National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI)

Innovating for a water and energy secure future for the United States

Lauren Nicole Core

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Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) announced the selection of 12 projects that will improve the energy efficiency of desalination and water reuse technologies across the country. The selected projects will drive decarbonization of the water and wastewater sectors through innovative technologies to treat, use, and recycle water to bolster a circular economy and provide the United States with climate-resilient, cost-effective water supplies.

The climate crisis, population growth, and changes in how communities use water contribute to a growing water scarcity problem worldwide. Many regions around the United States are now water-stressed, lacking the water supply required for daily needs, agriculture, and energy and materials production. To meet demand, it is critical that we develop technologies that provide alternative water sources and treat and use water in ways that are efficient, sustainable, and cost-effective.

The selected research projects will attack two key process challenges in the treatment of brackish or salty groundwater, as well as municipal and industrial wastewater: 1) pre-treatment prior to desalination, and 2) post-treatment and disposal of the high-salt concentrate waste created after the desalination process. These two steps often represent a large percentage of the total cost and energy associated with the treatment of nontraditional water sources.

The projects will also advance NAWI’s goal of achieving pipe-parity for 90% of nontraditional water sources. Pipe parity is achieved when the costs and technology solutions for treating and reusing nontraditional water sources, such as wastewater, are equal to the cost of treating conventional water sources.

NAWI is a public-private partnership that brings together a world-class team of industry and academic partners to examine the critical technical barriers and research needed to radically lower the cost and energy of desalination. NAWI is led by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with National Energy Technology Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and is funded by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)’s Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office.

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Republished with permission from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.

The nitrate runoff problem, a source of carcinogens and a cause of suffocating algal blooms in U.S. waterways, may not be all gloom and doom. A new study led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign demonstrates an approach for the integrated capture and conversion of nitrate-contaminated waters into valuable ammonia within a single electrochemical cell.

The study, directed by chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Xiao Su, demonstrates a device capable of an eightfold concentration of nitrate, a 24-times enhancement of ammonium production rate and a greater than tenfold enhancement in energy efficiency compared with previous nitrate-to-ammonia electrocatalysis methods.

“By combining separation with reaction, we overcame previously existing limitations of producing ammonia directly from groundwater, where the concentrations of nitrate are very low, and thus make the conversion step inefficient,” Su said.

The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

“The goal of this study was to use as little energy as possible to remove nitrate from agricultural runoff before it hits our waterways, and transform it back to a fertilizer or sell it as a chemical feedstock,” Su said. “Our technology can thus have an impact on waste treatment, sustainable chemical production and advance decarbonization. We are hoping to bring greater circularity into the nitrogen cycle.”

The team developed a unique, bifunctional electrode that can separate and up-concentrate nitrate from a water stream, while converting to ammonia in a single unit using purely electrochemical control. “The bifunctional electrode combines a redox-polymer adsorbent, which captures the nitrate, with cobalt-based catalysts that drive the electrocatalytic conversion to ammonium,” Su said.

The system was tested in the lab using agricultural runoff collected from drain tiles around the U. of I. research farmlands to evaluate the potential of the technology for real-world conditions, the researchers said.

“This is a very efficient capture and conversion platform with a low footprint,” Su said. “We don’t need separate electrochemical cells for the water treatment and ammonium production or adding extra chemicals or solvents. Instead, we envision a module installed directly onto farmland and run using the power generated from the electrocatalytic process and a small solar panel.”

The team said its next goal is to develop even more selective materials used in the device to achieve higher nitrate removal and accelerate the conversion to ammonia – while engineering larger scale systems for practical deployment in the field.

Kwiyong Kim is the first author of the study, with contributions from Jaeyoung Hong and Jing Lian Ng, from the Su group. The work was carried out in collaboration with Tuan Anh Pham, from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Alexandra Zagalskaya and Vitaly Alexandrov, from the University of Nebraska.

Su also is affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and also is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Illinois.

The National Alliance for Water Innovation, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment at Illinois supported this study.

Editor’s notes:

To reach Xiao Su, call 217-300-0134; email .

The paper “Coupling nitrate capture with ammonia production through bifunctional redox-electrodes” is available online.

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-36318-1

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI), in collaboration with the California Department of Water Resources, today announced the selection of 11 projects for negotiation that will pilot breakthrough technologies and systems that will allow for more reliable and affordable freshwater supplies for the United States. The projects will also contribute to the decarbonization of the water and wastewater sectors through investments in technologies that enhance the efficient use of energy in the use, treatment, and distribution of water.

