Ten years as a patent attorney with Exxon Mobil initially predisposed Gary Katz to see purification of “produced water” at oil wells as the market for the off-grid desalination startup he founded and bootstrapped in 2016, aiming to use the industry’s own wasted gas it flares onsite. “We realized there [...]
The American-Made Challenges: Solar Desalination Prize is a four-stage, $9 million prize competition, providing an additional $1 million in support, designed to accelerate the development of low-cost desalination systems that use solar-thermal power to produce clean water from salt water. Competitors will receive cash prizes as they advance through each [...]
Wastewater treatment is an increasingly complex and resource intensive process. Many operators of wastewater processing plants have been looking for ways to lower their OPEX costs while using less resources and reducing the carbon print to carry out their cleaning process. Three systems have been developed and installed in [...]
Reverse osmosis is one of the most common methods for purifying saline water, but the process produces limited results. About 20% to 50% of the water that enters the system remains as a concentrated waste stream. There are several existing methods for handling concentrate streams, including injecting the waste into [...]
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the launch of the $9 million American-Made Challenges: Solar Desalination Prize, a competition to accelerate the development of systems that use solar-thermal energy to produce clean water from very-high-salinity water. “The U.S. has the technical knowledge, vision, and talent it takes to [...]
This first concept entails 99 hectares of PVC tubes with a diameter of a half meter, sunk 4 meters below ground, with air pumped through them at 1.5 meters per second. The solar thermal plant used in the study covers an area of about 195 hectares. Spanish researchers propose [...]
Desalination plants — which convert seawater into drinking water and water for agriculture — have been used since the 1950s in the Middle East and tropical regions of the world. While the technology has met urgent needs for clean water supplies, the environmental cost has been heavy due to its [...]
Technology researched at Cranfield University that harnesses concentrated solar power to desalinate sea water is being adopted by a new smart city under construction in Saudi Arabia. NEOM – a region in northwest Saudi Arabia on the Red Sea being built from the ground up as a living laboratory – [...]
Wet cooling of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants would be preferable if there was plenty of available water, because it promotes greater thermal efficiency. However, most CSP tends to be built in very arid regions, and so for environmental reasons, developers increasingly get these solar thermal power projects permitted only [...]
Saudi Arabia's futuristic $500-billion new city Neom has signed an agreement with the UK-based Solar Water Limited for the construction of the first desalination plant with 'Solar Dome' technology in the city. The pilot project promises to revolutionise the water desalination process, helping solve one of the world’s most pressing [...]
Deserts and other sun-drenched regions are the ideal location for concentrated solar power plants, but where sunlight is abundant, water tends to be scarce and dust covers everything. The EU-funded project MinWaterCSP develops new solutions to reduce water consumption in such plants, making the technology more attractive for countries that [...]
Taking a cue from the self-cleaning properties of the lotus leaf, researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have shed new light on microscopic forces and mechanisms that can be optimized to remove dust from solar panels to maintain efficiency and light absorption. The new technique removed 98 percent of [...]
Current approaches to water desalination are tremendously expensive and energy-intensive, so the search is very much on for new technologies that can get the job done more efficiently. Scientists in Melbourne have put forward one rather promising solution, developing a new kind of system that heats up and purifies water [...]
