desalination

BOSTON--It's a business with extremely risk-averse customers that have little money spend. On the plus side, it's vital to life and a strained natural resource.

Water purification and treatment techniques continue to attract bright ideas from researchers and entrepreneurs, but getting beyond a nifty prototype is challenge they all face, said a panel here at the TechConnect World conference on clean tech and nanotechnology.

Many of the municipal water treatment and distribution systems in the U.S. are in desperate need of repair. Other large potential customers for more energy-efficient or effective water treatment facilities are corporations, such … Read more

The waters of the Gulf of Mexico will see a novel offshore platform later this year, one that will use wave power to desalinate water.

Independent Natural Resources, which makes the Seadog water pump, on Wednesday said that it has received a permit for a wave power generation facility off the coast of Freeport, Texas. The company says it's the first to receive a "section 10 permit" from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to operate a wave generator in the U.S.

The facility, which the company hopes to put in the water by the … Read more

NanoH2O on Thursday said it will supply components to the Navy for an on-ship desalination test that promises to be significantly more efficient with energy and space.

The El Segundo, Calif.-based company has developed a membrane that can improve the energy efficiency of reverse osmosis seawater desalination machines by 50 percent to 100 percent, according to NanoH2O CEO Jeff Green. It plans to start production of modules that use the membrane for testing with customers in the second half of this year, he said.

The Office of Naval Research awarded NanoH2O $400,000 to test the system on ships … Read more

IBM and Saudi Arabia's national research group are opening a solar-powered desalination plant in the city of Al-Khafji.

The pilot plant will supply water to about 100,000 people and pump out about 30,000 cubic meters of potable drinking water per day. It will run exclusively on solar-powered electricity, and showcase two technology breakthroughs that were the result of a multi-year collaborative research agreement signed in 2008 by IBM and the Saudi research group known as the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST).

On the solar end, the plant will use ultra-high concentrator photovoltaic (UHCPV) cells … Read more

Carbon nanotech has been applied to everything from boat construction to windshields and now, with a licensing agreement from Livermore Lab, a Hayward, Calif., company will apply it to water desalination and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The National Nuclear Security Administration's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has licensed a new carbon nanotube technology to its spinoff company Porifera. The company will develop permeable membranes for CO2 sequestration, water desalination, and other liquid-based separations based on discoveries made at Livermore.

The technology integrates carbon nanotubes into polymer membranes, increasing the flux of carbon dioxide capture by two orders of … Read more

Renew Blue's Seadog pump, which uses wave and tidal power to produce electricity and can be harnessed for desalination, is about to be put to the commercial test off the coast of Texas.

Earlier this month, Renew Blue, a subsidiary of the Minneapolis-based Independent Natural Resources, was granted the first-ever state off-shore wave energy lease from the Texas General Land Office. On Thursday, Renew Blue announced that it has licensed its technology to Texas Natural Resources and that they will partner to develop an off-shore facility for 18 Seadog pumps that will both produce power and desalinate seawater for … Read more

Desalination start-up Oasys Water is banking on the fact that water will shortly be the new oil.

Flagship Ventures, Advanced Technology Ventures, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson seem to agree as the three invested a total of $10 million in Series A funding, according to a Wednesday announcement from Oasys Water.

Oasys (Osmotic Application Systems) Water, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company formed from a Yale University research project and seed money from GreatPoint Ventures, employs patented water treatment technology called Engineered Osmosis (EO).

The system was developed by Rob McGinnis, Oasys chief technology officer, while he was under Menachem Elimelech, the … Read more

I was thinking recently about the many problems facing our fragile planet--economic crisis, global warming, massive water shortages, and so on--and got to wondering what can be done to solve them.

In part, this stemmed from the recent American election and what it meant for our country and the world, but also from thinking about the ongoing alternate-reality game being run by the Institute for the Future, Superstruct, which tasks players with coming up with ideas that could help stave off a fictional extinction of the human race.

One problem, it seems to me, is that there are so many … Read more

Excavating oil and gas has a little-known byproduct that costs the energy industry billions of dollars annually in removal--smelly sludge water.

A New Mexico start-up is trying to deal with the problem. Privately held Altela has developed a hydrothermal system that aims to turn the ancient groundwater extracted in oil or gas production into clean drinking water. The company calls its system "clean technology" because it can produce potable water with less energy than other desalinization methods, such as carbon filtration, without the use of pumps. Its technology can also be considered more energy efficient than hiring 18-wheel … Read more