The selected pilot projects will process non-traditional source waters from a range of locations and produce water in real-world environments. In some cases, projects will partner directly with communities and groups that have historically been underserved by existing water supplies. The research will help to bolster a circular water economy by supporting water reuse and valorizing constituents we currently consider to be waste. Each project will also generate a range of data sets usable by other researchers seeking to advance the field of data analysis and automation, and fault detection in water treatment systems.

The collaborative project teams of industry, academic, national laboratory, and other stakeholders will deliver impact aligned with NAWI’s pipe parity metrics. Pipe parity is defined as technology solutions for treating and reusing nontraditional water sources that are competitive with conventional water sources for specific end use applications.

These pilot systems will directly address the highest priority research needs and technical knowledge gaps outlined in the NAWI Roadmap Publication Series, which was published in 2021.

The selected projects include:

(Listed in no particular order)

  • Concentrate Treatment and Chemical Production Using Innovative Electrodialysis Processes for Near Zero-Waste Discharge

Desalination technologies typically extract a fraction of pure water and leave behind a salty residual liquid called brine or concentrate that is expensive and difficult to dispose of at inland desalination facilities. This project is focused on the design and build of a novel process to further concentrate the brine using electrodialysis, producing more water and transforming the dissolved salts into valuable industrial chemicals. The pilot system will be fielded at the Kay Bailey Hutcheson Desalination Plant in El Paso, Texas.

Partners: New Mexico State University (lead); Veolia Water Technologies and Solutions, Inc.

  • Switchable Solvent ZLD Process for Solving the Inland Desalination Brine Problem

Desalinating and reusing municipal, industrial and agricultural wastewater is an attractive approach for improving the reliability and resilience of water resources. But the presence of dissolved minerals that can plug RO membranes and modules (a process called scaling) limits the amount of water that can be recovered using membrane processes such as RO. This project aims to integrate a novel, high-efficiency process for removing scale-forming ions from brine concentrates, enabling much higher amounts of water recovery and smaller volumes of waste brine. The mobile testbed will demonstrate high-recovery desalination at five sites in California.

Partners: Global Water Innovations, Inc. (lead); Trevi Systems, Inc.

  • Mobile Test Bed for Marginal Water Filtration

Water pre-treatment (before desalination) remains a critical process step for maximizing water production and lowering desalination cost. Current pretreatment technologies are large, slow, and multi-step, making them suitable for large desalination projects but clumsy and less effective for small-scale systems. This project will integrate a novel high-performance nanofiltration membrane system as pretreatment alongside two variants of electrocoagulation as a high-efficiency, all-electric pretreatment strategy. The mobile testbed developed by this team will travel to several sites around Albuquerque, New Mexico, evaluating high-efficiency desalination of different non-traditional water sources.

Partners: Garver USA (lead); City of Rio Rancho, New Mexico; the University of California, Los Angeles; NX Filtration, University of Colorado-Boulder; WaterTectonics, Inc; Rockwell Automation; Powel Water

  • Salt-Free Electrodialysis Metathesis (EDM) for High-Recovery Concentrate Management

Electrodialysis Metathesis (EDM) is a desalination process that uses specialized membranes and chemistry to produce fresh water while transforming the residual brine into two streams – a calcium-rich solution and a sulfate-rich solution. These two streams can be further refined into valuable industrial chemicals, producing a secondary revenue stream from desalination – and reducing the volume of waste brine. Until now, EDM has required the addition of sodium chloride (NaCl) to supply required ions for these solutions. In this project, a new ion-selective membrane technology will be utilized that will eliminate the need for additional NaCl and may lower the energy requirements of traditional EDM by as much as 50%. The system will be tested at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility (BGNDRF) in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Partners: University of Texas, El Paso; New Mexico State University

  • UHP-CCRO with Virtual Curtain to Achieve Minimal Liquid Discharge

Softening is the process of removing certain ions from water that otherwise precipitate during the desalination process, limiting the amount of water that can be recovered from inland brackish water sources using RO. This project proposes to use a novel softening technology to selectively remove these scale-forming ions by forcing the precipitation in the form of hydrotalcite – a mineral that is made from these ions – that could be used as a soil amendment or as an additive for concrete.

Partners: Jacobs Engineering (lead); New Mexico State University; Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation; DuPont

  • Mobile Demonstration DPR: Comparison of RO and non-RO DPR for aerobic and anaerobic effluents

Municipal wastewater can be reprocessed into drinking quality water. Reverse osmosis (RO) has traditionally been a final treatment step that can provide the high purity required to satisfy drinking water quality regulations, but RO generates a brine waste stream and drives up the cost and energy required for direct potable reuse (DPR). This project will perform a side-by-side demonstration at Silicon Valley Clean Water’s treatment plant in Redwood City, California, of both an RO-based treatment train and a novel treatment train that achieves nearly the same purity without using RO. The team will also investigate how different types of wastewater treatment technologies produce effluents that are either easier or harder to transform into drinking quality water.

