Global miners BHP and Rio Tinto have formed a partnership agreement to accelerate the development of technology that could significantly increase water recovery from mine tailings, and in turn reduce potential safety risks and environmental footprints associated with tailings storage facilities. Tailings usually takes the form of a liquid slurry... Read more →
Schlumberger has entered into a partnership with Gradiant, a global water solutions provider, to introduce a key sustainable technology into the production process for battery-grade lithium compounds. Schlumberger’s NeoLith Energy venture (earlier post) uses a continuous production process to selectively extract lithium from brine and then convert it into a... Read more →
The ongoing severe drought in the Colorado River Basin has led to the river flowing at 84% of its historic average flow. An even more intense “megadrought” hit the region around 1,800 years ago, according to a new study published in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters. At just 68%... Read more →
As demand for new energy sources grows, the wastewater co-produced alongside oil and gas (produced water) shows no signs of slowing down: The current volume of wastewater—the result of water forced underground to fracture rock and release the deposits—is estimated at 250 million barrels per day, compared to 80 million... Read more →
The BMW Group has joined the cross-sector “Responsible Lithium Partnership” project. The aim of the project is to reach a shared understanding of responsible management of natural resources with local interest groups and develop a vision for the future of the Salar de Atacama salt flat in Chile. The “Responsible... Read more →
With demand for lithium set to rise over the next decade, Roskill has examined the various ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) concerns that downstream investors and customers face in sourcing lithium products. As sustainability has been brought to the forefront of the lithium debate, producers have sought to underscore their... Read more →
The US Bureau of Reclamation released the Colorado River Basin August 2021 24-Month Study. This month’s study projections are used to set annual operations for Lake Powell and Lake Mead in 2022. Releases from these massive reservoirs are determined by anticipated reservoir elevations. Most of the flow of the Colorado... Read more →
When winter storms threaten to make travel dangerous, people often turn to salt, spreading it liberally over highways, streets and sidewalks to melt snow and ice. But a new study led by Sujay Kaushal of the University of Maryland warns that introducing salt into the environment—whether it's for de-icing roads,... Read more →
Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia have developed a continuous electrically-driven membrane process which successfully enriches lithium from seawater samples of the Red Sea by 43,000 times (i.e., from 0.21 to 9013.43 ppm) with a nominal Li/Mg selectivity >45 million. They precipitated lithium... Read more →
The US Department of Energy (DOE) is awarding $27.5 million to 16 water infrastructure projects. Modern technology has the potential to reduce energy use in aging water infrastructure, particularly in wastewater treatment, which demands up to 2% of domestic electricity use each year. These projects, operating in 13 states, have... Read more →
General Motors plans to reduce water intensity of its operations by 35% by 2035, compared to a 2010 baseline, which could result in enough savings to fill about 4,254 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The automaker has also signed the CEO Water Mandate—a UN Global Compact initiative—joining other global business leaders to... Read more →
Audi has included the economical and efficient use of water as a key aspect of its Mission:Zero environmental program. The company plans to keep its own water consumption to a minimum and stop using drinking water in vehicle production in the future. To this end, Audi is implementing efficient processes... Read more →
Researchers from Sun-Yat Sen University in China report in an open-access paper in ACS ES&T Engineering the development of a catalyst that destroys medications and other compounds already present in wastewater to generate hydrogen fuel, getting rid of a contaminant while producing something useful. Herein, we are aiming to construct... Read more →
The US Department of Energy (DOE) is awarding $35 million to 11 projects as part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy’s (ARPA-E) Submarine Hydrokinetic And Riverine Kilo-megawatt Systems (SHARKS) program. SHARKS teams will develop new economically competitive Hydrokinetic Turbines (HKT) designs for tidal and riverine currents. Hydrokinetic energy is an... Read more →
A team at the University of Tokyo has demonstrated steam electrolysis using a solid acid electrolysis cell (SAEC) for the production of hydrogen. The SAEC used a CsH2PO4/SiP2O7 composite electrolyte and Pt/C electrodes; hydrogen production was successfully demonstrated with Faraday efficiencies around 80%. Their paper appears in the journal ChemSusChem.... Read more →
Although hydropower is broadly considered to be much more environmentally friendly than electricity generated from fossil fuels (e.g., earlier post), a new study by a team at Environmental Defense Fund finds that the climate impact of hydropower facilities varies widely throughout the world and over time, with some facilities emitting... Read more →
The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced selections for up to $24.9 million in funding to drive innovative, industry-led technology solutions to advance the marine and hydrokinetics industry and increase hydropower’s ability to serve as a flexible grid resource. Projects were selected across four Areas of Interest (AOI): Hydropower Operational... Read more →
