Saturday - October 29, 2011

Pollution? Solution!

A new desal [desalination] technology has emerged that not only can desalinate water at an affordable cost, but can also simultaneously remove harmful chemicals and disease microbes from the water.

It all started years ago when a scientist working in a small lab at a university in Arizona, had an idea. Dr. Jim Beckman, a professor at Arizona State University, asked these questions: Why couldn’t desalination technology avoid using pressure, metal parts, and large amounts of electricity? Why couldn’t the technology use no pressure and instead rely on plastic parts to avoid corrosion, and thus use almost no electricity? So Beckman went to work – and after years in the lab, he produced a system that can do just that. In order to treat the water, Altela technology uses the simplest of Mother Nature’s processes, making rain.

What does this mean, in practice? It means that all water coming from the Marcellus Shale natural gas wells, known as “frac water,” can be made cleaner than drinking water before going into the river. It means that runoff from a landfill, water that pollutes the streams, rivers and oceans ultimately can be treated on site before it is released. And it means that every village in Africa can have a small water treatment plant to stop the deaths of 3.5 million people every year from a lack of safe drinking water.

In fact, Altela’s facility in Albuquerque is busy churning out modules to do just that. Its AltelaRain® 600 systems have also been installed in Pennsylvania and are processing water from natural gas wells to keep the industry going, despite new regulations, and sustaining 156,000 jobs in Pennsylvania alone.

“We set out to revolutionize the desal treatment, and we ended up finding a solution to water treatment all over the world, from the Marcellus Shale, to the smallest village in Africa,” said CEO Ned Godshall

Altela has redefined the fundamentals of water purification, which has world-changing implications, yet the AltelaRain® technology has entirely practical and realistic applications. In straightforward terms, it takes the simplest of nature’s processes for purifying water (making rain) and through revolutionary technology, re-creates that process using readily available materials and low energy compared with conventional thermal distillation.

Because it is so simple and elegant, the technology can treat the most highly-challenged water in almost any application. And it meets or exceeds even the strictest U.S. government environmental protection (EPA) standards for discharge of the purified water.

Even the DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) validated that Altela’s system can successfully treat the water stream onsite, providing distilled water as the product.

The AltelaRain® 600 is a revolutionary modular-based water desalination system that excels at treating highly challenged wastewater. Each Module consists of twelve Altela Rain Towers and one center chase that contains all the water, air and steam plumbing to and from the twelve towers, along with the required controls, steam boiler and pumps.
The Module treats approximately 25,000 gallons per day, the equivalent of 600 barrels per day.

It looks like each module can come in on 3 flatbed trucks and be assembled on site. Each module consumes either a moderate amount of natural gas (12,000 cu ft /day) and electricity (1 Kwh); they can be run on solar power. The modules are scalable, and require only 5 hours of maintenance per week. All the dirt removed from the water is collected in tanks that can be easily swapped out and emptied or trucked away. It’s a liquid; approximately 10% of the input water. A smaller model (the ARS-4000) exists that can be shipped on a single flatbed truck and produces 4,000 barrels a day.

The AltelaRain® technology recaptures energy 3 times, and thus makes 3 gallons of pure distilled water from the energy required to make 1 gallon from conventional thermal distillation. And, Altela is the only water desalination company in the world that uses no pressure (and therefore 99% of the energy is NOT from the electricity required to operate high-pressure pumps.) It is therefore perfectly married to the burgeoning sister industry of Solar Thermal (ST) – passive solar – because Altela uses (for free) the two-thirds energy of passive solar that presently now gets wasted as low-grade low-temperature waste heat.

Such low-grade waste energy is available for water desalination when co-located with such an ST location throughout the southwest U.S. in states like New Mexico, Arizona and southern California, as well as abroad in areas such as the Middle East.
...
Through the use of its proprietary patented AltelaRain® technology, Altela desalinates and decontaminates highly challenged water using an evaporation/condensation process like nature’s own process: clean rain water from undrinkable ocean salt water. The technology is simple, elegant, and disruptive. 

I like it. Fresh water from the oceans. Mine water put back into streams that’s cleaner than what comes out of your faucet. Altela is a publicly traded company. If I was a player in the stock market, I’d give them a serious look ‘n see.

As for those anti-fracker folks who cry that a) this extraction process will steal all our drinking water, and b) even if they use produced water (water found underground at far deeper levels than the regular water table), dumping such waste water back on the surface will pollute the world and kill us all ... it looks like Altela has them beat. With a nice heavy stick. Every hour on the hour. Their system removes all the oil, dissolved gas, heavy metals, and dirt. It can even remove radioactive particles.

Produced water is water trapped in underground formations that comes to the surface during oil and gas exploration and production. It occurs naturally in formations where oil and gas are found and is millions of years old. When oil or gas is extracted, they’re brought to the surface along with this produced water as a combined fluid. The composition of this produced fluid includes a mixture of either liquid or gaseous hydrocarbons, produced water, dissolved or suspended solids, produced solids such as sand or silt, and recently injected fluids and additives that may have been placed in the formation as a result of exploration and production activities.

Nice. Now all we need is another company to produce bags of minerals to add to the distilled water, to make it proper drinking water. A little salt, a little calcium, maybe a little fluoride, whatever. Just the good ones. Heck, mineral packs could come in flavors to imitate your favorite blend of bottled water. Great Bear. De Sani. Deer Park. Poland Spring. Evian. Your choice. Those water softeners already exist. So do some of the salts. Carbonation not included.

Posted by Drew458     on 10/29/2011 at 06:47 AM   
Filed Under: • Environment • High Tech • Oil, Alternative Energy, and Gas Prices •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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