Energy Recovery Thirsty for New Desalination Markets

The desalination guru company, Energy Recovery, has a parched throat for other things...

The Norwegian-American-Kuwaiti company – which held one of the few IPOs in greentech last year – today unfurls the PX-300, a larger, fine-tuned version of its energy capture devices for desalination plants. The PX-300 can process 300 gallons per minute, or more than its earlier versions.

The new device will likely be deployed in arrays in the large seawater desalination plants being currently constructed or planned in Australia, the Middle East and China where the flow can reach tens of thousands of gallons per minute. Energy Recovery commands approximately 70 percent of the market for its component, said Richard Stover, the company's CTO.

Resorts on the Red Sea and Baja are big purchasers of the systems. "In some of these places, there is no infrastructure," said Stover, adding that the company is also examining new markets.

Energy Recovery wants to start making equipment for brackish water desalination plants, which are more common in the U.S., as well as the emerging forward osmosis systems championed by, among others, Yale spin-out Oasys.

It is also working with Starkraft Energi in Norway to generate power through osmosis. Starkraft, optimistically, believes it could generate most of Norway's power through osmotic pressure gradients created where Norway's many streams and rivers meet the sea. The initial stage of a pilot will begin later this year.

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Energy Resources in a lot of ways can be considered the weirdo of desalination. Reverse osmosis desalination is effectively an energy-intensive pressure play: Water gets forced through a fine membrane that removes seawater. Energy Recovery's machines do not remove salt. Instead, they harness the pressure in the wastewater stream that flows from reverse osmosis systems and then feed it to the pressurizing machines at the front of the process, thereby lowering the total energy required.

Exploiting this pressure drastically reduces the amount of energy required to purify water, which in turn lowers the cost. Energy costs have been the Achilles' heel of desalination.It took around 20 kilowatt hours per cubic meter to desalinate water with traditional multi-stage systems, he said. Reverse osmosis membranes dropped that to 8 kilowatts to 10 kilowatt hours per cubic meter.

Putting a turbine in the waste stream and turning the pressure into waste stream drops it to 5 kilowatts to 6 kilowatts per cubic meter.

Energy Research's pressure harvesting technique drops it to 2 kilowatts per cubic meter. The system is also 97 percent efficient on average, which in turn makes the reverse osmosis process 60 percent efficient. Turbine systems – which convert hydraulic power to mechanical power and then to electricity – can't match that, he argued.

- Brewskie

Awsome Desalination Breakthrough

UCLA researchers, with the mini-mobile-modular (M3) "smart" water desalination and filtration system, have again vindicated the popular business maxim: bigger isn't always better (link).

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

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

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

"In this specific field study by our team, in the first part of the reverse osmosis process, 65 percent of the water that was fed in was recovered as drinking water, or potable water," said Yoram Cohen, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and lead investigator on the team. "We can potentially go up to 95 percent recovery using an accelerated chemical demineralization process that was also developed here at UCLA. This first field study with the M3 was a major achievement and the first phase of our high-recovery RO process demonstration program."

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In addition to its use as a pilot-scale testing unit, the M3, according to Bartman, could also be deployed to various locations and used to produce fresh water in emergency situations.

"The M3's 'smart' nature means it can autonomously adapt to almost any variation in source water, allowing the M3 system to operate in situations where traditional RO desalination systems would fail almost immediately," he said.

Though the system is compact enough to be transported anywhere in the back of a van, it can generate 6,000 gallons of drinking water per day from the sea or 8,000 to 9,000 gallons per day from brackish groundwater. By Cohen's estimate, that means producing enough drinking water daily for up to 6,000 to 12,000 people.

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Rahardianto said that the highly saline agricultural drainage wastewater in the San Joaquin Valley is one of the most difficult source waters to desalt.

- Brewskie

China, Saudi Arabia Team Up for Desalination Projects

Ironic: two-thirds of the world is covered with water, and only 3% is fresh water. Even with 3%, there's still plenty of water; the problem - its availability in particular parts of the world, the scarcity of clean water, or diminishing sources of water because of climate change.

China and the Middle East are remedying this by building desalination plants. Desalination isn't cheap: it's expensive, energy-intensive; but with a growing population, the availability of drinkable water is a must.

Shanghai Electric Power Generation Group (SECPG), and Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power International recently announced a partnership to work on power and desalination projects. The article can be read here.

The two countries also singed a deal that allows Chinese companies to explore and develop oil and gas projects.

- Brewskie