Chemists Work to Desalt the Ocean for Drinking Water, One Nanoliter at a Time

ORIGINAL: U of Texas

June 27, 2013

AUSTIN, Texas —

??By creating a small electrical field that removes salts from seawater, chemists at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Marburg in Germany have introduced a new method for the desalination of seawater that consumes less energy and is dramatically simpler than conventional techniques. The new method requires so little energy that it can run on a store-bought battery. The process evades the problems confronting current desalination methods by eliminating the need for a membrane and by separating salt from water at a microscale.

The technique, called electrochemically mediated seawater desalination, ?was ? described last week in the journal?? Angewandte Chemie. The research team was led by?? Richard Crooks of The University of Texas at Austin and Ulrich Tallarek of the University of Marburg. It’s patent-pending and is in commercial development by startup company Okeanos Technologies. “The availability of water for drinking and crop irrigation is one of the most basic requirements for maintaining and improving human health,” said Crooks, the Robert A. Welch Chair in Chemistry in the College of Natural Sciences. “Seawater desalination is one way to address this need, but most current methods for desalinating water rely on expensive and easily contaminated membranes. The membrane-free method we’ve developed still needs to be refined and scaled up, but if we can succeed at that, then one day it might be possible to provide fresh water on a massive scale using a simple, even portable, system.”

This new method holds particular promise for the water-stressed areas in which about a third of the planet’s inhabitants live. Many of these regions have access to abundant seawater but not to the energy infrastructure or money necessary to desalt water using conventional technology. As a result, millions of deaths per year in these regions are attributed to water-related causes.

“People are dying because of a lack of freshwater,” said Tony Frudakis, founder and CEO of Okeanos Technologies. “And they’ll continue to do so until there is some kind of breakthrough, and that is what we are hoping our technology will represent.”

The left panel shows the salt (which is tagged with a fluorescent tracer) flowing upward after a voltage is applied by an electrode (the dark rectangle) jutting into the channel at just the point where it branches. In the right panel no voltage is being applied.

To achieve desalination, the researchers apply a small voltage (3.0 volts) to a plastic chip filled with seawater. The chip contains a microchannel with two branches. At the junction of the channel an embedded electrode neutralizes some of the chloride ions in seawater to create an “ion depletion zone” that increases the local electric field compared with the rest of the channel. This change in the electric field is sufficient to redirect salts into one branch, allowing desalinated water to pass through the other branch.

“The neutralization reaction occurring at the electrode is key to removing the salts in seawater,” said Kyle Knust, a graduate student in Crooks’ lab and first author on the paper.

Like a troll at the foot of the bridge, the ion depletion zone prevents salt from passing through, resulting in the production of freshwater.

Thus far Crooks and his colleagues have achieved 25 percent desalination. Although drinking water requires 99 percent desalination, they are confident that goal can be achieved.

“This was a proof of principle,” said Knust. “We’ve made comparable performance improvements while developing other applications based on the formation of an ion depletion zone. That suggests that 99 percent desalination is not beyond our reach.”


The other major challenge is to scale up the process. Right now the microchannels, about the size of a human hair, produce about 40 nanoliters of desalted water per minute. To make this technique practical for individual or communal use, a device would have to produce liters of water per day. The authors are confident that this can be achieved as well.

If these engineering challenges are surmounted, they foresee a future in which the technology is deployed at different scales to meet different needs.

“You could build a disaster relief array or a municipal-scale unit,” said Frudakis. “Okeanos has even contemplated building a small system that would look like a Coke machine and would operate in a standalone fashion to produce enough water for a small village.”

—

The fundamental scientific breakthroughs that led to this advance were primarily supported by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences in the U.S. Department of Energy. Okeanos Technologies is funded by venture capital and grants from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The intellectual property is owned by The University of Texas at Austin through the Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC). In the event of eventual profits, patent holders, including Crooks and Knust, will be paid according to the OTC’s standard licensing agreement. Okeanos Technologies is also currently supporting Knust’s stipend and tuition via a gift to UT.

For more information, contact: Daniel Oppenheimer, College of Natural Sciences, 512 745 3353; Richard Crooks, 512-475-8639, 

Deadline Monday: Tell the EPA to save the bees!

ORIGINAL: CredoAction

flickr.com/max xx

The sudden bee die-off known as colony collapse has claimed about 30% of the U.S. honey bee population each year since 2006.

Scientists believe the pesticide clothianidin is at least partially to blame, but twice in the last year, the EPA has refused to intervene to review the pesticide's safety.

If we don't convince the EPA to reconsider, it will not review clothianidin again until 2018. By then it could be too late for the bees, and the one third of our food crops that bees play a crucial role in pollinating.

