Innovation Pipeline

Drinking water supplies around the world are in desperate straits, as illustrated in a recently released report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.
The 196-page report was a collaborative effort of 13 federal agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center and Jerry Melillo of the Marine Biological Laboratory, an international research center headquartered in Woods Hole, Mass.
Among the report’s key findings is a stern warning for the western U.S.: “Drought, related to reduced precipitation, increased evaporation and increased water loss from plants, is an important issue in many regions, especially in the West. Declines in mountain snowpack are important in the West and Alaska where snowpack provides vital natural water storage.”
Water experts and innovators everywhere are deeply concerned that people will not shift their habits before there’s an emergency. Peter Gleick, director of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Oakland Calif. “Good information is necessary and critical but it may not be the so-called ‘gating factor.’ I’m no longer convinced we’ll take action on problems before they become pronounced. The climate system of our planet is fundamentally being changed and we’re running out of time.”

[Read more →]

You’ve probably never heard of terpenes but you sure have smelled them. They’re the aroma in many spices like mint and basil. And scientists who study the plant-made molecules have found other nice traits: they repel pests, protect plants from diseases and attract pollinators.
So what do they have to do with cleantech? Plenty.
In an effort to get away from synthetic pesticides, scientists have been working with a host of natural compounds and organisms called biopesticides that control agricultural pests and don’t have adverse health effects on people.
Researchers at Michigan State University studying these molecules discovered new enzymes that make monoterpenes, which could lead to widespread natural ways to ward off pests.
edfa

Sensor networks are now commonly used for jobs like monitoring and managing heat and light in buildings. Now they’re being deployed underwater, to gain insights about environmental conditions beneath the oceans.
But lots of problems make underwater sensor networks difficult. Wireless signal propagation, short bandwidth, limited battery life and also a highly corrosive environment where fouling of electronics is a way of life.
Research scientists at the University of California at San Diego have made strides in building low-cost sensor networks that operate in the ocean. These networks will provide scientists with a cost-effective tool to enable applications for oceanographic data collection, pollution monitoring, offshore exploration, disaster prevention, assisted navigation and tactical surveillance applications.

[Read more →]

It didn’t command headlines but an important piece of legislation passed recently that involves water research.
The House of Representatives on April 23 passed H.R. 1145, the National Water Research and Development Initiative Act of 2009. It’s designed to coordinate national research-and-development efforts regarding water use, supply and demand.
The problem is Americans are drinking a lot of tapwater containing trace quantities of prescription drugs and other complex chemical compounds. Currently there is no long-term plan to address this issue and what level of drugs pose health concerns to the public. In line with investigating that problem, it’s also important to study how these compounds can be removed from our drinking-water sources.

[Read more →]

No doubt, cleantech companies were upbeat when the White House stimulus package allocated 13 percent of the total $104 billion stimulus package for green technology. Much of the economic stimulus will flow to cleantech infrastructure, but exactly where will it go?
Cleantech sectors, which were big winners, include smart grid technology with $4.5 billion, energy efficiency for federal buildings with $4.5 billion and wind and solar with $6 billion for new loan guarantees.
It’s an unheard of sum for cleantech. And a recent survey of technology experts by Changewave Research sheds some light on where the impact will be felt most. Changewave surveyed 409 members of the Changewave Research Network, people who work for companies involved in infrastructure projects. The March 12-17 survey covered infrastructure spending in the transportation, electricity/smart grid and broadband sectors. But for this blog I’m going to focus on the results for the smart grid.
[Read more →]

Researchers at the University of Minnesota reported recently that the production of ethanol fuelstocks may consume as much as three times more water than previously thought, depending on where they’re grown.
They found that ethanol fuelstock grown in Iowa uses the least water — about 6 gallons of water for each gallon of ethanol. While fuelstock grown in Minnesota uses about 19 gallons of water per gallon of ethanol.
And that’s just on the farm. The researchers found that total water use in the production of a single gallon of ethanol is up to 2,100 gallons of water — from farm to fuel pump — depending on the regional irrigation practice in growing corn. Although a dozen states in the Corn Belt consume less than 100 gallons of water per gallon of ethanol, making them better-suited for ethanol production.
Annual bioethanol production in the U.S. is about 9 billion gallons, according to the University of Minnesota researchers, who published their findings in an article titled “Water Embodied in Bioethanol in the United States” in the April 15 issue of the American Chemical Society’s journal.

