An article in FORBES España May issue about creative ways entrepreneurs are exploring for repurposing waste. Read the article here.
An article on the improvements for the future of extracting minerals from seawater by Jim Robbins appears in the May edition of Yale Environment 360 published by the Yale School of the Environment Read the article here.
Article originally published at U.S. Department of Energy Workshop on Transforming Industry:Strategies for Decarbonization Text Version
by the Industrial Efficiency & Decarbonization Office
Below is a transcription of a recording of the U.S. Department of Energy Workshop on Transforming Industry: Strategies for Decarbonization Workshop, which was held on March 14–15, 2024, by the U.S. Department of Energy.
The National Alliance for Water Innovation Will Continue Work To Make US Water Supplies More Accessible, Affordable, and Energy Efficient
Originally published at: https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2024/water-research-hub-earns-five-more-years-of-funding.html
Most Americans get their water from traditional sources, like large freshwater reservoirs or groundwater—fresh, underground rivers flowing beneath our feet.
But change is coming.
Climate change, population growth, and increased industrial and agricultural production are several factors (among many) that are stressing U.S. and global freshwater supplies.
“To supply the water needs of the future, it is critical that the United States develop technologies that provide alternative water sources,” said Abhishek Roy, a senior staff scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and member of the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI).
And NAWI is doing exactly that.
A National Hub Earns More Support
First launched in 2019, NAWI is a research hub that brings together a world-class team of partners from industry and academia, as well as the hub’s public membership organization, called the NAWI Alliance. Together, these experts and water treatment stakeholders are working to lower the cost and energy of water purification technologies, including those that can transform nontraditional water sources, like wastewater or salty groundwater, into clean drinking water.
As of April 2024, NAWI has been extended for five more years, so the team can continue to hone water treatment technologies and increase access to clean drinking water for all Americans, all while reducing the energy and emissions associated with water treatment processes. The organization has received $75 million in funding from two U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) offices: the Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office and the Water Power Technologies Office.
“The extension is great news,” said Matthew Ringer, the laboratory program manager for advanced manufacturing at NREL and NAWI’s partnerships director. “NAWI has more than 460 organizations and more than 1,800 members from around the world who are working together to help produce secure, reliable, and affordable water for communities that are most in need.”
NAWI is led by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in partnership with NREL, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the National Energy Technology Laboratory.
A Master Road Map to More Secure, Affordable Water
In its first five years, NAWI accomplished a lot—with help from its many members, including researchers at NREL. NREL’s Jordan Macknick led an early NAWI win: a master road map that identifies the highest-priority research needs for water desalination (or purification) and where such technologies are already in use. From the beginning, this road map helped NAWI members optimize their investments; it also serves as the foundation—and future guide—for NAWI’s five-year extension. Macknick also leads one of NAWI’s core research areas—the Data Modeling and Analysis topic area—which focuses on analyzing the cost, efficiency, and performance of entire water treatment systems.
This type of research also happens to be one of NREL’s areas of expertise.
For example, NREL’s Kurban Sitterley helped improve an open-source software tool that can assess the technological and economic value of more than 60 different water treatment technologies. Water treatment researchers and facilities can use the tool, called the Water Treatment Technoeconomic Assessment Platform (or WaterTAP), to evaluate technologies that could help reduce their costs and energy consumption while continuing to meet existing and future water demands. (Sitterley also developed a new model for WaterTAP that can evaluate one of the most promising ways to remove forever chemicals and other contaminants from drinking water).
Plus, WaterTAP can help assess how water treatment facilities could use renewable energy resources, like solar, wind, and geothermal, along with batteries to power their facilities without raising their costs. Some community-scale treatment systems could even provide water for disaster relief and recovery missions or remote military deployments.
“This funding extension is essential to continue the maturation of these technologies and improve their cost and performance,” said Scott Struck, a senior integrated water systems research scientist at NREL.
Solutions for Communities With Dwindling or Contaminated Water Supplies
Struck appreciates how much NAWI has advanced water treatment tools, technologies, policies, and planning. But he is especially excited about NAWI’s work with communities. Even in the United States, not all communities have access to uncontaminated drinking water. In one area of the Central Valley of California, the available drinking water contains high levels of arsenic (a carcinogen), making it unsafe to drink. Because the community is small and financially unable to shoulder the costs of a centralized water treatment system, the residents resorted to buying bottled water instead.
But with NAWI’s help, the community could receive a more affordable and sustainable solution: smaller, more modular water treatment technologies that can filter out enough arsenic to achieve drinking water standards. With that, the community could access a local, more affordable water supply.
In NAWI’s next five years—which has been dubbed NAWI 2.0—the organization will pursue more community-based projects to help Americans maintain affordable and effective drinking water even as hotter temperatures or droughts threaten their supplies. NAWI Alliance members will also continue to advance desalination and other novel technologies that can treat unconventional water sources and cut greenhouse gas emissions at the same time.
“NREL is excited that DOE has extended NAWI for another five years,” Ringer said. “We look forward to working with our partners in national labs, academia, and industry to drive solutions for decarbonizing water and wastewater sectors.”
“Working together,” Struck added, “the NAWI community will help secure a more sustainable and resilient water supply.”
Become a thought leader in clean water innovation and join the NAWI Alliance for free today to unite with world-class lab, industry, and academic experts to address some of the greatest water and energy security challenges.
“This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.”
To build all of the solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries, and other technologies necessary to fight climate change, we’re going to need a lot more metals. Mining those metals from the Earth creates damage and pollution that threaten ecosystems and communities. But there’s another potential source of the copper, nickel, aluminum, and rare-earth minerals needed to stabilize the climate: the mountain of electronic waste humanity discards each year.
Exactly how much of each clean energy metal is there in the laptops, printers, and smart fridges the world discards? Until recently, no one really knew. Data on more obscure metals like neodymium and palladium, which play small but critical roles in established and emerging green energy technologies, has been especially hard to come by.