The US Department of Energy (DOE) selected the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) to lead a US Department of Energy (DOE) Energy-Water Desalination Hub that will address water security issues in the United States. The Hub will focus on early-stage research and development (R&D) for energy-efficient and cost-competitive desalination... Read more →
The US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory recently released an updated version of an online computer model meant to help bioenergy developers preserve critical resources. The model, called Water Analysis Tool for Energy Resources or WATER, has users from more than 35 US states. This map depicts water availability... Read more →
SEAT has succeeded in lowering its water consumption per car produced by 31% in the past 8 years and is moving towards the goal of achieving 38% by 2025. The paint workshop and the rain test booth are the areas that consume the most water and where most progress has... Read more →
Audi has put a new service-water supply center into operation at the Ingolstadt site. In conjunction with the existing treatment plant, about half of the wastewater produced at the site can now be recycled and treated for reuse. In this way, Audi will saves up to 500,000 cubic meters of... Read more →
The US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced $11 million in funding for 7 projects in the fourth and fifth cohorts of the agency’s OPEN+ program: Energy-Water Technologies and Sensors for Bioenergy and Agriculture. Energy-Water cohort teams will develop new, energy-efficient processing technologies for industrial (particularly oil... Read more →
The rapidly increasing number of desalination plants worldwide—now almost 16,000, with capacity concentrated in the Middle East and North Africa—are creating an issue with the chemical-laden leftover brine. In a UN-backed paper, experts estimate the freshwater output capacity of desalination plants at 95 million cubic meters per day—comparable to 40%... Read more →
The amount of water used per well for hydraulic fracturing surged by up to 770% between 2011 and 2016 in all major US shale gas and oil production regions, according to a new Duke University open-access study published in Science Advances. The volume of brine-laden wastewater that fracked oil and... Read more →
Enhanced oil recovery and fracking methods result in large quantities of produced water, which contains, among other things, oil-water emulsions. Rice University scientists have now developed a nanoparticle-based solution that reliably removes more than 99% of the emulsified oil that remains after other processing is done. The Rice lab of... Read more →
For the first time, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has published state-by-state energy and water Sankey diagrams in one location so that analysts and policymakers can find all the information they need in one place. These diagrams depict energy use and water flow during the year 2010, the latest year... Read more →
The life-cycle water consumption of fuel cell electric vehicles using hydrogen produced from natural gas with steam methane reforming is almost 50% less than the life-cycle water consumption of conventional internal combustion engine vehicles using gasoline, according to a study by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL). If the hydrogen... Read more →
Audi is systematically building on its e-fuels strategy. (Earlier post.) Together with the partners Ineratec GmbH (earlier post) and Energiedienst Holding AG, the company has plans for a new pilot facility for the production of e-diesel in Laufenburg, in Canton Aargau (Switzerland). For the first time, the energy needed will... Read more →
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award winners. The annual awards recognize landmark green chemistry technologies developed by industrial pioneers and leading scientists that turn climate risk and other environmental problems into business opportunities, spurring innovation and economic development. The Presidential Green Chemistry... Read more →
The US Department of Energy (DOE) has selected two projects that will test emerging enhanced water recovery (EWR) technologies for their potential to produce useable water from CO2storage sites. The two projects were competitively selected from the five Brine Extraction Storage Test (BEST) projects awarded in September 2015. The two... Read more →
The US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced up to $30 million in funding for a new program for technologies that use renewable energy to convert air and water into cost-competitive liquid fuels. (DE-FOA-0001562) ARPA-E’s Renewable Energy to Fuels through Utilization of Energy-dense Liquids (REFUEL) program seeks... Read more →
Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have analyzed the water consumption for transportation fuels in the United States using an extended lifecycle system boundary that includes the water embedded in intermediate processing steps. In a paper published in the RSC journal Energy & Environmental Science, they compared the water consumed per... Read more →
by James Stafford for Oilprice.com Globally, water demand is threatening to dangerously outpace supply, while in the US, dry states such as Texas and California are suffering from shortages and the future forebodes more suffering. For the North American shale boom, the lack of water is suffocating. Amid this doom... Read more →
