Water Power R&D

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.

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