Now, the United Nations has taken a first step toward filling in these data gaps with the latest installment of its periodic report on e-waste around the world. Released last month, the new Global E-Waste Monitor shows the staggering scale of the e-waste crisis, which reached a new record in 2022 when the world threw out 62 million metric tons of electronics. And for the first time, the report includes a detailed breakdown of the metals present in our electronic garbage, and how often they are being recycled.
“There is very little reporting on the recovery of metals [from e-waste] globally,” lead report author Kees Baldé told Grist. “We felt it was our duty to get more facts on the table.”
One of those facts is that some staggering quantities of energy transition metals are winding up in the garbage bin.
Two of the most recyclable metals found abundantly in e-waste are aluminum and copper. Both are slated to play essential roles in the energy transition: Copper wiring is prevalent in a range of low- and zero-carbon technologies, from wind turbines to the power transmission lines that carry renewable energy. Aluminum is also used in some power lines, and as a lightweight structural support metal in electric vehicles, solar panels, and more. Yet only 60 percent of the estimated 4 million metric tons of aluminum and 2 million metric tons of copper present in e-waste in 2022 got recycled. Millions of tons more wound up in waste dumps around the world.
The world could have used those discarded metals. In 2022, the climate tech sector’s copper demand stood at nearly 6 million metric tons, according to the International Energy Agency, or IEA. In a scenario where the world aggressively reduces emissions in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, copper demand for low-carbon technologies could nearly triple by 2030.
Aluminum demand, meanwhile, is expected to grow up to 80 percent by 2050 due the pressures of the energy transition. With virgin aluminum production creating over 10 times more carbon emissions than aluminum recycling on average, increased recycling is a key strategy for reining in aluminum’s carbon footprint as demand for the metal rises.
For other energy transition metals, recycling rates are far lower. Take the rare-earth element neodymium, which is used in the permanent magnets found in everything from iPhone speakers to electric vehicle motors to offshore wind turbine generators. Worldwide, Baldé and his colleagues estimated there were 7,248 metric tons of neodymium locked away in e-waste in 2022 — roughly three-quarters of the 9,768 metric tons of neodymium the wind and EV sectors required that year, per the IEA. Yet less than 1 percent of all rare earths in e-waste are recycled due to the immaturity of the underlying recycling technologies, as well as the cost and logistical challenges of collecting rare earth-rich components from technology.
“It’s a lot of hassle to collect and separate out” rare-earth magnets for recycling, Baldé said. Despite the EV and wind energy sectors’ fast-growing rare-earth needs, “there is no push from the market or legislators to recover them.”
The metals present in e-waste aren’t necessarily useful for every climate tech application even when they are recycled. Take nickel. The lithium-ion batteries inside electric vehicles gobble up huge amounts of the stuff — over 300,000 metric tons in 2022. The amount of nickel required for EVs could rise tenfold by 2050, according to the IEA. But while the world’s e-waste contained more than half a million metric tons of nickel in 2022, most of it was inside alloys like stainless steel. Rather than getting separated out, that nickel gets “recycled into other steel products,” said Kwasi Ampofo, the lead metals and mining analyst at energy consultancy BloombergNEF. Some of that recycled steel could wind up in wind turbines and other zero-emissions technologies. But it won’t directly help to fill the much larger nickel demands of the EV battery market.
In other cases, e-waste might represent a significant supply of a specialized energy transition metal. Despite being present in tiny amounts, certain platinum group metals — found on printed circuit boards and inside medical equipment — are already recycled at high rates due to their value. Some of these metals, such as palladium, are used in the production of catalysts for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, said Jeremy Mehta, technology manager at the Department of Energy’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office. “Recycling palladium from e-waste could help meet the growing demand for these metals in fuel cell technologies and clean hydrogen production, supporting the transition to clean energy,” Mehta said.
For the energy transition to take full advantage of the metals present in e-waste, better recycling policies are needed. That could include policies requiring that manufacturers design their products with disassembly and recycling in mind. Josh Blaisdell, who manages the Minnesota-based metals recycling company Enviro-Chem Inc., says that when a metal like copper isn’t getting recycled, that’s usually because it’s in a smartphone or other small consumer device that isn’t easy to take apart.
In addition to design-for-recycling standards, Baldé believes metal recovery requirements are needed to push recyclers to recover some of the non-precious metals present in small quantities in e-waste, like neodymium. To that end, in March, the European Council approved a new regulation that sets a goal that by 2030, 25 percent of “critical raw materials,” including rare-earth minerals, consumed in the European Union will come from recycled sources. While this is not a legally binding target, Baldé says it could “create the legislative push” toward metal recovery requirements.
Harvesting more of the metals inside e-waste will be challenging, but there are many reasons to do so, Mehta told Grist. That’s why, last month, the Department of Energy, or DOE, launched an e-waste recycling prize that will award up to $4 million to competitors with ideas that could “substantially increase the production and use of critical materials recovered from electronic scrap.”
“[W]e need to increase our domestic supply of critical materials to combat climate change, respond to emerging challenges and opportunities, and strengthen our energy independence,” said Mehta of the DOE. “Recycling e-scrap domestically is a significant opportunity to reduce our reliance on hard-to-source virgin materials in a way that is less energy intensive, more cost effective, and more secure.”
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/staggering-quantities-of-energy-transition-metals-are-winding-up-in-the-garbage-bin/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org
Article originally published at netl.doe.gov on March 26, 2024.
By using software tools developed at the Lab, NETL helped co-author “Modeling Framework for Cost Optimization of Process-Scale Desalination Systems with Mineral Scaling and Precipitation,” which was recently published in the journal ACS ES&T Engineering.