by James Stafford of Oilprice.com Texas is famous the world over for two things on a massive scale: oil and droughts. Now the slick but dry state is becoming famous for water: that precious element that both resolves the drought problem and also makes it possible to pump more oil... Read more →
Argonne National Laboratory released the newest version (3.0) of the online tool Water Assessment for Transportation Energy Resources (WATER) this week. This latest version of WATER allows, for the first time, biofuels manufacturers to analyze water consumption associated with use of cellulosic feedstocks such as residue left from lumber production... Read more →
One-pot electrolytic process produces H2 and solid carbon from water and CO2. Li et al. Click to enlarge. A team at George Washington University led by Professor Stuart Licht has simultaneously co-generated hydrogen and solid carbon fuels from water and CO2 using a mixed hydroxide/carbonate electrolyte in a “single-pot” electrolytic... Read more →
ARPA-E’s vision of advanced phenotyping to enhance biomass yield. Click to enlarge. The US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) will award up to $60 million to two new programs ($30 million each). The Transportation Energy Resources from Renewable Agriculture (TERRA) program (DE-FOA-0001211) seeks to accelerate biomass yield... Read more →
Aluminum and water react exothermically to form aluminum hydroxide and hydrogen; this basic property has lured numerous researchers interested in generating hydrogen from the aluminum-water reaction for modern transportation systems for at least 35 years. (Earlier post.) However, among the barriers to the practical application of this reaction are the... Read more →
A team from Duke University, Stanford University, Dartmouth College and Ohio State University has published in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology an overview and synopsis of recent investigations (as of January 2014) into one set of possible environmental impacts from unconventional shale gas development: the potential risks to... Read more →
The US Department of Energy (DOE) released a new report that frames an integrated challenge and opportunity space around the water-energy nexus for DOE and its partners and lays the foundation for future efforts. Present day water and energy systems are tightly intertwined. Water is used in all phases of... Read more →
Left: Wet flood machining. Right: MQL machining. Graphics: Unist Inc. Click to enlarge. Ford Motor Company has added its near-dry machining process—Minimum Quantity Lubrication (MQL)—to six plants globally, a number that will nearly double in the next few years. Machining metal pieces generates friction and heat. Conventional wet machining floods... Read more →
Bitumen production from the Canadian oil sands provides a point of reference that could be used to observe and better manage the land and water impacts of a rapid transition to unconventional fuels, suggests Dr. Sarah Jordaan of the Energy Technology Innovation Policy Research Group, Department of Earth and Planetary... Read more →
Borla Performance Industries, a leader in the design and manufacture of stainless steel performance exhaust, has an option to license a novel nanopore membrane technology developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Borla will combine this with its diesel exhaust technology to create a low-cost, novel system that doubles as... Read more →
Schematic representation of the working principle behind a complete cycle of the desalination battery, showing how energy extraction can be accomplished: step 1, desalination; step 2, removal of the desalinated water and inlet of seawater; step 3, discharge of Na+ and Cl− in seawater; step 4, exchange to new seawater.... Read more →
Ford plans to cut the amount of water used to make each vehicle 30% globally by 2015, compared with the amount of water used per vehicle in 2009. If Ford meets the 30% goal, the amount of water used to make a vehicle will have dropped from 9.5 m3 (2,510... Read more →
A new study led by Praveen Kumar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, details the links between the hydrologic cycle and large-scale land conversion for the cultivation of bioenergy crops, both now and as growing conditions change in the future. The findings, published this week in the journal Proceedings... Read more →
Other environmental concerns have pushed ahead of climate change on a global average basis. Source: Nielsen. Click to enlarge. Concern about climate change/global warming among online consumers around the world took a back-seat to other environmental issues such as air and water pollution, water shortages, packaging waste and use of... Read more →
Water consumption intensity of ethanol from corn grain and crop residue and the avoided/displaced water use credits assigned to coproducts: DGS and electricity. Credit ACS, Mishra and Yeh. Click to enlarge. While a number of studies have tired to assess the water consumption required for ethanol production, the results differ... Read more →
Projected median temperature change in °F (of 112 climate projections) over the Western United States, 2070–2099 relative to 1950–1979. Source: DOI. Click to enlarge. The US Department of the Interior released a report that assesses climate change risks and how these risks could impact water operations, hydropower, flood control, and... Read more →
The 50-year linear surface salinity trend (pss/50-years). Contours every 0.2 pss are plotted in white. Regions where the resolved linear trend is not significant at the 99% confidence level are stippled in grey. Source: Durack and Wijffels. Click to enlarge. A new study co-authored by CSIRO (Australia) scientists Paul Durack... Read more →