Partners: Colorado School of Mines (lead); Stanford University; University of Colorado, Boulder

  • Piloting an Electrical, Modular, and Distributed ZLD Arsenic-Removal Technology

Arsenic is a pervasive, naturally occurring carcinogenic contaminant in groundwater. Thousands of wells in California and around the world have arsenic levels that exceed safe levels, forcing communities to install expensive and hard-to-operate treatment systems or shutter their local wells and travel miles to fill water jugs for home use. This project will demonstrate a new simple, reliable and highly automated electrochemical process that uses iron and electrical current to safely remove arsenic in well water. The team will partner with the community of Allensworth, California, a rural community whose residents must drive miles to pay for retail water from a kiosk.

Partners: University of California, Berkeley (lead); Allensworth Progressive Association

  • Reciprocating Piston Batch Reverse Osmosis: Pushing the limits of efficiency and fouling resistance

Conventional reverse osmosis utilizes high pressure pumps to continuously supply pressure into RO modules and generate fresh water. This steady-state process can result in the gradual build-up of organic and inorganic precipitates on membrane surfaces (known as fouling), which reduces water production and requires frequent cleaning. This project will demonstrate a novel batch-mode process whereby RO modules are pressurized using a piston-based pump and fresh water is produced in a non-continuous process. This approach to reverse osmosis not only uses less energy but may also greatly reduce the rate of fouling of membrane surfaces.

Partners: Purdue University (lead); Colorado School of Mines; Oak Ridge National Laboratory

  • Integrated Counter-Flow Reverse Osmosis Treatment for High-Salinity Produced Water

High salinity produced water is predominant in U.S. oilfields. Reverse osmosis (RO) has been used to desalinate low-salinity produced water, but has a salinity limit below that of most U.S. produced waters. This project will field a novel advancement that uses commercial RO membranes and infrastructure, and counterflow RO (CFRO) in order to enable treatment of high salinity water by managing the osmotic pressure differential across the membranes of sequential stages in a counter-flow arrangement.

Partners: Aris Water (lead); New Mexico State University; Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University; Stanford Linear Accelerator Center; Garver, OLISoft, Inc.

  • Field Pilot Testing of Electrically Conductive Reverse Osmosis (ECRO) Membranes for High Mineral Content Brackish Groundwater Desalination

Unconventional and difficult-to-treat water resources, such as brackish groundwater, have complex chemistries, and treating them to freshwater levels requires complex processes consisting of multiple stages of pre-treatment followed by membrane desalination, making them costly and difficult to operate which limit their widespread application and adoption by society and various industries. Both ECNF and ECRO use combinations of applied electrical fields and in situ electrochemical generation to actively resist membrane fouling – the deposition of particles onto membrane surfaces that causes pore clogging and diminished performance over time. The project will operate the pilot system as two parallel trains to evaluate the head-to-head performance of ECRO compared with conventional RO at Sand City, California.

Partners: Pacific Water Solutions, Inc.

  • A Convergent Monitoring Platform for Dynamic Characterization of Reverse Osmosis Membrane Fouling and Demonstration of Innovative Control Strategies

Membrane fouling and scaling is a pervasive and costly aspect of many membrane-based water treatment systems. This project will demonstrate and validate an unprecedented sensing/time series monitoring system at Orange County Water District for the dynamic characterization of reverse osmosis (RO) biofouling, mineral scaling, and organic fouling. The data obtained from this system will be combined with pilot and full-scale RO performance data to train next-generation Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) models to better forecast and mitigate fouling and scaling. This project will also evaluate novel sensor technologies and a new commercial membrane technology that can resist the application of oxidizing cleaning chemicals.

Partners: Rice University (lead); University of Texas, Austin; University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Orange County Water District; Noria Water Technologies, Inc., NALA Membranes, Inc.; Carollo Engineers

NAWI is a public-private partnership that brings together a world-class team of industry and academic partners to examine the critical technical barriers and research needed to radically lower the cost and energy of desalination. NAWI is led by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with National Energy Technology Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and is funded by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office.

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) today announced the selection of seven projects that will advance breakthrough technologies for reliable and affordable freshwater supplies for the United States. The selected projects will conduct early-stage applied research on desalination and treatment of nontraditional water sources for beneficial end uses. The research will help to bolster a circular water economy by supporting water reuse and valorizing constituents we currently consider to be waste.

The collaborative project teams of industry, academic, national laboratory, and other stakeholders will deliver impact aligned with NAWI’s pipe parity metrics. Pipe parity is defined as technology solutions for treating and reusing nontraditional water sources that are competitive with conventional water sources for specific end use applications.

