Tag Archives: water

small-scale desalination

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MIT makes some bold claims for a cheap, small scale desalination system.

The researchers estimate that if the system is scaled up to the size of a small suitcase, it could produce about 4 to 6 liters of drinking water per hour and last several years before requiring replacement parts. At this scale and performance, the system could produce drinking water at a rate and price that is cheaper than tap water.

MIT

If it works for salt water, I wonder if it could work for any type of water. Decentralized treatment is a worthy goal – if we could easily and safely reuse water from our rooftops, showers, dishwashers, etc., that would be a lot less water to be sucking out of the environment and moving around in pipes, and a lot less energy and chemicals than we use to run our water systems now. Toilets? People don’t like to hear this, but if we get desperate enough we might be open to it. For the water industry, it could be a “killer app” akin to the digital camera or cellular phone. Don’t expect the water industry to go quietly though.

MIT News

August 2019 in Review

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My work-life balance situation continues to not favor a lot of blog posts. Or is it work-life-family balance? Or is family part of life? Yes, I guess so. Anyway, what there is not a lot of time for is personal leisure activities like reading, writing, and thinking. Not that I don’t enjoy reading Green Eggs and Ham for the 50th time. I do. Anyway, here are a few highlights of the slim pickings that constituted this blog in August 2019. Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • Drought is a significant factor causing migration from Central America to the United States. Drought in the Mekong basin may put the food supply for a billion people in tropical Asia at risk. One thing that can cause drought is deliberately lying to the public for 50 years while materially changing the atmosphere in a way that enriches a wealthy few at everyone else’s expense. Burning what is left of the Amazon can’t help. 
Most hopeful story:
  • I explored an idea for automatic fiscal stabilizers as part of a bold infrastructure investment plan. I’m not all that hopeful but a person can dream.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

July 2019 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Most hopeful story: Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • I laid out the platform for my non-existent Presidential campaign.

Pennsylvania’s Integrated List

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Pennsylvania has released its DRAFT 2018 PENNSYLVANIA INTEGRATED WATER QUALITY MONITORING AND ASSESSMENT REPORT. This might seem esoteric and of interest to just a few, but it’s worthwhile to think about what U.S. water quality regulations are supposed to accomplish and how much they are actually accomplishing.

  • The authority to regulate the water quality of “navigable waters” rests with Congress, under the concept that water quality is important to interstate waters. In practice, most rivers, streams, and lakes that do not dry up at any point during a typical year are covered. There is an enormous, long-running legal fight over water bodies at the margins of this definition, such as wetlands that are connected to larger bodies of water sometimes but not all the time.
  • Congress makes the law, the EPA is required to implement them, and the EPA in most cases delegates this to state-level agencies, although it can supervise them and, in theory at least, take over at any time. This very occasionally happens.
  • State level agencies are required to map all the water bodies in the state that come under these regulations, break them up into segements, and specify the “uses”, such as type of aquatic ecosystem and type of recreation, to be protected for each and every one.
  • Then they are supposed to collect data and determine whether each and every segment is “attaining” each and every use.
  • If any segment is not attaining its use, the state is supposed to determine an exact cause.
  • If the cause is a specific pollutant, it is supposed to identify all the sources of that pollutant, how much it needs to be reduced for the use to attain, and how much each source of the pollutant is required to reduce their discharges.
  • The results of this process, called “total maximum daily load”, are not immediately enforceable. Now the numbers have to flow down into enforceable permits and other programs.

It’s all very logical and straightforward. Now here are some of the problems.

  • The federal and state agencies don’t have the funding, personnel, and expertise to do the data collection right. This means that the determinations are often done on very little data, by people of questionable expertise, and the conclusions are easy to challenge by permitted polluters with some means. “Polluters” as I use the term here are not necessarily bad actors – they are cities, towns, businesses and farmers. In short, civilization causes pollution and the idea is to control the amount and type to what the environment can assimilate.
  • When a reasonable amount of data is collected, it is usually paid for by the polluters themselves. Again, they are not necessarily bad actors. They may be perfectly ethical people who want to be regulated based on accurate information. But sometimes not, and either way there is a conflict of interest involved. Data collection is also an effective delay tactic – when data is inadequate, the problems are not well understood and the most appropriate solutions are not easy to identify, a data collection effort can be a good compromise among all parties involved and an alternative to endless legal action.
  • Even when there is a lot of data, the science is complicated, there is a lot of uncertainty, and this makes any required reductions fairly easy to challenge by those with financial means.
  • Cities and towns are required to limit stormwater pollution, but in practice stormwater pollution is generated by thousands or millions or individual property owners. Fixing this would require changing the way we build and use land. Technological solutions exist, and are not even necessarily high-tech or expensive, but there is enormous uncertainty built into current political and institutional arrangements.
  • Agriculture is almost entirely unregulated, and is an enormous source of pollution. It is controlled only through a patchwork of voluntary and incentive programs funded mostly at the state level. Some states do this better than others, but it is never adequate.
  • The concept of chemical “water quality” as we tend to think of it does not really guarantee the restoration of functioning ecosystems. The legal framework probably could be implemented in a way that would do this, but there is a critical lack of system understanding even among educated professionals, and even if a critical mass of people had that understanding, there is enormous resistance to change built into our institutions.
  • The regulatory agencies tend to go after a few big polluters, because that is how they get the most bang for their buck. Numerous small polluters, who collectively add up to most of the pollution, don’t get addressed. The big polluters are able to delay enforcement, sometimes indefinitely, through a variety of legal tactics. Third party advocacy groups get involved in lawsuits and add to the fray.