Authored by Mayo Amusat of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Adam Atia of NETL, Alex Dudchenko of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and Tim Bartholomew of NETL, this paper is the first publication to demonstrate the mathematical optimization of multiple key decision variables for a water treatment train while modeling detailed water chemistry phenomena like mineral scaling and precipitation. This work was the product of a collaboration between NETL researchers and OLI Systems, a water chemistry software company, which was funded by the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI).
“In the 21st century, water supply and wastewater management faces significant stressors such as climate change, aging infrastructure, growing wastewater production, and rising awareness of human health and environmental impacts from current water management practices,” Bartholomew, one of the paper’s co-authors, said.
“This publication demonstrates how state-of-the-art modeling tools can better evaluate the potential of novel treatment technologies. It is our hope that, as we and other researchers conduct more analyses, decision makers will be better informed when investing in the research and development of new technologies to address the challenges in water management.”
The authors generated accurate surrogate models from water chemistry software, specifically OLI Systems, and demonstrated that they are solvable at the process-scale with equation-oriented methods. This work was enabled by the Water treatment Technoeconomic Assessment Platform (WaterTAP) and the Institute for Design of Advanced Energy Systems (IDAES) platform, which are open-source software tools developed by NETL.
WaterTAP advances water treatment technologies by providing a platform to conduct detailed technoeconomic assessments. These analyses enable researchers to identify innovation opportunities, determine technological bottlenecks, and set research targets for new materials, components, and processes by quantifying performance and cost metrics. WaterTAP provides this capability by developing a modular model library for a wide range of water treatment technologies and is built on the advanced process systems engineering platform IDAES, which won the R&D 100 award in 2020. WaterTAP seeks to be more unified, flexible, and powerful than current water treatment software by being open-source, modular, multi-hierarchical, customizable, and equation oriented.
NETL is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory that drives innovation and delivers technological solutions for an environmentally sustainable and prosperous energy future. By leveraging its world-class talent and research facilities, NETL is ensuring affordable, abundant and reliable energy that drives a robust economy and national security, while developing technologies to manage carbon across the full life cycle, enabling environmental sustainability for all Americans.
Republished from Stanford Water in the West with permission.
For most people, once water goes down the drain, it’s out of sight and out of mind. But if you were to follow the path of water from your shower, sink, or toilet, you’d likely wind through a maze of pipes, sloshing around with other wastewater until you arrive at a central treatment plant miles from your home. However, waning natural water supplies and new demands on piping infrastructure mean that these traditional systems are increasingly unreliable.
Recent technology innovations, policy changes, and market shifts are accelerating deployment of scaled-down water treatment solutions, but the market is still in its infancy. Scholars from Water in the West, a program of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and the National Alliance for Water Innovation organized a workshop with academics, water technology innovators, public health experts, environmental regulators, and venture capitalists to explore the future of extreme decentralization and its role in interfacing with and supporting traditional centralized systems. Experts from around the world produced a white paper outlining key insights and questions about effectively combining new and existing water treatment technology and barriers to progress.
Below, report coauthor Meagan Mauter, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and School of Engineering, discusses how treating water across scales could make water systems more resilient and affordable.
What problems does a centralized approach to water treatment pose as we envision more sustainable water systems?
Mauter: Traditional water treatment plants have great economies of scale in terms of the cost and energy they take to operate. But there are also serious diseconomies of scale when it comes to water transport. It takes energy to pump water where it needs to go, and it can be expensive to build or maintain piping infrastructure. Expanding options for on-site reuse could help to minimize the infrastructure requirements and pumping costs for the entire system.
The American West faces increasing pressure on its water supplies from climate change, prolonged drought, and increasing demand. How could a more decentralized approach contribute to long-term sustainability in this region?
Mauter: The reality is that natural supplies of water are dwindling. And the one truly consistent long-term, sustainable source of water is your wastewater. The question is just at what scale does it make sense to reuse that wastewater? The cost of alternative marginal supplies like seawater desalination are so high that on-site reuse even at very small scales starts to look financially attractive.
Where else would it make sense to expand on-site water treatment and reuse?
Mauter: This approach is also useful in places where you have high population density. For example, when you convert a block of single-family houses in New York into a 75-story apartment building, the flows of water and wastewater are much higher, and urban piping capacity may not be adequate.
On-site reuse provides a less expensive alternative to digging up miles of city streets and expanding wastewater treatment facilities. On-site reuse is also rapidly expanding in international settings where there is limited existing centralized wastewater treatment infrastructure. For instance, in India, some apartment building owners treat and sell wastewater for construction or other valuable uses.
Finally, we are seeing pretty rapid adoption in industry, where it can be challenging to secure permits and pay for connections to municipal systems. This benefits the wastewater facility, too – it’s much easier to treat concentrated industrial wastewater on-site before it has been diluted by rainwater or municipal sewage at a centralized facility.
If individuals and businesses started taking more advantage of on-site reuse, what would that mean for existing infrastructure?
Mauter: Incorporating on-site treatment and reuse doesn’t mean getting rid of centralized treatment facilities. It’s really more about expanding the marginal capacity of those systems. We need tools to help municipalities understand what this means for the role and financial security of existing facilities and how decentralized systems can help with their mission of affordably securing water for their service area. Municipalities might start to provide incentive programs for decentralized reuse, much in the way they incentivize or mandate water-efficient appliances. New business models might emerge where municipalities operate building-scale reuse systems or service on-site treatment technology.
Are there lessons we can learn from other sectors that have taken a decentralized approach?
Mauter: We’ve seen huge movement toward hybrid systems in the energy sector where solar panels on your roof and batteries in your garage are working in concert with centralized generation and transmission systems to provide you and your neighbors with reliable power supply.