The research will directly address the highest priority research needs and technical knowledge gaps outlined in the NAWI Roadmap Publication Series, which was published in 2021. The projects focus on addressing challenges related to either autonomous water or precision separation. The autonomous water challenge area aims to develop sensor networks and adaptive process control for improved water desalination treatment systems. The precision separation challenge area aims to develop flexible platform technologies that remove (and/or recover) target compounds from one or more priority classes of contaminants and from specific water end use sectors.

The selected projects include:

(Listed in no particular order)

  • Energy-Efficient Selective Removal of Metal Ions from Mining Influenced Waters Using H-Bonded Organic-Inorganic Frameworks

The H-Bonded Organic-Inorganic Frameworks technology will bring tremendous value into the treatment of nonconventional waters with reduced energy consumption, system complexity, and waste management costs while providing unmatched brine valorization and profit recovery. The precision separation and recovery of metals in acid mine drainage (AMD) waters may also expand the availability of critical materials and help alleviate dependency on metal supply chains for the U.S.

Partners: Rio Tinto Services Inc. (lead), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of Oklahoma, California Department of Water Resources (funding partner)

This project will use machine learning and artificial intelligence to reduce energy and chemical use, improve operational support, increase treatment system uptime, and improve confidence in purified water quality.

Partners: Carollo Engineers, Inc. (lead), Yokogawa Corporation of America, National Water Research Institute, U.S. Military Academy West Point, tntAnalysis, Las Vegas Municipal Water District, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, West Basin Municipal Water District, Orange County Water District, Baylor University, California Department of Water Resources (funding partner)

This project will generate a technology that enables the selective removal and recovery of metals/oxyanions from water, enabling the use of a non-traditional water source, significantly reducing the cost and energy of treatment, and valorizing compounds that would typically be considered waste.

Partners: University of California, Berkeley (lead), Greeley and Hansen LLC, NTS Innovations Inc., California Department of Water Resources (funding partner)

Copper recovery will help to achieve pipe parity with conventional treatment of mining process waters and/or reuse at copper mines and refineries while simultaneously improving environmental sustainability. The project will also provide platform technology that can be used to develop additional ion-selective cation exchange membranes, targeting other ionic contaminants of interest, such as lead and cadmium.

Partners: Rice University (lead), The University of Texas El Paso, Magna Imperio Systems Corp.

This project will overcome the persisting inefficiencies in the current state-of-the art boron removal strategies. The research will also provide a demonstration of an effective method for electrosorption of weak acid/base species and selective removal of trace contaminants.

Partners: Yale University (lead), University of Michigan, Magna Imperio Systems Corp.

Selective electrosorption technologies for the separation and concentration of charged nutrients could enable a sustainable water treatment paradigm, particularly for small communities that struggle to operate centralized facilities and highly sensitive biological removal systems. 

Partners: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (lead), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Voltea Inc.

This project will overcome technical limitations of existing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) destruction technologies by improving selectivity for PFAS destruction, minimizing toxic byproduct formation, and limiting short-chain PFAS formation.

Partners: University of Illinois Chicago (lead), Purdue University, Argonne National Laboratory, M. Davis & Sons Inc., Trimeric Corporation, CDM Federal Programs Corporation, Orange County Water District

NAWI is a public-private partnership that brings together a world-class team of industry and academic partners to examine the critical technical barriers and research needed to radically lower the cost and energy of desalination. NAWI is led by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with National Energy Technology Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and is funded by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office.

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The National Water Research Institute (NWRI) named Dr. Eric M.V. Hoek, NAWI Deputy Topic Area Lead for Process Innovation and Intensification, as the 2022 Clarke Prize Laureate for Outstanding Achievement in Water Science and Technology. The Clarke Prize is awarded to leaders in the areas of water research, science, technology, or policy in the United States. Hoek is a Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). At UCLA, Dr. Hoek leads the UCLA Nanomaterials & Membrane Technology Research (NanoMeTeR) Lab where research explores the union of membrane technologies, nanomaterials and electrochemistry for water, energy and environmental applications. The 29th Clarke Prize Lecture will be delivered by Hoek on 29 October at the award ceremony in Irvine, California.

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Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), in partnership with the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI), announced USD 29,180,282 in total funding (USD 17,730,476 in federal funds and USD 11,449,806 in cost share [39%]) for sixteen projects to support the development of innovative water treatment technologies for the U.S. These selected projects, in combination with other ongoing NAWI-funded projects, are advancing research in NAWI’s challenge areas including autonomous operation, modular and manufacturable systems, and electrified treatment processes.

