Are desalination plants worth it?

In many jurisdictions, the answer is no. But if you're in Australia's Victoria state where the agricultural industry is withering away from drought and cities have to impose water rationing, it's a bargain.

Even if you're not in some of the hardest hit areas of the globe, the economic argument for desalination will likely improve over the next few years. Right now, desalinated water from state-of-the-art facilities in Israel or Singapore costs about 56 cents a cubic meter, said Mark Shannon, Director of the NSF STC WaterCAMPWS at the University of Illinois. (Shannon will speak at the Water Innovations Alliance in Chicago next week.) Meanwhile, new technologies – such as forward osmosis, gravity, capacitors or carbon nanotube membranes – will likely bring the price down.

"I am confident that we will hit 25 cents a cubic meter," he said.

Currently, delivering water to U.S. consumers costs about 50 cents a cubic meter, he said. In cities like New York and Chicago, it can run $1.45 a cubic meter.

"London is the highest in the world," he said.

At the conference, Shannon will discuss his plans for an anaerobic digester (the same sort of bacteria-filled box some are using to convert manure into methane) to convert sewage into recycled water, methane and saleable minerals. Read more here.

Imagine H2O will start accepting applications for a contest to find new, commercially practical ideas for alleviating some of the world's water problem.

The non-profit will give away awards of up to $70,000 in cash, prizes and services, but more importantly it will help incubate companies from the ideas. The organizations members include executives from General Electric, Harvard Business School, McKinsey & Co., Trinity Ventures, CMEA, Catamount Ventures and other places. One of the chief obstacles facing water entrepreneurs remains getting noticed, so these connections will help.

Water, according to many, is the perhaps the first major crisis that will emerge from climate change. Regions of Australia and China already suffer from prolonged droughts and crop failures. Approximately four in 10 people in the world are affected by water scarcity. And it's not just overseas. Many southern states are facing increased levels of natural arsenic in the groundwater. Water also consumes a significant amount of power: approximately 19 percent of California's electricity gets used to move, purify and heat water (the figure drops to close to 5 percent if you just count pumping and moving.)

In the middle of the 20th century, there was about 4,000 cubic meters of fresh water per person per year, DHI Water Group told me last year. Now we're close, globally, to 1,000 cubic meters per person per year. One thousand cubic meters per person per year is defined as water scarcity, he said. Water stress is defined as having 1,700 cubic meters per person per year. No matter how you cut it – water has to be consumed and purified more efficiently than in the past.

The demand has prompted GE and Siemens to snap up water companies and IBM to develop technology for desalination and generating power from the interaction between fresh and sea water.

But is the world bursting with startups? Hardly. One problem is the customer base. Municipal water districts constitute one of the largest customer segments, and even among utilities, a naturally conservative lot, water agencies are considered stodgy. Many new companies have instead focused their energies on oil refiners, dairies and others with large daily water requirements. A few companies have gained momentum – Energy Recovery (a desalination expert that IPOed last year), Miox, Oasys, Hydropoint Data Systems – but the number of water companies getting funding pales in comparison to those in solar.

The water also suffers to some degree from not being as cool as electric cars or space elevators. Still, we are going to need to need technology so we don't have to resort to more traditional tools (i.e., guns, bribery) to resolve water disputes.

Would-be entrants have until November 16 to file their entry. Winners will be announced early next year.

Bill.com – how did they ever secure that name? – has raised $8.5 million in another round of financing for its online bill payment system for companies.

The company was founded by Rene Lacerte, who sold PayCycle, an employee compensation service, to Intuit.

How is it green? Paper and transportation. Paperless bill payment can save 7.5 pounds of paper and 71 gallons of water, when you look at the entire supply chain. It also can cut 297 pounds of greenhouse gases. Considering that the bulk of a bill gets thrown in the garbage (An coupon for a Dale Earnhardt Memorial Grandfather Clock in my monthly Chevron bill, anyone?) there's not a lot of reasons not to go paperless.

Paperless transactions, of course, require servers and electrical power, but the balance likely favors paperless in most jurisdictions.

August Capital and DCM participated in the round.

Officials and startup execs from Australia and in particular the state of Victoria are making a swing through the high-tech centers of the U.S. this month. Australia has already minted a few interesting green startups: Ausra, the solar thermal company, and Ioteq, which purifies water for food processors with iodine, come to mind. In the U.S. the difficulty has sometimes been distance. VCs want the companies to move here before they will invest and some of the startups (Ausra excluded) don't necessarily want to move.

Still, it will likely be one of the more active regions for greentech in the future. University laboratories have an extensive history in areas such as solar. (The technology behind Suntech actually came out of the University of New South Wales.) Additionally, because of its heavy sunshine, big waves and severe drought, Australia will be a large end market for green equipment.

So what's interesting on tour?