The other parallel is that demand on water and energy infrastructure systems can vary widely. This sets up an interesting planning problem: how much capacity do we need to maintain reliable supply? If you build too much, you pay tremendous capital and financing costs; if you build too little, you pay the social, political, and economic price of inadequate supply. We can often deploy decentralized systems more quickly, meaning that we could adaptively implement these technologies to more closely align with demand. On-site reuse could become a kind of “water peaking plant” during periods of intense water stress.
What kinds of progress do we need to make on-site water treatment more feasible for water users?
Mauter: Right now there’s a whole host of conflicting state-level regulations related to on-site reuse. At the local level, building codes and public health codes were simply not set up to support distributed water treatment and reuse – and they often contradict each other.
We need better scientific research on risk-based regulatory standards (e.g., how pure does your water need to be to safely flush a toilet or wash the laundry). Aligning regulatory standards across states will help manufacturers of on-site systems achieve economies of scale.
Some cost reductions will happen through “learning by doing” as manufacturers make and install more systems. But other capital cost reductions are harder to realize because of technology limitations. This is where research and development happening here at Stanford can help move the needle.
Mauter is also an associate professor in the Social Sciences Division at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy, and research director of the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI). The report was produced by scholars with the Water in the West program and NAWI. Coauthors of the paper include Alex Fairhart, David L. Sedlak, Peter Fiske, and Paula Kehoe.
Scott Struck was waist deep in the Missouri River when he saw the frog. The amphibian lay half in and half out of the water and was exactly what Struck was hunting for. As a military brat (as Struck calls himself), he spent his childhood leapfrogging across the country. But even if his home changed from Kansas to Georgia to Minnesota, and finally to Washington, one thing stayed the same.
“A common theme of any place I lived was nature,” Struck said. “Often water.”
The young Struck could often be found scrambling through forests or wading into lakes and rivers in search of lizards, turtles, snakes, and frogs. So, when he spotted that half-submerged frog in the Missouri River floodplains, he did not hesitate. He plodded through the mud and water and snatched the frog up.
But the frog was not alone.
“It was half consumed by a snake,” Struck said. “The snake was dangling there.” He immediately dropped the frog—knowing the snake could be poisonous—but he did not run. “I was amazed,” he said. “That gave me a real appreciation for nature and the circle of life.” Today, as a senior integrated water systems research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Struck studies a different circle of life: the cyclical water supplies that keep humans and ecosystems happy and healthy (if they are clean enough).
Although Struck started out studying psychology and zoology, he later served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania, where he first experienced life without running water. “Even though I’ve done a lot of recreating on water,” Struck said, “there, it was part of my survival.” In the latest Manufacturing Masterminds Q&A, Struck explained how burned bits of wood or even manure could help purify storm runoff, why recycled wastewater could be cleaner than many natural sources, and what to do about so-called “urban drool.” And, he said, all these sources, from runoff to drool, could help bolster dwindling water supplies across the country and around the world. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
If I picked up a frog that had a snake attached, I would run. I’m terrified of snakes that swim, like black mambas.
I’ve seen a black mamba. Not here in Colorado, of course. I saw one in East Africa when I lived there for a couple of years as a Peace Corps volunteer. They’re amazing creatures that can actually stand on their tails to climb onto lower tree branches. I was very afraid of them. No antivenom for many, many miles!
I’m curious how you went from majoring in zoology and psychology at the University of Washington to water treatment.
It is a circuitous path. I was good at math, so I started down a pre-med path. You could do biology or zoology. I chose zoology, partly because I met a couple of professors (Mark Cooper and Bill Moody) who were studying the spinal cord—how embryonic stem cells specialize to form brain and spinal cord cells. I worked in Mark Cooper’s lab for about a year and a half doing menial things, like taking care of frogs.
More frogs!
More frogs. I also took a couple of psychology courses. I enjoyed those, so I took a couple more, and it turned out I only had to take a few more to get a Bachelor of Arts in psychology. But the best thing that came out of that was an appreciation for statistics—what it takes to achieve statistically significant results with observations and data. To conclude whether an animal’s behavior is statistically significant or just an anomaly, you have to have a lot of data.
So, you fell in love with statistics. But that doesn’t explain how you ended up in water treatment.
That came from my experience in the Peace Corps. I joined following my undergraduate studies. And I lived in Tanzania, East Africa, and taught mostly sciences—chemistry, biology, a little bit of physics. I lived on the school grounds, which had houses for the administrative staff and the two Peace Corps volunteers. We volunteers lived in one house, but it had no running water and no electricity. Cooking, cleaning, bathing—all that depended on how much water we had. We captured roof runoff during the wetter seasons. Then, during the dry seasons, we had to obtain water from the nearest bore hole. I also built more rainwater harvesting systems at some other schools to provide a more local water supply.
How close was the water supply to your home?
About 3 kilometers, or just under 2 miles, so not close. The jerry cans we used to transport the water were about 4 to 5 gallons each. And we usually didn’t have tops for them, so you couldn’t fill them completely because the water would splash out. We would often pay a student to put the cans on the side of their bike and carry them to and from the water supply and our house. That whole experience gave me a new appreciation for the connectivity of people and water.
Wow, OK. Now your passion for water makes a whole lot of sense. So, after you completed your Peace Corps service, what did you do next?
Well, I met a woman in the Peace Corps who ended up becoming my wife. When we returned, we got married and decided to go straight into graduate school, and Indiana University served both our needs. I started out doing both environmental policy and water resource engineering and management, and then about 18 months into that, I decided to do a doctorate. That was almost all on wetlands—wetland biology—but also water treatment. That’s what got me into the treatment side and doing more water quality work.
And you did that exact type of work during a postdoctoral fellowship with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Is that what you study today?
