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Category: Investment, Water
O2 ENVIRONMENTAL Technology Assessment Group (TAG) Feature
Low Cost Desalination – Technology Breakthrough
Brought to Investors by www.investorideas.com and its water investing portal, www.water-stocks.com
January 29, 2010 Edition
By Paul O'Callaghan
Bio and more info: http://www.water-stocks.com/Paul_OCallaghan/
Canadian firm, Saltworks Technologies, recently got some exciting press in The Economist in relation to their desalination technology, which they claim reduce the electrical energy required for desalination by over 70%. They report they can produce 1m3 of water with 1kW hour of electrical energy, compared to the 3.7kWhr per m3, which is what is currently achievable using reverse osmosis with the use of energy recovery devices.
So how to they do it? Well its novel. It appears to be a new approach. And novel and new are two things scarce as hens teeth in relation to desalination technologies.
They use solar heat (or waste heat) to evaporate water and concentrate salt water. They are converting solar energy into osmotic energy by doing this. They then use this osmotic energy to desalinate water.
Doing this they reckon they can produce 1m3 of water using 1kWh of electrical energy, which is used to pump fluids around the pipework.
Because the system is not under pressure, they can use plastic pipes instead of steel pipes, potentially reducing capital costs also.
I met with Saltworks about six months ago in Vancouver and I was impressed by the methodical way they have been going about technology commercialisation. Despite winning a technology innovation award in British Columbia in May 2009, they have kept this remarkably quiet.
BlueTech Tracker1 – SaltWorks Technologies
| Company | Technology | Revenues | Investment Stage | Ownership | Disrupto-meter |
| SaltWorks Technology | SaltWorks Desalination system | Pre-Revenue | Round A | Private | Moderately Disruptive |
O2 Environmental: Water News Report:
City of Orlando, FL, to start up worlds largest Supercritical Water Oxidation Plant for treating wastewater sludge Feb 2010
The City of Orlando Florida is about to make history by commissioning the worlds largest full-scale supercritical water oxidation plant to treat wastewater sludge. If this is successful, it will be an important milestone in proving that this technology can be applied to deal with waste sludges.
It will be quite a large demonstration facility, with a capacity of 5 dry tonnes of sludge per day. This will be capable of taking about 25% of the sludge from the 40MGD Ironbridge Wastewater treatment plant. The goal after that is to run the plant contiuously for a period of 90 days to demonstrate reliability of the technology.
For those of you not familiar with supercritical water oxidation , the basic premise is that once water goes above 370 Deg C and 220 Bar of pressure, it enters a fourth state, referred to as supercritical. If you introduce oxygen into supercritical water, you can completely oxidise organic material. This releases energy which can be used to generate electricity and heat, so there is a renewable energy angle to this, and the technology does not have the licensing and air permitting issues associated with incineration.
Supercritical processes are not new in and of themselves, but the treatment of sewage sludge, is a new application of the technology. The US military use supercritical water oxidation to destroy military waste.
It will be interesting to see how the Ironbridge and other SCWO projects such as Aquacritox progress.
Gasification and Pyrolysis are receiving considerable attention with demonstration plants in California (Rentech in Rialto), Stamford Connecticut ( Nexterra) and Florida ( MaxWest ). I would take the view that the future of sludge handling will involve a) moving away from aerobic secondary treatment process which will eliminate WAS, and b) complete energy recovery in one step, possibly eliminating need for anaerobic digestion as an intermediary step.
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