2018 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: Cape Town, South Africa looked to be in imminent danger of running out of water. They got lucky, but the question is whether this was a case of serious mismanagement or an early warning sign of water supply risk due to climate change. Probably a case of serious mismanagement of the water supply while ignoring the added risk due to climate change. Longer term, there are serious concerns about snowpack-dependent water supplies serving large urban populations in Asia and western North America.
  • FEBRUARY: Cape Town will probably not be the last major city to run out of water. The other cities at risk mentioned in this article include Sao Paulo, Bangalore, Beijing, Cairo, Jakarta, Moscow, Istanbul, Mexico City, London, Tokyo, and Miami.
  • MARCH: One reason propaganda works is that even knowledgeable people are more likely to believe a statement the more often it is repeated.
  • APRIL: That big California earthquake is still coming.
  • MAY: The idea of a soft landing where absolute dematerialization of the economy reduces our ecological footprint and sidesteps the consequences of climate change through innovation without serious pain may be wishful thinking.
  • JUNE: The Trump administration is proposing to subsidize coal-burning power plants. Meanwhile the long-term economic damage expected from climate change appears to be substantial. For one thing, Hurricanes are slowing down, which  means they can do more damage in any one place. The rate of melting in Antarctic ice sheets is accelerating.
  • JULY: The UN is warning as many as 10 million people in Yemen could face starvation by the end of 2018 due to the military action by Saudi Arabia and the U.S. The U.S. military is involved in combat in at least 8 African countries. And Trump apparently wants to invade Venezuela.
  • AUGUST: Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
  • SEPTEMBER: A huge earthquake in the Pacific Northwest could be by far the worst natural disaster ever seen.
  • OCTOBER: The Trump administration has slashed funding to help the U.S. prepare for the next pandemic.
  • NOVEMBER: About half a million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since the U.S. invasions starting in 2001. This includes only people killed directly by violence, not disease, hunger, thirst, etc.
  • DECEMBER: Climate change is just bad, and the experts seem to keep revising their estimates from bad to worse. The Fourth National Climate Assessment produced by the U.S. government is not an uplifting publication. In addition to the impacts of droughts, storms, and fires, it casts some doubt on the long-term security of the food supply. An article in Nature was also not uplifting, arguing that climate change is happening faster than expected due to a combination of manmade and natural trends.

Climate change, nuclear weapons, and pandemics. If I go back and look at last year’s post, this list of existential threats is going to be pretty much the same. Add to this the depressing grind of permanent war which magnifies these risks and diverts resources that could be used to deal with them. True, we could say that we got through 2018 without a nuclear detonation, pandemic, or ecological collapse, and under the circumstances we should sit back, count our blessings, and wait for better leadership. And while our leadership is particularly inept at the moment, I think Noam Chomsky has a point that political administration after political administration has failed to solve these problems and this seems unlikely to improve. The earthquake risk is particularly troublesome. Think about the shock we felt over the inept response to Katrina, and now think about how essentially the same thing happened in Puerto Rico, we are not really dealing with it in an acceptable way, and the public and news media have essentially just shrugged it off and moved on. If the hurricanes, floods, fires and droughts just keep hitting harder and more often, and we don’t fully respond to one before the next hits, it could mean a slow downward spiral. And if that means we gradually lose our ability to bounce back fully from small and medium size disasters, a truly huge disaster like an epic earthquake on the west coast might be the one that pushes our society to a breaking point.

Most hopeful stories:

I believe our children are our future…ya ya blahda blahda. It’s a huge cliche, and yet to be hopeful about our world I have to have some hope that future generations can be better system thinkers and problem solvers and ethical actors than recent generations have been. Because despite identifying problems and even potential solutions we are consistently failing to make choices as a society that could divert us from the current failure path. And so I highlighted a few stories above about ideas for better preparing future generations, ranging from traditional school subjects like reading and music, to more innovative ones like meditation and general system theory, and just maybe we should be open to the idea that the right amount of the right drugs can help.