I look at things like how to improve storm water runoff before it goes into our water systems, rivers, streams, and creeks. And that pushed me toward distributed and integrated water infrastructure: How do we place those treatment systems to provide the optimal benefit to the receiving water? So, while I do some wastewater and drinking water treatment, I also look at nature-based solutions for water quality and cost and social benefits they can add to a project. This includes creating engineered media that water can filter through. On the manufacturing side, for instance, I look at novel materials that we can use—things like biochar, a charcoal-like substance made from burning wood, grass, and other organics, like biosolids produced during wastewater treatment processes.
Biosolids. That’s just a fancy way of saying poop, right?
Primarily. And other organic solids that make their way into our sanitary sewer system. If we take this organic material and turn it into a charcoal-like substance, we can either improve water quality or decarbonize systems. If you prevent that organic material from decomposing—which releases carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere—and instead bury it or use it to improve soil quality, that can reduce carbon emissions.
That takes care of poop. You also study drool, right? Urban drool?
Correct. There are all kinds of water uses within an urban system, like car washing or irrigation. We call that “urban drool” because it’s stuff that gets slobbered onto an impervious surface and, because of gravity, flows into our water systems. That drool carries a fair number of pollutants along with it, so it can be a concern.
Is the concern mostly about other communities that might be downstream or for nearby wildlife and ecosystems?
All of the above. All our water systems have a downstream user. There are some pollutants that are very, very challenging to remove, like the perfluorinated alkyl substances—or PFAS—one class of forever chemicals. We’ve been exploring using biochar to remove lower concentrations of PFAS in urban drainage systems, so it doesn’t make its way to receiving waters or groundwater.
At NREL, you’re also looking at the efficiency of these water filtration systems, right? Evaluating them from an energy perspective?
Correct. We’re working with the National Alliance for Water Innovation to develop and manufacture less energy-intensive water filtration technologies. Much of the alliance’s work focuses on desalination techniques—or ways to remove salts and other impurities from water. But often pretreatment systems are also necessary to purify alternative sources of water, like wastewater.
We also use a lot of energy treating water to potable standards and then go and put it on our lawn. We can use lower-quality water to keep our grass green. Oftentimes, we overtreat, which means we’re not being efficient with our energy use or our treatment technology.
Could renewable energy be part of that energy equation, too?
Absolutely! We’re looking at how we use renewable energy in a way that can work for water treatment. How do we develop treatment trains that can operate with variable energy, like solar power and wind energy? We can also generate energy from renewable biogases from bacteria breaking down waste and use that to help operate the wastewater treatment plant. Right now, we’re looking at how solar power can supplement grid supplies for a desalination plant outside Phoenix, Arizona. But desalination is very expensive and takes a lot of energy. Now, you get into environmental justice issues. If that’s your only source of water, you have to pay more than a neighborhood not very far away that may have a cleaner supply or requires much less treatment. We end up running into the social and environmental justice sides of the water equation, which is not what engineers do well. But I enjoy it. Maybe that’s the psychology background coming in. It’s a complex problem that does not necessarily have easy answers.
Speaking of psychology, I was listening to the radio, and they were discussing the psychological barriers that keep people from accepting recycled wastewater, i.e., toilet water.
Right. At first, the industry called this toilet-to-tap water. We know this so-called “blackwater” has many uses. But it turns out people do not like that phrase. They don’t want to drink water that they know came from the toilet. Of course, it has to go through a complete treatment process, even more so than a lot of our surface water does in some instances. So, it ends up being not much different in terms of quality, once treated.
I think people forget how much waste is in our rivers. Animals live out there, and they poop, too. For sure. I’ve worked in some river cities where the water coming into the city far exceeded water quality criteria for pollutants.
In an ideal world, what would you hope to achieve?
A zero-energy water system for every home. Systems could be as simple as changing out the cartridge on your water filter. If everybody could access enough renewable energy, our systems could be energy and waste balanced. We could turn organic waste into a tea that’s very high in nutrients and use it in our soil and gardens. So many of our “waste” products have potential uses that we just haven’t tapped yet.
Every year, oil and gas companies spend billions of dollars to dispose of their wastewater. But at least some of that water—and those billions of dollars—could be saved by recycling and reusing it instead. Now, thanks to a new investment, one water purification company in the National Alliance of Water Innovation (NAWI), Crystal Clearwater Resources, LLC (also known as CCR), can continue to advance their promising wastewater treatment technologies, so industries with wastewater streams can save water, energy, money, and even the planet.
CCR’s mission is to provide companies with clean technologies that can help them lessen their environmental impact by boosting their sustainability. Their clean tech could also help create new sources of freshwater to help increase the United States’ supplies.
“This investment is not just a testament to what our team has achieved so far but also a vote of confidence in our vision for the future,” said Derek Pedersen, CCR’s co-founder and CEO, in a recent press release.
The company received their Series-A funding from Texas-based Elk Mountain, Ltd.
“We’re thrilled to back CCR in this next chapter of their growth,” said Elk Mountain, Ltd.’s Russell Gordy. “Their unique approach to treating challenging wastewater streams and impressive traction in the market makes them a standout in the industry.”
The water treatment technology is designed to recover more purified water from wastewater generated by the oil and gas industry, manufacturing, municipal water recovery facilities, and mining. The technology can also decrease costs and greenhouse gas emissions associated with disposing of wastewater.
The investment will also enable CCR to scale their operations to reach new markets in new industries and geographical regions. CCR will also pilot and launch its novel proprietary technology and design new solutions that can tackle emerging challenges in wastewater treatment.
“We are deeply grateful for this opportunity and partnership with Elk Mountain, Ltd.,” said Pedersen.
NAWI Executive Director Peter Fiske presented at WEFTEC 2023, the Water Environment Federation’s Annual Technical Exhibition and Conference. The largest conference of its kind, WEFTEC 2023 was held from 30 September to 4 October 2023 in Chicago, Illinois, United States of America. Fiske’s presentation, titled Advancing Desalination and Treatment of Non- Traditional Source Water: The First 3.5 Years of the National Alliance for Water Innovation, delved into NAWI’s portfolio of 74 research projects, network of 440+ NAWI Alliance member organizations, and more. Access the presentation here.