The EPA is currently accepting public comments on its latest decision not to declare bee die-offs an emergency situation and suspend the use of clothianidin. Now is a crucial moment to make our voices heard for the bees.

Tell the EPA: Stop stalling. Ban the pesticide that's killing bees.

The science of colony collapse is complex, but increasingly scientists are pointing to the class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids - which includes clothianidin - as a major causal factor.1

The pesticide, which is used to treat seeds like corn and canola, expresses itself through the plants' pollen and nectar - the honey bee's favorite sources of food. Neonicotinoid pesticides are relatively new, and their use coincides with the rise of colony collapse.

Astonishingly, clothianidin was approved by the EPA in 2003, based on virtually no scientific study.2 Yet the EPA continues to allow its use.

Now, a group of senators have joined the call, writing a letter telling the EPA that waiting until 2018 to again review clothianidin and other neonicotinoids will be too late.3

There is no time to waste. Please submit a comment now urging the EPA to immediately suspend approval of clothianidin to protect honey bees and our food system.

1. "Pesticides and Honey Bees: State of the Science," Pesticide Action Network North America

2. "Leaked document shows EPA allowed bee-toxic pesticide despite own scientists' red flags," Grist, 12/10/10

3. "Gillibrand Calls for Expedited Review of Harmful Pesticides to Protect Honey Bee Health," Senator Kristin Gillibrand

Tell the EPA: Shell's latest bait and switch should be the last straw.

ORIGINAL: CREDO Action

Weeks away from starting the first major offshore drilling operations in the Arctic, Shell is pulling a major bait and switch - telling the EPA its drilling rigs can't meet the air pollution rules the company had already agreed to in order to get a drilling permit.¹

Shell has known since 2010 it would have problems meeting the rules.² But officials still told the EPA they could. Now Shell wants the EPA to weaken the rules at the last minute?

It's clear that Shell simply cannot be trusted. The company's last minute request gives the EPA the option to cancel Shell's permit. That's exactly what EPA must do.

Tell EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson: Don't fall for Shell's bait and switch. Reject Shell's permit to drill in the Arctic.

This bait and switch is the latest in a long list of broken promises, walk-backs and mishaps which should serve as clear signs to the Obama Administration that allowing Shell to drill in the Arctic is a recipe for disaster.

Just this weekend, Shell literally lost control of its Discoverer drilling rig, which either ran aground or very nearly did so, when its anchor broke while harbored a thousand miles south of the Arctic.³Moderate winds are being blamed -- yet these winds are mild compared to what it will encounter in the Arctic. The rig, one of the oldest in the world, had a similar anchor malfunction just last year, while it was stationed in New Zealand.

Shell is also having problems with its nearly forty-year-old oil spill recovery barge. While Shell promised the Coast Guard it would upgrade it substantially to withstand stronger weather, Shell now says those upgrades aren't necessary. The Coast Guard hasn't yet decided if it will weaken these standards for Shell.⁴

And of course -- while we've known for some time that the Obama Administration was being hoodwinked by Shell's hopelessly inadequate oil spill response plan -- now Shell has come out and admitted its initial spill response claims were overstated. Shell initially said it could "recover" 95% of oil in the case of a major spill. Now Shell is saying that what it actually meant is "encounter" 95% of the oil -- whatever that means.⁵

Tell the EPA: Don't fall for Shell's bait and switch. Reject Shell's permit to drill in the Arctic.

Shockingly, the Department of Interior has put the probability of an oil spill in the Arctic at 40%.⁶

That is simply unacceptable. With Shell in the driver's seat, it's clear that it would be unwise to even bank on those unacceptably high odds.

Shell's request to EPA is a major opportunity for President Obama and the EPA to revisit the undeserved trust they have put in Shell thus far. It's time for EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to be a hero, and draw a line stop the next major drilling disaster in the Arctic.

EPA's response could come any day. Please sign the petition now.

Tell the EPA: Don't fall for Shell's bait and switch. Reject Shell's permit to drill in the Arctic.

1. "Shell Seeks to Weaken Air Rules for Arctic Drilling," New York Times, 7/13/12
2. "Shell Application to Revise Discover Chukchi Permit," EPA
3. "Shell Loses Control of Arctic Drilling Rig in Alaskan Harbor," Think Progress 7/16/12
4. "Shell may be ready for the Arctic, but its oil spill barge isn't," LA Times, 7/5/12
5. "Shell Clarifies: It Can 'Encounter' 95 Percent Of An Arctic Oil Spill, Not Collect It," Think Progress, 7/2/12
6. "What if an oil spill happened at an Arctic well?," LA Times, 5/6/10

Sign the petition

The EPA’s most important decision this year could be over... vegetable oil?

ORIGINAL: Washington Post

by Brad Plume

04/27/2012

Okay, quick quiz: Which country is the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after the United States and China?