Fossil fuels just might be on their way out, as alternatives start to become economical and public outrage slowly, almost imperceptibly continues to build.

There is real progress in the fight against disease, which alleviates enormous quantities of human suffering. I mention AIDS, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease above. We can be happy about that, of course. There are ideas about how to grow more food, which is going to be necessary to avoid enormous quantities of human suffering. Lest anyone think otherwise, my position is that we desperately need to reduce our ecological footprint, but human life is precious and nobody deserves to suffer illness or hunger.

Good street design that lets people get around using mostly their own muscle power. It might not be sexy, but it is one of the keys to physical and mental health, clean air and water, biodiversity, social and economic vibrancy in our cities. Come to think of it, I take that back, it can be sexy if done well.

Good street design and general systems theory – proof that solutions exist and we just don’t recognize or make use of them. Here’s where I want to insert a positive sentence about how 2019 is the year this all changes for the better. Well, sorry, you’ll have to find someone less cynical than me, and/or with much better powers of communication and persuasion than me to get the ball rolling. On the off chance I have persuaded you, and you have communication and/or persuasion super powers, let me know.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Whatever else happens, technology and accumulation of human knowledge in general march on, of course. Computer, robotics, and surveillence technology march on. The human move into space is much slower and painful than many would have predicted half a century ago, and yet it is proceeding.

I’ll never drop the waterless sanitation thing, no matter how much others make fun of me. It’s going to happen, eventually. I don’t know whether we will colonize Mars or stop defecating in our water supply first, but both will happen.

The gene drive thing is really wild the more I think about it. This means we now have the ability to identify a species or group of species we don’t want to exist, then cause it not to exist in relatively short order. This seems like it could be terrifying in the wrong hands, doesn’t it? I’m not even sure I buy into the idea that rats and mosquitoes have no positive ecological functions at all. Aren’t there bats and birds that rely on mosquitoes as a food source? Okay, I’m really not sure what redeeming features rats have, although I did read a few years ago that in a serious food crunch farming rats would be a much more efficient way of turning very marginal materials into edible protein than chicken.

The universe in a bottle thing is mind blowing if you spend too much time thinking about it. It could just be bottles all the way down. It’s best not to spend too much time thinking about it.

That’s it, Happy 2019!

envisioning a water-energy utility with smart metering

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This article envisions a single utility that provides water, electricity, and natural gas service, meters all three at the household level, and is able to integrate them using smart grid concepts. To me it illustrates some concepts of how multiple utilities and government agencies, each making cost effective operating and capital investment decisions within their narrowly defined missions, do not necessarily add up to an efficient whole.

Integrated intelligent water-energy metering systems and informatics: Visioning a digital multi-utility service provider

Advanced metering technologies coupled with informatics creates an opportunity to form digital multi-utility service providers. These providers will be able to concurrently collect a customers’ medium-high resolution water, electricity and gas demand data and provide user-friendly platforms to feed this information back to customers and supply/distribution utility organisations. Providers that can install low-cost integrative systems will reap the benefits of derived operational synergies and access to mass markets not bounded by historical city, state or country limits. This paper provides a vision of the required transformative process and features of an integrated multi-utility service provider covering the system architecture, opportunities and benefits, impediments and strategies, and business opportunities. The heart of the paper is focused on demonstrating data modelling processes and informatics opportunities for contemporaneously collected demand data, through illustrative examples and four informative water-energy nexus case studies. Finally, the paper provides an overview of the transformative R&D priorities to realise the vision.

water tunnels

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As tunneling technology continues to advance, this article says that transportation tunnels get all the press but water tunnels are also becoming much more numerous and common.

Most of the attention in other cities may go to the multibillion-dollar transportation tunnel projects, like the Second Avenue Subway in New York City or the Gateway tunnel between New York and New Jersey. But the sheer number of water tunnels being built or planned exceeds the sexier transportation tunnels. “There are more water tunnels than transportation tunnels,” says Mike Schultz, technical strategy leader for the geotechnical-structural group at CDM Smith.

Egger at Black & Veatch estimates there are about 200 miles of water tunneling in various stages of planning and design in North America, 50 miles of which directly involve Black & Veatch. Jacobs alone is involved in the development of  more 150 miles of water, wastewater and CSO tunnels around the world.

Technology has reduced the price of tunnels enough so that mid-size cities like Fort Wayne and Alexandria, Va., can use a tunnel option to handle their excess water. Technology also has made tunneling a viable option in some cities with soft ground, such as Houston, which couldn’t have considered building tunnels just a decade ago.

Full disclosure: This is the business I am in and I have a business relationship with one of the firms above. Well, not the tunneling business specifically but the water management business. I would much rather see water managed using green infrastructure and ecosystem-based solutions as much as possible, but a backbone of hard infrastructure certainly has its place in urban areas.

groundwater

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This paper in Water Resources Research is about global groundwater depletion and pollution, and how groundwater can be managed better.