One primary objective of the NAWI program is to foster stronger connections between the academic research community and the water industry. We actively promote and financially support collaborative research initiatives, bringing together experts from academia, industry, and national laboratories. Additionally, we advocate for the direct involvement of industry professionals in all our research projects through their active membership in Project Support Groups.
The NAWI Leadership Team recently had a valuable chance to actively connect with the water treatment community during our participation in the annual Water Environment Federation’s Technical Exhibition and Conference (WEFTEC). NAWI unveiled its inaugural booth at WEFTEC and took the opportunity to host two noteworthy sessions: one focusing on the NAWI research program and another as an informational session within the “Innovation Theater.” We were thrilled to receive numerous visits from members of the NAWI Alliance community at our booth. The NAWI team was particularly grateful to be invited to Rockwell’s reception.
During the four-day event, the NAWI team actively participated in knowledge sharing, engaged in peer-to-peer dialogues, and fostered in-depth discussions. From these interactions, several intriguing themes surfaced:
- The concept of OneWater is challenging the water industry’s historical “stovepipe” separations between drinking water treatment and wastewater treatment. OneWater is also igniting some of the biggest thinking related to water treatment design and practice over the last century. Industrial water users and systems designers repeatedly emphasized their desire for breakthrough technologies that can facilitate improved use and reuse of the wastewater they generate. The drive for water efficiency is coming not only from practical concerns about securing more resilient water supplies at the level of individual manufacturing facilities, but also from strong corporate-level Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) goals. The head of Veolia’s North American Industrial Water Practice Area Patrick Schultz summed it up: “Most companies we are speaking with have [water reuse] goals, but no plans.”
- Direct Potable Reuse (DPR) is gaining significant momentum and recognition in the field. An all-star panel of experts and regulators gave a summary of the current state-of- play of DPR regulations emerging in across the United States. While specific standards and requirements vary considerably among the handful of states that have released proposed or adopted standards, this diversity may actually accelerate the speed at which new states establish DPR. Why? A new state can look at different approaches chosen by different states and adopt an approach that is “right for them” as opposed to struggling to fit itself within a single national standard.
- Corporate ESG goals are driving more than just an interest in water reuse but also an interest in zero-liquid discharge (ZLD) treatment plans. ZLD eliminates industrial discharges entirely—mitigating potential environmental risks while achieving significant milestones in corporate ESG objectives. “I never heard from industrial customers about ZLD five years ago,” noted one water industry leader, “but now it’s actively discussed and considered.”
The NAWI team will continue to engage the water industry directly at future trade shows and conferences. Our 2024 Annual Meeting, to be held from March 11-13 in Denver, Colorado, is set to align perfectly with the WateReuse Association’s Annual Meeting. This timing will bring us together in the same city, allowing for exciting opportunities to collaborate on joint activities and initiatives. Stay tuned for more information!
Water scarcity and insecurity is a pervasive problem around the world. Climate change, population growth, and changes in how communities use freshwater all contribute to shrinking resources worldwide. In the next few years, water managers in 40 U.S. states expect to face increased freshwater shortages. Water is not only necessary for individuals to hydrate, clean, and cook, it is also essential to produce food and energy.
Solving a Looming Problem
From seas to sewers to salty groundwater, it may seem like water is everywhere you look. But the amount of freshwater available on Earth is limited—and demand is rising. Equalizing freshwater demand with supply requires more efficient use of existing water resources. And that requires new, innovative ways to repurpose or reuse water that is often unused or discarded.
For example, immense underground reservoirs of brackish water lie beneath some of the world’s most drought-stricken regions. This water is too saline to be used in its current state, and desalination is still too costly and inefficient. But how can unconventional water sources become a cost-effective and sustainable way to boost draining supplies?
The National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) is developing technologies that bring a wider range of unconventional water sources within reach while ensuring efficient-as-possible usage. Formed in 2017 as a partnership between Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the National Energy Technology Laboratory and roughly 30 stakeholders across the academic, industry, and non-profit spheres, NAWI was incorporated as a Department of Energy innovation hub in 2020. It currently exists as a five-year, $110 million research program that brings together experts from over 300 organizations, including national laboratories, universities, companies, water utilities, and state agencies.
“Today’s water system is not sustainable for a number of reasons,” said Yarom Polsky, NAWI’s Process Innovation and Intensification topic area leader and a group leader for the Sensors and Embedded Systems group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “We’re at a point where we’re beginning to have to treat sources of water that are much more complicated that require more advanced water treatment technologies.”
NAWI’s Present Roadmap
NAWI is working to design energy-efficient and cost-effective desalination technologies, which extract salts and other impurities from both salt water and wastewater to produce clean water with the same (or higher) quality as current water treatment methods. They aim to achieve this for 90% of nontraditional water resources within the next 10 years.
How, exactly? To recycle wastewater while reducing energy use and water treatment costs, NAWI has a plan—or five, to be exact. Following a 2020 roadmapping initiative, the NAWI Alliance published five technology roadmaps (and one master roadmap) tailored to five sectors: power, resource extraction (which includes mining for minerals and oil), industrial, municipal, and agricultural (PRIMA). Many desalination technologies are still relatively expensive. But NAWI’s roadmaps can guide technology developers and adopters to overcome technological and economic barriers as well as social and cultural hurdles.