[Read more →]

There’s no better way to take the pulse of innovation than to survey R&D spending. And there’s no better time than during a downturn, because history tells us that this is the opportunity for businesses to gain advantage by investing and growing.
Two recent R&D surveys, one from the Wall Street Journal and the other from McKinsey
were released recently and both confirm that many companies are still spending on R&D (for now).
So what about green investment? Are companies spending on cleantech? They should be, since transforming energy markets (which is critical) will require an unprecedented level of R&D.
But the challenges are enormous. The energy industry is the largest on the planet, with sales of more than $2 trillion a year, and industrial labs and government have scaled back R&D drastically over the past 20 to 30 years.
Still, the Obama administration seems at least to recognize the need. It has outlined an ambitious policy to invest in energy R&D, a big reversal from previous years of shrinking energy R&D budgets. Whether the government can sustain the investment is unclear (R&D is expensive) but the gains from R&D today will far exceed the up-front cost 20 years down the road.
[Read more →]

The U.S. water market is $95 billion ($425 billion globally). Of that $95 billion, $24 billion is spent on industrial wastewater purification and recovery.
Innovative water technology startup Crystal Clear Technologies has developed a novel approach to separate out toxic contaminants such as arsenic, copper, uranium and selenium. The technology is specifically relevant to industrial smelters, power plants and mining operations.
“We’re the first company doing this kind of approach,” says James Harris, CEO of Crystal Clear Technologies.
The company uses a low-cost biopolymer with absorbents called Chitosan to separate out contaminants. It works as a sponge that binds to specific toxic elements. At the core of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company’s technology is bifunctional ligands, which bind to toxic metals on the order of eight times more effectively than existing reverse-osmosis systems.
[Read more →]

A global water crisis is expected by 2025 unless economically viable ways of purifying water can be developed.

One of the major threats to water supplies is contamination, from saltwater from industrial waste, from pesticides.

New sensors would help. Research labs are working on sensors specially designed to deal with monitoring and purification problems.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have synthesized DNA to detect trace amounts of lead, mercury, arsenic and other contaminants in water. The DNA sensors can be produced in the form of sophisticated testing instruments suitable for metropolitan water districts or in the form of strips — like a home pregnancy test — for households and other direct-source water users.

And once you know your water is bad, what do you do about it? Urbana-Champaign is helping there as well. Mark Shannon, director of the Center of Advanced Materials for Purification of Water with Systems at the university, and his team have synthesized chemically activated fibers and granules of carbon to remove heavy metals and pesticides like atrazine.
[Read more →]

Researchers at Duke University have come to respect the power of nano-engineered buckyballs.

In one project, the engineers found that ultrafine mesh coatings made of carbon buckyballs can hinder the ability of bacteria and other microorganisms to colonize the membranes that filter impurities from water. This is one of the major problems — and costs — in treating H2O.

The bacteria builds up and attracts other organic matter. In time, a film of biological material accumulates. A reduction in membrane-replacement cost, even of 50 percent, would translate to huge savings.

“Biofouling is viewed as one of the biggest costs associated with membrane-based water-treatment systems,” said Claudia Gunsch, assistant professor of civil engineering at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering and senior member of the research team.

A buckyball is one shape within the family of nano-carbon shapes known as fullerenes. They’re both named after Richard Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome, because their shapes resemble his famous structure.

When water-filtering membranes are treated with buckyballs, the researchers discovered that only a very small number of bacteria (20 units) are able to colonize on the surface material.

[Read more →]