for the next five years–then Nevada will lose 90% of the water they receive from the Hoover Dam.

Here’s another article on ongoing struggle between Florida, Alabama and Georgia over dwindling water resources in the southeast. Both the southeast and the southwest were beneficiaries of the New Deal water projects. That both are in deep trouble now–shows that the 20th century solutions to water power are no longer adequate.

I think that point was made fairly clear Friday morning. Too bad this was not made clear before the report came out.

A second point made by the report as to limits of RO efficiency was off base. We were informed that RO membranes were limited to only a 15% improvement in efficiences. (One Bureau of Rec Scientist strolled up to me during the Town Hall Meeting and stage whispered “Whoa they’re off by a factor of about 100%.” He didn’t turn his head. The man had a job to keep. We were in the presence of PC.)However, current LLNL research suggests that carbon nanotube based membranes can achieve efficiencies 80% greater than current membranes. The membranes to achieve these efficiencies have already been spun out the the llnl labs.

Then of course there’s the big news recently that the Yale spinoff Oasys:

Oasys says that it can wrest drinking water from these non-potable sources at less than half the cost of existing desalination systems by doing away with the high-pressure components commonly found in reverse osmosis systems. Electricity and fuel demands could drop by 90 per cent, it hopes.

“The only real way to significantly reduce the cost is to eliminate the need for lots of electricity,” says CEO Aaron Mandell, who is also a managing partner at GreatPoint Ventures, a Boston-based firm that invested an undisclosed amount of seed funding in Oasys.

Mandell estimates it currently costs between $0.90 and $1 to turn one cubic meter (or 264 gallons) of seawater into potable drinking water. He says Oasys’s technology can lower the cost to $0.35 to $0.50 for the same quantity.

The Yale work is forward osmosis. I first mentioned their work back in 2007. But I’m betting that part of their efficiency claims come from either the membrane of llnl spinoff porifera or the membrane of the UCLA spinoff NanoH20

According to the article Oasys Water Inc. has raised $10 million to pilot a technology.

Investors in Oasys’s $10-million funding round include Advanced Technology Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Flagship Ventures. Mandell says an additional funding round, expected to total $30-50 million, is needed to commercialize its technology on a broad scale.

The amazing thing is that private capital is available at all in these challenging times. While government has not adequately responded to the need for more water–more companies are getting funding in response to the opportunity provided by the increased demand for water. Oasys is not the only company to get finanacing lately.

The current funding comes amid an active period for venture investment in the water purification sector. Companies that received money in the past six months include WaterHealth International, a producer of contaminated water treatment technology that raised $10 million in January; NanoH20, a developer of membrane materials for water purification, which raised $15 million in September; and Quench, a distributor of water purification coolers that closed a $26 million funding round in August.

According to consulting firm Lux Research, spending on water treatment products and infrastructure is slated to rise sharply, jumping from $522 billion in 2007 to nearly $1 trillion by 2020. Researchers forecast that by 2030, the world will use 40 percent more water than today, and nearly half of the world’s population will face severe water stress.

Mandell estimates that the desalination market is at least $30 billion, but that is a fraction of the broader wastewater treatment sector.

The Dept of the Interior will get several hundred million dollars for water projects but they will mostly go for wastewater treatment–though I would think that a portion of that will go to desalinating brackish pump water from oil wells.