“We aim to identify the key barriers to lowering the cost and energy of water treatment and then attack those barriers through a coordinated campaign of applied research,” said Peter Fiske, the executive director of NAWI and a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
NAWI’s master roadmap synthesizes the highest-priority research needs for state-of-the-art, emerging, and existing desalination and advanced water technologies. In 2021 and 2022, NAWI added to their growing list of guides and tools, publishing eight foundational, sector-specific, baseline studies that provide a comprehensive assessment of challenges and opportunities associated with different source waters, which could help accelerate the creation of a circular water economy. Several of these studies relied on a new analytical tool developed by NAWI researchers. Called the Water Technoeconomic Assessment Platform (TAP), this tool evaluates water treatment costs, energy needs, environmental impacts, and resiliency trade-offs in a consistent manner across sectors.
Did you miss NAWI’s recent sector-specific studies? Here’s a refresher of what desalination technologies can offer individual sectors, such as:
- Power: NAWI researchers explored the economic and technical feasibility of extracting salt from seawater for use in power plants, for example, as well as reusing water that cools machinery in power plant facilities to keep them running safely.
- Resource Extraction: NAWI researchers assessed how novel water treatment technologies and strategies can help mining operations reclaim water used to clean quarried material. They also studied how the oil and gas industries could transition to new water treatment technologies to reclaim and reuse the wastewater generated from cooling the rigs used to extract oil from the ground.
- Industrial: Including food and beverage companies, data centers, and industrial campuses, industry makes up the fourth largest category of U.S. water use. In this study, researchers at NAWI explored the potential for industrial wastewater to serve as an alternative water resource for these same companies, irrigation of farms or city parks, or drinking water.
- Municipal: Two NAWI studies examined the cost and energy needed for alternative municipal water treatment methods and the challenges and opportunities of desalinating brackish water from groundwater, for use in irrigation or as drinking water, for example.
- Agricultural: A significant amount of freshwater is used to grow fruits and vegetables and raise livestock in the United States. In fact, irrigation for farms may account for 42% of total freshwater use in the United States, according to this 2021 NAWI study, which examined the institutional and economic barriers preventing states from reusing agricultural drainage.
Preparing For the Future
In early 2022, NAWI also issued a request for information on innovative, small-scale desalination and water-reuse technologies and systems. This effort could lead to a request for proposals to build and operate small-scale systems to treat unconventional water sources and achieve pipe parity (meaning similar- or higher-quality water than conventional water treatment methods.)
“We do not have a water shortage on this planet,” said Benny Freeman, a NAWI Research Consortium and Alliance member and chemical engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “The problem is that it’s contaminated with salt and other constituents. I think, in the future, we’re going to have a society and an environment where we have enormous amounts of water … because of desalination technologies.”
NAWI Executive Director Peter S. Fiske writes about what we must do to address the mounting water crisis.
The National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) announced today that ExxonMobil has officially joined the Alliance as a member. In 2019 NAWI was selected to lead a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Energy-Water Desalination Hub to support United States water security. As a founding member of the NAWI Research Consortium, ExxonMobil is part of a world-class team of industry and academic partners formed to examine the critical technical barriers and research needed to radically lower the cost and energy of desalination.
“We’re pleased to support the efforts of the National Alliance for Water Innovation,” said Monte Dobson, ExxonMobil Unconventional Technology Development Manager. “We will leverage our capabilities to jointly develop a roadmap of different technologies to find beneficial ways to use treated produced water.”
The NAWI Research Consortium is headquartered at Berkeley Lab and includes Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the National Energy Technology Laboratory, 19 founding university partners, and 10 founding industry partners including Exxon Mobil. NAWI’s goal is to advance a portfolio of novel technologies that will secure a circular water economy in which 90% of nontraditional water sources – such as seawater, brackish water, and produced waters – can be cost-competitive with existing water sources within 10 years.
“ExxonMobil’s objectives align well with the research space of NAWI. We are excited to have them as part of our team as we embark on our research efforts,” said Dr. Peter Fiske, NAWI Executive Director.
In the NAWI Alliance, the four national laboratories and founding industry and academic partners are joined by a member community of hundreds of public and private sector organizations – all focused on the future of water treatment and stability of water supplies for U.S. industries and communities.
Each member hopes to influence technology development by participating in steering and technical working groups to help develop research roadmaps and review research projects.
Find a link to the official Press Release here.
Despite efforts to conserve, traditional water supplies will become increasingly constrained in some U.S. regions as populations grow, industry demands expand, and/or regulations restrict access to over-drafted aquifers and require additional environmental flows in rivers and streams to support ecological needs. Water scarcity will be exacerbated by the changing climate. Warmer temperatures and/or shifting precipitation patterns may escalate irrigation demands while sea level rise may increase groundwater and surface water salinity in coastal areas. According to the Government Accountability Office, forty U.S. states expect to experience water shortages in the next few years, highlighting the need for increased access to non-traditional water supplies (e.g., seawater and brackish water desalination; “wastewater” reuse from municipal, industrial, agriculture, power, oil and gas, and mining sectors).
Developing new supplies in water scarce-areas must be done with long-term sustainability in mind, considering the social, economic, and environmental implications. Water managers need new metrics and tools to compare tradeoffs between alternative water resource opportunities based on, for example, economic performance, system reliability and resilience, and environmental impacts. This information will guide decision-makers toward pipe parity, a condition where the full costs of providing new water supplies, including conveyance, treatment, disposal, and ancillary costs and benefits, are comparable to the marginal supplies in use today.
The National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) aims to prioritize research investments that maximize pipe parity for non-traditional water supplies in critical regions. This talk will describe NAWI’s early efforts to develop pipe parity metrics; identify barriers to non-traditional water use for five broad categories of water users; collect and curate data on water technology, sources and uses in a state-of-the-art database (WaterDAMS); and develop a tool (WaterTAP 3 ) to comprehensively and consistently quantify pipe parity for non-traditional water supplies across the diverse set of conditions in the U.S.