The projects will deliver impact aligned with NAWI’s pipe parity metrics and further the country towards net-zero emissions by 2050. The selected projects aim to address some of the greatest challenges relating to water and energy security. All NAWI-selected projects support the development of low-cost and energy-efficient desalination technologies to improve nationwide water infrastructure decarbonization and to build climate resilience.

“We are eager to partner with NAWI to support these awardees, whose work will improve the quality and availability of water for human consumption, agriculture, and energy and materials production,” said Kelly Speakes-Backman, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy. “The projects announced today will apply cutting-edge research and development to our water-management challenges, ensuring we make the most of every water resource at our disposal.”

Improved desalination technologies can make nontraditional sources of water a cost-effective alternative. These nontraditional sources can then be applied to a variety of beneficial uses, such as industrial process water and irrigation. As an added benefit, these water supplies contain valuable minerals and organic materials that can be reclaimed and usefully repurposed.

The selected projects will perform research in autonomous operation, modular and manufacturable systems, and electrified treatment processes. These research topics support the technology-related goals established in the NAWI Master Roadmap, which was published in the summer of 2021.

Here are the sixteen selected projects:

  • The University of Texas at Austin (Lead), Carollo Engineers, Georgia Institute of Technology, Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), BlueTech Research, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Eastman Chemical Company (North Ghent and Indian Orchard Sites.)

Title: Assessing the Impact of A-PRIME on Industrial Sector Supply Portfolios: Chemical Industry Case Studies

This project will develop a circular water systems analysis (CWSA) software tool to enable industrial water users to better quantify the total value of implementing novel water treatment, desalination, and reuse systems at their facilities.

  • University of California, Berkeley (Lead), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Fresno State University, University of California, Davis, and Meridian Institute 

Title: Next-Gen Desalination for Agricultural Drainage

This project will complete the first ever study of how distributed desalination and water reuse could secure new water supplies for California’s Central Valley while potentially creating new economic opportunity through the manufacturing of valuable products from brine waste streams from desalination.

  • Stanford University (Lead)

Title: Robust Technology and Policy Pathways for Urban Water Security

This project will develop a new decision support software tool to enable urban water planners and operators to identify cost- and energy-optimal non-traditional source water augmentation pathways, including desalination, that enhance municipal resilience against current and future water shortages.

  • Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Lead), Baylor University, Colorado School of Mines, Colorado Springs Utilities, inCTRL Solutions, IntelliFlux Controls, Inc., and Rockwell Automation

Title: Advanced Process Controls – Autonomous Control and Optimization

This project will develop novel process control methods for water treatment facilities that enable operators to predict and adapt to impending process upsets and equipment failures to enable safe and reliable operations of desalination and water reuse facilities.

  • University of California at Irvine (Lead), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Orange County Water District (OCWD), Hampton Roads Sanitation District (HRSD), Glacier Technologies International, Inc., Brown and Caldwell, and Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts (LACSD)

Title: Process Twins for Decision-Support and Dynamic Energy/Cost Prediction in Water Reuse Processes

This project will develop physical and digital twins of desalination and related treatment processes operating in several water plants to enable operators to better understand the consequences of large deviations from normal operation.

  • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Lead), University of California at Los Angeles, and California State University, San Bernardino

Title: Analytics for Causal Analysis and Decision Support Models for Autonomous and Smart Water Treatment

This project will push the frontier of artificial intelligence in water treatment operations by developing autonomous, adaptive, and co-learning water treatment and desalination systems enabled by fundamental process operation building blocks that predict the operational performance of such systems.

  • Washington University in St. Louis (Lead), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and WaterTectonics, Inc.

Title: Tailored Reductants for Selenium Removal in Iron Electrocoagulation

This project will target selenium, a problematic naturally-occurring element that is not easily removed by reverse osmosis (RO), and can contaminate wastewater in many industrial applications, with a novel electrochemical method of particle removal called electrocoagulation.

  • University of California at Los Angeles (Lead), National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Yale University, and University of Connecticut

Title: Ultra-High Pressure Reverse Osmosis (UHPRO) Membrane and Module Design and Optimization

This project will develop new RO membranes that can withstand the ultra-high osmotic pressures created when desalinating concentrated brines.

  • University of Connecticut (Lead), The University of Texas at Austin, Argonne National Laboratory, NALA Systems, Inc., ZwitterCo, Inc., and Vortex Engineering LLC

Title: Additive Manufacturing for Customized Membranes

This project advances a breakthrough method for manufacturing thin-film composite membranes using Nano-scale 3D printing that will enable membranes to be created for specific separations needs at low cost. 