With rivers in critical regions already exploited to capacity throughout the world and groundwater overdraft as well as large-scale contamination occurring in many areas, we have entered an era in which multiple simultaneous stresses will drive water management. Increasingly, groundwater resources are taking a more prominent role in providing freshwater supplies. We discuss the competing fresh groundwater needs for human consumption, food production, energy, and the environment, as well as physical hazards, and conflicts due to transboundary overexploitation. During the past 50 years, groundwater management modeling has focused on combining simulation with optimization methods to inspect important problems ranging from contaminant remediation to agricultural irrigation management. The compound challenges now faced by water planners require a new generation of aquifer management models that address the broad impacts of global change on aquifer storage and depletion trajectory management, land subsidence, groundwater-dependent ecosystems, seawater intrusion, anthropogenic and geogenic contamination, supply vulnerability, and long-term sustainability. The scope of research efforts is only beginning to address complex interactions using multi-agent system models that are not readily formulated as optimization problems and that consider a suite of human behavioral responses.

They get something important right here, which is that if you are formulating a question in a way that the answer can be “optimized”, you have probably defined the question much too narrowly. Water resources are one part of much larger complex natural and social systems. Modeling and technical analysis is important to pare the universe of all possible decisions down to a smaller set where each possible decision is close to “optimal” or efficient in the technical and economic senses. But then this information needs to be fed into a stakeholder or political process where a much wider range of factors can be considered and decisions made.

I am concerned that the current laser focus on “science, technology, engineering, and math” in education is pushing people too far down the path of expecting clear-cut technocratic answers to questions that have messy political and cultural dimensions in reality. All these subjects are good to study, but they need to pared with solid education in planning processes and tools, and an appreciation of systems in general.

Joe Jenkins

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Here’s an interview with Joe Jenkins, author of The Humanure Handbook, a guide to compost toilets. Composting toilets are a potentially very good idea – they could save enormous amounts of water, energy, and money everywhere, address problems caused by aging and inadequate wastewater infrastructure in developed countries, and bring life-saving basic sanitation to billions who don’t have it now.

There are commercial composting toilet systems available – you can see some in Chapter 6 of Jenkins’s book. I don’t know why they have not caught on more widely. Maybe it’s a case like the QWERTY keyboard where the design that caught on is not the best one available, but simply an adequate design that got implemented at scale first, and is now hard to displace. Or maybe the designs are too expensive and/or just not good enough to overcome the incredible power of social taboos about human waste, which are not to be taken lightly. If this is the case, the technology may be stuck in a chicken and egg problem where it is not quite good enough to be adopted on a larger scale, and it is not going to be improved unless and until it is subjected to a larger marketplace. People are not going to take a risk on it as long as they are content with the flush toilet system they already have. That said, it really would not be rocket science to come up with better designs. It would just have to be taken seriously as a research and development project and have some real resources thrown at it, the kind of resources we routinely throw at weapons, chemicals, drugs and electronics.

Let’s assume we get to a better, cheaper composting design that everyone will want in their house – what then? The composting toilets people are using now need a carbon source such as sawdust to balance out the nitrogen in the feces. That is fine on a small scale, but on a large scale we would now need a system to produce and distribute sawdust or something similar to billions of people. That sounds like a sustainability problem. A possible solution there would be to build the carbon source into packaging of consumer products – instead of all the plastic wrap we use now, make consumer packaging out of some sort of carbonaceous waste (corn stalks, switchgrass?). When people unwrap things they would just throw it into the toilet.

The next problem is what to do with the compost. Compost is great stuff that gardeners love. But not everybody is a gardener, and now you have done this on a large scale. You have to collect the stuff and get it to gardens, parks or farm fields where it can be used. So now you are back to a system of trucks or pipes to do this – not much different from what we do now, except you have moved the treatment step from the central wastewater plant to individual homes.

A biogas system is a possible alternative technology. Instead of the aerobic composting system, you would put your bodily waste, carbonaceous packing material, and food waste (the same ingredients from your aerobic system) in a sealed reactor with the right microbes to break it down to methane. The solids remaining should be less than with the aerobic system although you still have to deal with them. You can use the methane for anything you use natural gas for now – heating, hot water, or electricity which you can either use or sell back to the grid. An intriguing possibility is to feed it into a fuel cell rather than burning it. Whereas both aerobic composting and combustion will liberate the carbon from the carbon source back into the atmosphere (if the carbon source is plant-based, it will be the same carbon absorbed from the atmosphere when the plants were grown), an ideal fuel cell (which may not have been invented yet) theoretically will produce only electricity, clean water, and elemental carbon. So in theory, the carbon is sequestered. You still need to pick it up and do something with it. Since I’m daydreaming, we’ll use some kind of biotechnology to turn it into cement.