Our 10 most popular news stories in 2019 reflect the scope of our scientific achievements this year, ranging from a new way to recycle plastic to spearheading a once-in-a-generation investment in water treatment technologies. Here are the most viewed stories at the Berkeley Lab News Center this year, followed by four Editor’s Picks.
The breadth of science conducted by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is vast, spanning from fundamental questions about the nature of the universe to solutions for saving energy in our homes and offices. Our 10 most popular news stories in 2019 reflect the scope of our scientific achievements this year, ranging from a new way to recycle plastic to spearheading a once-in-a-generation investment in water-treatment technologies.
Here are the most viewed stories at the Berkeley Lab News Center this year, followed by four Editor’s Picks:
- Cool Roofs Can Help Shield California’s Cities Against Heat WavesThis summer alone, intense heat waves have been to blame for at least 11 deaths in Japan, a record-breaking temperature of 45.9-degrees Celsius (or 115 F) in France, and a heat advisory affecting 147 million people on the U.S. East Coast. These extreme air temperatures can heat our bodies, causing sunstrokes or even organ damage. A new study by Berkeley Lab shows that if every building in California sported “cool” roofs by 2050, these roofs would help contribute to protecting urbanites from the consequences of these dangerous heatwaves. Full story here.
- Plastic Gets a Do-Over: Breakthrough Discovery Recycles Plastic From the Inside OutBecause plastics contain various additives, like dyes, fillers, or flame retardants, very few plastics can be recycled without loss in performance or aesthetics. Now a team of researchers at Berkeley Lab has designed a recyclable plastic that, like a Lego playset, can be disassembled into its constituent parts at the molecular level, and then reassembled into a different shape, texture, and color again and again without loss of performance or quality. The new material, called poly(diketoenamine), or PDK, was reported in the journal Nature Chemistry. Full story here.
- Dark Energy Instrument’s Lenses See the Night Sky for the First TimeThe dome of the Mayall Telescope near Tucson, Arizona, opened to the night sky on April 1, and starlight poured through the assembly of six large lenses that were carefully packaged and aligned for a new instrument that will capture light from tens of millions of galaxies and produce a 3D map of the universe. Just hours later, scientists produced the first focused images with these precision lenses, marking an important “first light” milestone for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). Full story here.
- What if you could make a magnetic device out of liquids? Using a modified 3D printer, a team of scientists at Berkeley Lab have done just that. Their findings, published in the journal Science, could lead to a revolutionary class of printable liquid devices for a variety of applications – from artificial cells that deliver targeted cancer therapies to flexible liquid robots that change their shape to adapt to their surroundings. Full story here.
- New $100M Innovation Hub to Accelerate R&D for a Secure Water FutureThe National Alliance for Water Innovation, which is led by Berkeley Lab, has been awarded a five-year, $100-million Energy-Water Desalination Hub by DOE to address water security issues in the United States. The Hub will focus on early-stage research and development for energy-efficient and cost-competitive desalination technologies and for treating nontraditional water sources for various end-uses. Full story here.
- With Little Training, Machine-Learning Algorithms Can Uncover Hidden Scientific
KnowledgeSure, computers can be used to play grandmaster-level chess, but can they make scientific discoveries? Researchers at Berkeley Lab have shown that an algorithm with no training in materials science can scan the text of millions of papers and uncover new scientific knowledge.By analyzing relationships between words, the algorithm was able to predict discoveries of new thermoelectric materials years in advance and suggest as-yet unknown materials as candidates for thermoelectric materials. The findings were published in the journal Nature. Full story here. - A Single Dose for Good Measure: How an Anti-Nuclear-Contamination Pill Could Also
Help MRI PatientsEver since they became commercially available in the 1980s, MRIs have long been considered to be safe. But in recent years, a growing number of MRI patients have reported feeling unusual symptoms – such as joint pain, body aches, and loss of memory – within days and sometimes even hours after an MRI scan. Some patients have also reported long-term chronic side effects such as kidney damage. Now Berkeley Lab chemist Rebecca Abergel and her team are developing a pill that could protect people from potential toxicity from the long-term retention of gadolinium, a critical ingredient in widely used contrast dyes for MRI scans. Full story here. - Go With the Flow: Scientists Design Better Batteries for a Renewable Energy GridHow do you store renewable energy so it’s there when you need it, even when the sun isn’t
shining or the wind isn’t blowing? Giant batteries designed for the electrical grid – called “flow batteries,” which store electricity in tanks of liquid electrolyte – could be the answer, but so far utilities have yet to find a cost-effective battery that can reliably power thousands of homes throughout a lifecycle of 10 to 20 years. Now, a battery membrane technology developed by researchers at Berkeley Lab may point to a solution. Full story here. - Study Concludes Glassy Menagerie of Particles in Beach Sands Near Hiroshima Is Fallout
Debris from A-Bomb BlastMario Wannier, a career geologist with expertise in studying tiny marine life, was sorting
through samples of beach sand from Japan’s Motoujina Peninsula when he spotted something unexpected: a number of tiny, glassy spheres and other unusual objects. A study detailing this material concludes that it is A-bomb fallout from the destroyed city of Hiroshima. Full story here. - Some Assembly Required: Scientists Piece Together the Largest U.S.-Based Dark Matter
ExperimentWhen complete, an underground dark matter-search experiment called LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) will be the largest, most sensitive U.S.-based experiment to directly detect theorized dark matter particles. Scientists have been trying for decades to solve the mystery of dark matter, which makes up about 85 percent of all matter in the universe, though we don’t know much about it. Full story here.
Republished from the Trinity Tripod.
Yale University professors Menachem Elimelech and Jaehong Kim were selected – as a part of the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) – to lead the Energy Water Desalination Hub, a national convention dedicated to addressing the water issues around the United States. The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has allocated nearly 100 million dollars to the Energy Water Desalination Hub, the most amount the DOE has ever spent on water-related efforts. Read the full issue of the Trinity Tripod.