Water in the desert
- PDF / 790,052 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 585 x 783 pts Page_size
- 23 Downloads / 297 Views
Inside: EDITORIAL
Water in the desert ENERGY SECTOR ANALYSIS
Can carbon capture and storage deliver on its promise? ENERGY SECTOR ANALYSIS
Search for water-splitting catalysts for global usage
ENERGY QUARTERLY ORGANIZERS CO-CHAIRS George Crabtree, Argonne National Laboratory, USA Elizabeth A. Kócs, University of Ilinois at Chicago, USA Andrea Ambrosini, Sandia National Laboratories, USA Monika Backhaus, Corning Incorporated, France
Water in the desert
David Cahen, Weizmann Institute, Israel
El Paso, Texas, is located in the desert southwest region of the United States. The Rio Grande, which separates El Paso from its neighbor, Juarez, Mexico, was a major water source in the past, but now it flows only a couple of months a year. With an average annual rainfall of less than nine inches, El Paso relies primarily on groundwater to supply potable water for a growing population, but the groundwater is becoming progressively salty. To supplement the dwindling supply from moderately salty wells, in 2007, El Paso Water, the local water utility, opened what was then the world’s largest plant to make potable water from groundwater by reverse osmosis with a production capacity of 27.5 million gallons per day. El Paso Water is now planning a facility for direct potable reuse (DPR) of treated wastewater, which is expected to be the world’s largest DPR operation. Another first for El Paso is a plant under construction by the Enviro Water Minerals Company, which will extract industrial chemicals from the reverse osmosis concentrate and recover potable water that will be returned to the El Paso Water distribution system. In 2008, the Center for Inland Desalination Systems (CIDS) was established at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). I was recruited to be the Director of CIDS and immediately recruited Malynda Cappelle, a rising star in desalination research at Sandia National Laboratories, to join CIDS. The Desal Prize competition was held last year at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility (BGNDRF) in neighboring New Mexico, and the competitors had to rely completely on renewable energy to power their desalination processes. The UTEP team, headed by Cappelle, used a technology called zero discharge desalination (ZDD) for their entry. ZDD uses electrodialysis metathesis (EDM) to concentrate the salts in the stream of reverse osmosis or nanofiltration to high levels and recover gypsum as a solid byproduct. The team used photovoltaic (PV) panels to provide power and charge batteries for nighttime operation of their system. ZDD has demonstrated high recovery of fresh water (up to 98%) from the
Russell R. Chianelli, The University of Texas at El Paso, USA Shirley Meng, University of California, San Diego, USA Sabrina Sartori, University of Oslo, Norway Anke Weidenkaff, University of Stuttgart, Germany M. Stanley Whittingham, Binghamton University, The State University of New York, USA Steve M. Yalisove, University of Michigan, USA
Images incorporated to create the energy puzzle concept used unde
Data Loading...
