Selectee: New Mexico State University

Project Partners: Veolia Water Technologies and Solutions, Inc.

Location: Veolia Water Technologies and Solutions, Inc.

Description: Desalination technologies typically extract a fraction of pure water and leave behind a salty residual liquid called brine or concentrate that is expensive and difficult to dispose of at inland desalination facilities. This project is focused on the design and build of a novel process to further concentrate the brine using electrodialysis, producing more water and transforming the dissolved salts into valuable industrial chemicals. The pilot system will be fielded at the Kay Bailey Hutcheson Desalination Plant in El Paso, Texas.

Selectee: Global Water Innovations

Project Partners: Trevi Systems Inc.

Locations: Cambria, California; San Luis Obispo, California; Oxnard, California; Ventura County, California; South Beach County, California

Description: Desalinating and reusing municipal, industrial and agricultural wastewater is an attractive approach for improving the reliability and resilience of water resources. But the presence of dissolved minerals that can plug RO membranes and modules (a process called scaling) limits the amount of water that can be recovered using membrane processes such as RO. This project aims to integrate a novel, high-efficiency process for removing scale-forming ions from brine concentrates, enabling much higher amounts of water recovery and smaller volumes of waste brine. The mobile testbed will demonstrate high-recovery desalination at five sites in California.

Selectee: Garver USA

Project Partners: City of Rio Rancho, New Mexico; the University of California, Los Angeles; NX Filtration, University of Colorado-Boulder; WaterTectonics, Inc; Rockwell Automation; Powel Water

Location: Rio Rancho, New Mexico

Description: Water pre-treatment (before desalination) remains a critical process step for maximizing water production and lowering desalination cost. Current pretreatment technologies are large, slow, and multi-step, making them suitable for large desalination projects but clumsy and less effective for small-scale systems. This project will integrate a novel high-performance nanofiltration membrane system as pretreatment alongside two variants of electrocoagulation as a high-efficiency, all-electric pretreatment strategy. The mobile testbed developed by this team will travel to several sites around Albuquerque, New Mexico, evaluating high-efficiency desalination of different non-traditional water sources.

Selectee: University of Texas, El Paso 

Project Partners: New Mexico State University

Location: Alamogordo, New Mexico

Description: Electrodialysis Metathesis (EDM) is a desalination process that uses specialized membranes and chemistry to produce fresh water while transforming the residual brine into two streams – a calcium-rich solution and a sulfate-rich solution. These two streams can be further refined into valuable industrial chemicals, producing a secondary revenue stream from desalination – and reducing the volume of waste brine. Until now, EDM has required the addition of sodium chloride (NaCl) to supply required ions for these solutions. In this project, a new ion-selective membrane technology will be utilized that will eliminate the need for additional NaCl and may lower the energy requirements of traditional EDM by as much as 50%. The system will be tested at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility (BGNDRF) in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Project Lead: Jacobs Engineering

Project Partners: New Mexico State University; Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation; DuPont

Location: Yuma, Arizona

Description: Softening is the process of removing certain ions from water that otherwise precipitate during the desalination process, limiting the amount of water that can be recovered from inland brackish water sources using RO. This project proposes to use a novel softening technology to selectively remove these scale-forming ions by forcing the precipitation in the form of hydrotalcite – a mineral that is made from these ions – that could be used as a soil amendment or as an additive for concrete.

Project Lead: Colorado School of Mines

Project Partners: Stanford University; University of Colorado, Boulder

Location: Redwood City, California

Description: Municipal wastewater can be reprocessed into drinking quality water. Reverse osmosis (RO) has traditionally been a final treatment step that can provide the high purity required to satisfy drinking water quality regulations, but RO generates a brine waste stream and drives up the cost and energy required for direct potable reuse (DPR). This project will perform a side-by-side demonstration at Silicon Valley Clean Water’s treatment plant in Redwood City, California, of both an RO-based treatment train and a novel treatment train that achieves nearly the same purity without using RO. The team will also investigate how different types of wastewater treatment technologies produce effluents that are either easier or harder to transform into drinking quality water.

Project Lead: University of California, Berkeley

Project Partner: Allensworth Progressive Association

Location: Allensworth, California

Description: Arsenic is a pervasive, naturally occurring carcinogenic contaminant in groundwater.  Thousands of wells in California and around the world have arsenic levels that exceed safe levels, forcing communities to install expensive and hard-to-operate treatment systems or shutter their local wells and travel miles to fill water jugs for home use. This project will demonstrate a new simple, reliable, and highly automated electrochemical process that uses iron and electrical current to safely remove arsenic in well water. The team will partner with the community of Allensworth, California, a rural community whose residents must drive miles to pay for retail water from a kiosk.

Project Lead: Purdue University

Project Partners: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Colorado School of Mines

Location: Denver, Colorado

Description: Conventional reverse osmosis utilizes high pressure pumps to continuously supply pressure into RO modules and generate fresh water. This steady-state process can result in the gradual build-up of organic and inorganic precipitates on membrane surfaces (known as fouling), which reduces water production and requires frequent cleaning. This project will demonstrate a novel batch-mode process whereby RO modules are pressurized using a piston-based pump and fresh water is produced in a non-continuous process. This approach to reverse osmosis not only uses less energy but may also greatly reduce the rate of fouling of membrane surfaces.

Project Lead: Aris Water

Project Partners: New Mexico State University; Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University; Stanford Linear Accelerator Center; Garver, OLISoft, Inc.

Location: Reeves County, Texas

Description: High salinity produced water is predominant in U.S. oilfields. Reverse osmosis (RO) has been used to desalinate low-salinity produced water, but has a salinity limit below that of most U.S. produced waters. This project will field a novel advancement that uses commercial RO membranes and infrastructure, and counterflow RO (CFRO) in order to enable treatment of high salinity water by managing the osmotic pressure differential across the membranes of sequential stages in a counter-flow arrangement.

Full Title: Field Pilot Testing of Electrically Conductive Reverse Osmosis (ECRO) Membranes for High Mineral Content Brackish Groundwater Desalination

Project Lead: Pacifica Water Solutions

Project Partners: N/A

Location: Sand City, California

Description: Unconventional and difficult-to-treat water resources, such as brackish groundwater, have complex chemistries, and treating them to freshwater levels requires complex processes consisting of multiple stages of pre-treatment followed by membrane desalination, making them costly and difficult to operate which limit their widespread application and adoption by society and various industries. Both ECNF and ECRO use combinations of applied electrical fields and in situ electrochemical generation to actively resist membrane fouling – the deposition of particles onto membrane surfaces that causes pore clogging and diminished performance over time. The project will operate the pilot system as two parallel trains to evaluate the head-to-head performance of ECRO compared with conventional RO at Sand City, California.

Full Title: A Convergent Monitoring Platform for Dynamic Characterization of Reverse osmosis Membrane Fouling and Demonstration of Innovative Control Strategies

Project Lead: Rice University

Project Partners: University of Texas, Austin; University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Orange County Water District; Noria Water Technologies, NALA Membranes, Inc.; Carollo Engineers

Location: Orange County, California

Description: Membrane fouling and scaling is a pervasive and costly aspect of many membrane-based water treatment systems. This project will demonstrate and validate an unprecedented sensing/time series monitoring system at Orange County Water District for the dynamic characterization of reverse osmosis (RO) biofouling, mineral scaling, and organic fouling. The data obtained from this system will be combined with pilot and full-scale RO performance data to train next-generation Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) models to better forecast and mitigate fouling and scaling. This project will also evaluate novel sensor technologies and a new commercial membrane technology that can resist the application of oxidizing cleaning chemicals.