  • New Mexico State University (Lead), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, New Mexico Produced Water Research Consortium, Flow-Tech Systems, LLC, EVUS, Inc., El Paso Water, Aqua Membranes Inc., and NGL Energy Partners, LP

Title: Electromagnetic Field for Membrane Scaling Control

This project will rigorously and systematically investigate electromagnetic fields (EMF) that have been shown to suppress the nucleation of “scale-forming” minerals in desalination systems.

  • Texas A&M University (Lead), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, WaterTectonics, Inc., KIT Professionals, Inc., Orange County Water District, and CAP Water & Power International, Inc.

Title: Electrocoagulation/Electrooxidation to Accelerate Cost-Effective Water Reuse

This project will develop hybrid iron-iron and iron-carbon electrocoagulation/electro oxidation (EC/EO) systems for pretreating secondary wastewater effluent prior to microfiltration and desalination and improve log10 virus reduction and remove suspended particles in a single step.

  • University of California at Los Angeles (Lead), Georgia Institute of Technology, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Knoxville Utilities Board, WaterTectonics, Inc., and Southern Company

Title: Enabling Minimal Liquid Discharge through a Modular, Flexible, and Electrified Pretreatment System

This project will develop a combination electrochemical reactor based on electrocoagulation with an immersed filtration system to react and separate problematic contaminants in water in a single modular step prior to desalination.

  • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Lead), William Marsh Rice University, Auburn University, Stanford University, and Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)

Title: Direct Electrochemical Reduction of Selenium to Achieve A-PRIME Water Treatment

This project utilizes breakthrough computational techniques to design novel electro-reactive materials that could directly chemically reduce and remove selenium from non-traditional water sources as a pre-treatment step prior to desalination. 

  • Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Lead), Georgia Institute of Technology University, ReactWell, LLC, and Tennessee Valley Authority

Title: Selective Separation of Selenium Oxyanions by Chelating Hydrogen-Bonding Ligands

This project explores a promising family of chemical compounds that could directly bond to selenium atoms prior to RO for efficient removal of this challenging contaminant.

  • University of California at Berkeley (Lead), Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Colorado School of Mines, Colorado Higher Education Competitive Research Authority (CHECRA), and ZOMA Foundation

Title: Porous Polymer Networks (PPN) and Membranes for PFAS and Selenium Removal from Water

This project will design novel cage-like molecules that can be modified to selectively bond to specific contaminants in water, focusing on removal of selenium and PFAS, which are problematic constituents in desalination and water reuse systems.

  • University of California at Berkeley (Lead) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Title: Electrochemical Advanced Oxidation

This project will create a novel, low-cost electrochemical process for oxidizing and removing organic contaminants from water suitable for pre-treatment prior to RO in distributed treatment and water reuse environments. 

NAWI is a public-private partnership that brings together a world-class team of industry and academic partners to examine the critical technical barriers and research needed to radically lower the cost and energy of desalination. NAWI is led by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with National Energy Technology Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and is funded by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Office.

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Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), in partnership with the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI), announced a $5 million solicitation for small-scale desalination and water-reuse technologies that will improve the safety, security, and affordability of America’s water supply.

The Pilot Program request for proposals (RFP) offers applicants the chance to design, build, operate, and test desalination and water reuse treatment systems that produce clean water from non-traditional water sources, such as brackish water, seawater, produced and extracted water, and wastewater.

“The innovative desalination technologies funded through this initiative will help us build a modern water-management infrastructure that can treat a wider range of water resources and equitably deliver water when and where it is needed,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Kelly Speakes-Backman.

Many domestic water sources contain high levels of salt and contaminants, a problem that can be intensified by changing precipitation patterns associated with climate change. This RFP will support projects that significantly reduce the levelized cost of water for small-scale desalination systems, helping the U.S. diversify its water supplies, improve its resilience to the effects of climate change, and move closer to net-zero carbon emissions.

Pilot projects that support the research objectives established in the NAWI Roadmap Publication Series stand the best chance of receiving an award. NAWI will ultimately select 6-8 research teams from industry, academia and the U.S. National Laboratories, with a minimum 35% cost share required from each team.

Concept papers are due by Wednesday, June 29, 2022. To learn more, read the full request for proposals.

NAWI is a public-private partnership that brings together a world-class team of industry and academic partners to examine the critical technical barriers and research needed to radically lower the cost and energy of desalination. NAWI is led by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with National Energy Technology Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and is funded by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Office.

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An Enterprise Approach to Developing Industrial Membrane-based Solutions
A Virtual Seminar with Dr. Adil Dhalla
Singapore Membrane Consortium (SG MEM)
Monday, May 23, 2022 at 12:30 pm PT

Join Singapore Membrane Consortium’s (SG MEM) Dr. Adil Dhalla for a seminar presented by the National Alliance for Water Innovation on Monday, May 23, at 12:30 p.m. PT. He will discuss SG MEM’s framework for taking early stage membrane inventions to commercially viable solutions. These solutions help to tackle both water and environmental challenges.