There are around 6,600 orangutans on Indonesia’s Sumatra island, but more than two-thirds of the area has been divided up into palm oil concessions. (Reuters)

The answer, at least in some recent years, has been Indonesia. That’s surprising. It’s not the world’s third-largest economy. It’s not an industrial powerhouse. But Indonesia has been clearing its vast rain forests and burning through its peatlands of late, releasing huge stores of carbon into the air. One of the big culprits here has been the country’s fast-growing production of palm oil, an edible vegetable oil that’s increasingly being harvested to make biodiesel fuel for cars and trucks in Europe and elsewhere.

This isn’t just a bit of environmental trivia. Currently, there’s a fierce battle in the United States over whether the Environmental Protection Agency should allow more diesel made from palm oil to be used by U.S. refineries. Agribusiness groups are lobbying for its use. Environmentalists are trying to block it — with some saying this could be the EPA’s most important climate-change decision of the year.

Here’s the backstory: In 2007, Congress expanded a requirement for U.S. refineries to blend a certain amount of “renewable fuel” in with their gasoline. Ethanol or biofuels could count. They just had to be 20 percent cleaner than traditional fossil fuels. And, in January, the EPA released a preliminary analysis suggesting that biodiesel and renewable diesel made from palm oil didn’t quite make the cut, thanks in part to the deforestation effect. (Over the course of their lifecycle, the EPA found, palm-oil fuels emitted between 11 percent to 17 percent fewer greenhouse gases than regular gasoline.)

But the EPA hasn’t fully made up its mind yet. The agency is gathering comments on its analysis until Friday, April 27. And industry groups from Indonesia, Malaysia, and the United States have sharply criticized the agency’s analysis, with the American Palm Oil Council claiming that the EPA’s conclusion was “based on faulty data and erroneous assumptions.”

What do they mean? Robert Shapiro, a former Clinton administration economist who now does analysis for business groups, argued in his comment that it’s “highly speculative” to calculate how, exactly, the production of biofuels will drive deforestation. Efforts to figure out how biofuels indirectly affect land use — by, say, displacing cooking-oil production elsewhere — are still a relatively new area of science. If you remove this from the analysis, Shapiro argued, then palm-oil fuels look considerably cleaner and easily qualify as a renewable fuel. What’s more, he noted, palm-oil producers will likely increase their yields on existing lands in the future, which means they’ll cut down fewer forests.

Palm-oil skeptics aren’t buying it. In a conference call with reporters on Thursday, Jeremy Martin, a biofuels expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, argued that the EPA’s analysis actually understimates the destructive impact of palm-oil production in Indonesia and Malaysia. His group’s comments to the EPA can be found here.

For one thing, Martin explained, much of the forest area that’s being cleared for palm oil is peatland, whose soils store considerable amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The EPA assumed that only around 9 to 13 percent of future palm-oil production would occur on peatland, whereas a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found the number was already above 50 percent. And, Martin said, the EPA was too optimistic about the ability of countries like Indonesia to enforce their forestry laws.

When all of these factors are taken into account, said Martin, “the emissions of palm oil based biofuels substantially exceed the emissions from conventional petroleum diesel.”

There’s a lot at stake in getting this right. Palm oil is a potentially lucrative industry for developing countries like Indonesia and Malaysia. But Indonesia’s peatlands also contain an enormous amount of carbon-dioxide. (To get a sense for the scale here, one particularly large peatland fire in Kalimantan in 1997 released more total greenhouse-gas emissions than the entire United States over that period.) And, according to the PNAS study, peatland emissions from palm-oil production are expected to surge in the years ahead. Palm-oil producers are also razing habitats for elephants, tigers, rhinos, and orangutans on various islands in Southeast Asia.

Some green activists have placed their hopes in sustainable palm-oil production to navigate these concerns — after all, poorer communities in Southeast Asia aren’t just going to agree to an outright ban. But, increasingly, attention has shifted toward wealthy countries that are artificially inflating palm-oil production with government mandates on biofuels.

The EPA decision will help determine whether the United States becomes a major buyer. But, for now, the biggest market for palm-oil based fuels is still the European Union, which has a law requiring 10 percent of all transportation fuel to come from renewable sources by 2020. The problem with this rule, said Chris Malins of the International Council on Clean Transportation, is that the European Union never considered the indirect deforestation effects from biofuels. The science on this only really emerged in 2008 or so, after the E.U. law was largely crafted.

“What Europe did was basically consistent with the best life-cycle emissions analyses of the past,” said Malins. “But,” he added, “Europe recognizes that there’s an issue here, and there’s an ongoing process to change that.”

Which means that the EPA’s decision here in the United States could very well influence how governments around the world think about palm oil. In a quiet year for climate policy, that could stand out as a major move.