Innovation Pipeline

We’ve heard plenty about the developing world’s water woes but California now faces one of the worst droughts ever recorded. California’s Department of Water Resources says supplies in major reservoirs and many groundwater basins are far below average. Add to that the outdated statewide water system and the court-ordered restrictions on water deliveries.
And it gets worse in neighboring states like Utah. Lake Powell is one of a dozen reservoirs linked to the Colorado river. It’s in a drought that began in 2000. The outlook is so bleak that it’s likely Lake Powell will vanish by midcentury, according to a new University of Colorado at Boulder study.

Source: USGS
Those big problems demand big solutions.
There’s plenty of effort being focused on innovation, technology and conservation. One effort is underway at University of California at Los Angeles, where researchers have achieved a breakthrough with water desalination with a new system called M3.
In the first part of a reverse-osmosis process, 65 percent of the water fed in was recovered as drinkable. Researcher Yoram Cohen, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and lead investigator on the team, claims the system has the potential to recover as much as 95 percent using an accelerated chemical-demineralization process also developed at UCLA.
Another compelling aspect: the desal system is small enough to fit in the back of a van, where 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.
The M3 demonstrated its effectiveness in a recent field study in the San Joaquin Valley, when it desalted agricultural drainage water that was nearly saturated with calcium sulfate salts, accomplishing this with just one reverse-osmosis stage.
Another advantage of the system is it can measure in real-time the water pH, temperature, turbidity and salinity. What’s more, operators can also monitor how much energy the system is using. Specialized software provides techniques to optimize M3 so it can run with minimum energy consumption.
No doubt water woes are here to stay but the innovation and creative insights to handle the problem are moving fast to meet the challenge. Let’s hope they intersect well before midcentury, before Lake Powell and other water bodies vanish from the planet. –Lee Bruno