Hybrid Event Highlights Partnerships and Collaborations for Platform Solutions

One of the biggest challenges for commercialization of novel ideas, even if the Intellectual Property is duly protected, is the gap between laboratory processes, results and testing, and the full scale final product. Key risks include scale-up of component materials and equipment, systems level thinking, testing at pilot scale in an actual application setting, and final implementation.

Singapore’s Membrane Consortium, SG MEM, was set up to enable partnerships and collaborations towards developing Platform Solutions across our Membrane Ecosystem.  It brings together early stage research from our universities, Singapore’s unique translational facilities, and industry partners from upstream (materials companies), to membrane manufacturers, solution providers and end-users of separations technologies.  This expanding and varied group of companies ranges from start-ups to SMEs, large local enterprises to multinationals.

One of the key institutional members of this ecosystem is the Separation Technologies Applied Research and Translation (START) Centre, Singapore’s national facility for bridging the gap between promising innovations in separations, especially membrane based inventions, at the laboratory scale, and industrial scale products and processes.  Over the past three years, this centre has built up broad capabilities in membrane (both flat-sheet and hollow-fiber) fabrication at industrial scale, the design, construction and testing of elements and modules, and the design of pilot systems for testing in real-life scenarios. 

This talk will showcase two case studies in how we have built the framework to take early stage membrane inventions to commercially viable solutions for key challenges in the fields of Water and Environment.  Examples will include technologies focused on industrial waste-water treatment for re-use, including potential recovery of valuables from the waste stream, and development and piloting of systems for lowering desalination system cost.

One of the biggest challenges for commercialization of novel ideas, even if the Intellectual Property is duly protected, is the gap between laboratory processes, results and testing, and the full scale final product.  Key risks include scale-up of component materials and equipment, systems level thinking, testing at pilot scale in an actual application setting, and final implementation.

Singapore’s Membrane Consortium, SG MEM, was set up to enable partnerships and collaborations towards developing Platform Solutions across our Membrane Ecosystem.  It brings together early stage research from our universities, Singapore’s unique translational facilities, and industry partners from upstream (materials companies), to membrane manufacturers, solution providers and end-users of separations technologies.  This expanding and varied group of companies ranges from start-ups to SMEs, large local enterprises to multinationals.

One of the key institutional members of this ecosystem is the Separation Technologies Applied Research and Translation (START) Centre, Singapore’s national facility for bridging the gap between promising innovations in separations, especially membrane based inventions, at the laboratory scale, and industrial scale products and processes.  Over the past three years, this centre has built up broad capabilities in membrane (both flat-sheet and hollow-fiber) fabrication at industrial scale, the design, construction and testing of elements and modules, and the design of pilot systems for testing in real-life scenarios. 

This talk will showcase two case studies in how we have built the framework to take early stage membrane inventions to commercially viable solutions for key challenges in the fields of Water and Environment.  Examples will include technologies focused on industrial waste-water treatment for re-use, including potential recovery of valuables from the waste stream, and development and piloting of systems for lowering desalination system cost. 

Singapore Membrane Consortium and World-class Research, Dedicated Translation and Test-bedding Capabilities

The Singapore Membrane Consortium (SG MEM) was launched in 2018, and serves as an umbrella platform to integrate, coordinate and expand membrane-based technologies and commercial offerings from Singapore to the world. We are funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Singapore, and our mandate includes connecting existing cutting-edge membrane research and innovation activities (which range from fundamental research to applied and translational research) with industry partners. This is aimed at accelerating the commercialization of membrane technologies that meet industry needs in and beyond water e.g. gas separation and purification, concentration and purification of ingredients/mixtures/solvents in the pharmaceutical and food and beverage sectors, controlled drug delivery systems etc.

Our ecosystem encompasses institutes of higher learning (IHLs), national scale-up and translation centres as well as industry members. We currently have 28 industry members on paid membership, spanning from chemical suppliers, to membrane manufacturers, system integrators, solution providers and end users. We also recently signed partnership agreements with international universities and research centres from the US, Europe, Israel and Australia to explore new research areas for potential collaboration.

About Dr. Adil Dhalla 

Dr Adil Dhalla is Managing Director, Separation Technologies Applied Research and Translation (START) Centre, funded by Singapore’s National Research Foundation, is a national facility for bridging the gap between research innovations and commercial outcomes.  The START Centre’s mandate involves scaling up industrially relevant advanced separation technologies and processes from the various Institutions of Higher Learning and Research Institutes in Singapore, evaluating their efficacy at pilot scale, and commercializing them with industrial partners.  Currently in it’s second phase, the START Centre has also been selected to lead an effort to find cutting-edge technologies with the potential to lower the system cost of seawater desalination, translate as needed to higher Technology Readiness Levels, and set up and operate a demonstration scale Integrated Validation Plant for testing the same at scale.

Dr. Dhalla chairs the steering committee of SG MEM, Singapore’s Membrane Consortium.  SG MEM functions as the umbrella organization coordinating innovation in the field of membranes across Institutions of Higher Learning, Research Institutes, and key Industry players, including polymer companies, membrane manufacturers, integrators, and systems level solution providers, as well as end users from pharma, food and beverage and refining.  

He serves on the Water Technology Advisory Panel for PUB, Singapore’s national water agency, and Environment and Resources Standards Committee (ERSC), Singapore.

Dr Dhalla is also concurrently Chief Operating Officer and Deputy Executive Director, Nanyang Environmental and Water Research Institute (NEWRI) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU).  Ranked among the world’s top water research organisations, NEWRI operates across the spectrum of Research, Innovation and Enterprise, providing a multi- and trans-disciplinary platform for some 250 researchers in the domains of Water, Waste, Wastewater, and the Energy-Water nexus.  

Prior to his current roles, he was the Director of the GE Singapore Water Technology Center at NUS, from April 2010 to July 2015, where his role included leading GE’s technology efforts in Singapore, and liaising with regional government agencies and universities on collaborative efforts relating to technology development.  He was also an Ombudsperson for GE Power and Water, ASEAN.

Before coming to Singapore, he was the Technical Director of the Polymer Science and Technology team, and earlier the Chemistry and Characterization team, at GE’s John F. Welch Technology Center in Bangalore, India. Since joining GE in 2000, he established and led technical centers of excellence in chemistry, materials and process technologies.

After completing his five-year integrated master’s degree in chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, he earned a doctorate in chemistry from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Following a post-doctoral stint at Penn State University, he was a research fellow at the Bristol-Myers Squibb PRI in Princeton, N.J., and a senior manager in the research and technology division of Ciba Specialty Chemicals in Mumbai, India.

With industrial experience spanning twenty nine years, including twenty five years in management roles, his key areas of professional expertise include the leadership and operational management of large, multifunctional teams, strategic planning, R&D in product/process development and commercialization.  He has co-authored more than 20 issued patents (US and EP), more than 30 GE internal reports and several publications in peer-reviewed international journals.

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Trevi Systems, Inc., a NAWI Alliance organization, recently licensed a pair of new switchable solvent water extraction technologies that were developed by a team of researchers at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). The research team is led by NAWI Alliance member and INL researcher, Aaron Wilson.

“Trevi Systems is excited to be partnering with NAWI and INL on this promising technology,” said John Webley, Founding Chairman and CEO of Trevi Systems. “With INL providing the theoretical framework underpinning the desalination mechanism and NAWI the funding and strong project management oversight, Trevi is uniquely positioned to rapidly advance the technology to commercial deployment.”

The newly licensed technologies use a closed loop condensable gas solvent process to enable low-energy desalination and contaminant precipitation from aqueous feed streams. Researchers expect that these technologies will be able to produce fresh water from brines (and other high salinity sources, including sea water) using substantially less energy. NAWI plans to help further develop the technologies as part of the “Solvent-Driven Zero Liquid Discharge for Production of Synthetic Gypsum” task.

Read the in-depth journal article to learn more about the fundamentals of the aqueous separation technologies.

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Eden Tech recently licensed two aqueous separation technologies developed by researchers at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), one of which is supported by NAWI. NAWI Alliance member and INL researcher, Aaron Wilson, is leading the vital NAWI project, which pioneers the use of dimethyl ether (DME) as a solvent to concentrate brines for zero-liquid discharge (ZLD).

The second technology, which was supported by DOE’s Critical Materials Institute, also leverages a condensable gas solvent to drive low-cost dewatering and selective precipitation of target products from aqueous feed streams. Eden plans to deploy both technologies in solution mining applications related to the Circular Water project in Saudi Arabia, and is marketing the technology under the CircularH2O brand.

Wilson is the principal investigator of NAWI task Solvent-Driven Zero Liquid Discharge for Production of Synthetic Gypsum. NAWI’s goal with this project is to ultimately advance DME-Driven ZLD desalination for treating water associated with brine management. By addressing the challenge of fugitive solvent loss, the DME-based process can bring significant improvements to brine concentration, including increased water recovery, reduced capital and energy costs, reduced land requirements, and reduced environmental impacts.