Zeobond: The company makes cement that is 100 percent fly ash. Most of the time, fly ash cement from other companies only contains 15 percent to 18 percent fly ash, says Peter Duxson, business development manager for Zeobond. "We went the whole way," he said. The technology for doing this has actually been around since the 1940s, but hasn't been brought to scale, he said. The company will start small – try to sell cement for roadway projects and things like that – and attack skyscrapers later. That's the reverse strategy of some other cement companies like iCrete, but it's also safer. Sidewalks tend to cost less than large buildings. 

Overall, the greenhouse gas emissions in making Zeobond cement are 80 percent lower than normal. It will also only sell for a slight, declining premium, he claimed. Price could be a tough barrier without carbon taxes.

Aqua Diagnostics: It makes water quality monitoring tools for dairies and food processors. In some jurisidictions, food processors and industrialsts get fined if their waste water contains too much waste. AD's machines can dynamically test water but without the noxious chemicals (mercury, etc.) found in current systems. The units are also portable and reasonably priced.

Aquatain: Sort of like Eleanor of Aquitane but spelled differently. A silicon membrane to prevent evaporation. Victoria has had strict rules on residential watering for the past four years and similar regs are coming to the U.S. A big market.

Ceramic Fuel Cell: A solid oxide fuel cell. The SOFC market has been around as long as the electronic book, and has progressed at about the same rate. But it may happen.

If you learned that someone had invented a car that runs on water, you’d probably be thrilled. But if you found out that the car consumes 50 gallons of water for every mile driven, you might wonder if it’s worth it.

Of course any vehicle that requires 50 gallons of any liquid fuel is a nonstarter given the volume and weight of the fuel, but for the purposes of this thought exercise the issue is using up all that water.

Something very like this scenario is rapidly becoming a reality, and is even mandated by law. It turns out that producing ethanol from corn uses an awful lot of water, and the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 requires the U.S. to produce 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol annually by 2015.

A study by researchers from Rice University, Clarkson University and Missouri University of Science and Technology found that it takes 500 to 4,000 liters of water to grow feedstock to produce one liter of ethanol, depending on the crop and where it’s grown.

Given an 800-to-1 water-fuel ratio and a car that gets 16 miles per gallon of ethanol (ethanol has a lower energy density than gasoline, which means lower mileage), you’d use 50 gallons of water per mile. This is the case for Nebraska-grown corn. You’d use 23 gallons per mile for Iowa corn and 115 gallons per mile for Texas sorghum.

The 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol mandated by 2015 is only about 10 percent of the transportation fuel the U.S. is likely to use that year, but producing it will require the equivalent of 44 percent of the corn grown in the U.S. in 2007. Agriculture today accounts for 80 percent of the water consumed in the U.S., and our freshwater supply is already under a lot of pressure.

The water-use scenario is very different for cellulosic feedstocks, particularly drought-resistant plants like miscanthus that require far less water. In theory, many types of grasses can be grown without any irrigation.

This makes efforts to come up with economical and scalable cellulosic biofuel production all the more urgent. Sorting out the land-use issues around biofuels is challenging enough without worrying about water.

Eric Smalley is the editor of Energy Research News. He has written about technology since 1987 and has freelanced for many publications including Discover, Scientific American, Wired News and The Boston Globe on topics ranging from quantum cryptography to global warming.

Critics and doomsayers have predicted for several years that fast-growing sunbelt cities would become ghost towns because of rapid population growth and limited water supplies.

It's not happening yet, says Phil Gordon, the Mayor of Phoenix.

Although the city has grown by 400,000 t0 500,000 residents in the past ten years, "we're using the exact same amount of water we did a decade ago," he said during a keynote speech at Surviving the Shakeout a conference taking place today and tomorrow sponsored by Greentech Media.

The city, moreover, has accomplished this without imposing mandates on water use or rationing, he said.

Instead, Phoenix has aggressively moved to recycle water. The Tres Rios project, for instance, is a reclaimed riverbed. It used to be a paved-over channel. Now, Tres Rios is an avian wetland. Water, which ultimately makes it to residential taps, is percolated through the sands there. (The city, he added also covers 535 square miles.)

Former governor Bruce Babbitt also gets a good amount of the credit for work his administration accomplished in the 1980s. Then, the state set up regulations that required developers in critical areas to show that their projects would have adequate water supplies for 99 years.

Like other cities, Phoenix is trying to attract greentech companies to set up operations in the state and using its own energy-efficiency plans as a selling point. New city buildings, Gordon added, are LEED certified.

Sales guys live on software as a service. Now the landscape crew gets it too. Greenleaf has developed a hosted software service that it says can save tens of thousands a year in irrigation costs. The company essentially examines the irrigation footprint of a commercial building -- the type of plants, the topography, the soil conditions, the weather, the type of sprinklers, etc. -- and then develops a water plan. Landscapers and facilities managers then use the program to control watering. It can also be updated. Let's say someone notices a brown patch developing outside of one building, he or she can plug the data into the system, change the watering schedule, and try to cure it. Later, it can be turned back down. The system, of course, tracks any changes. An apartment building in San Jose has saved $99,770 over the last six year. The system effectively works in a similar way as the services put out by Hydropoint Data Systems. Hydropoint dynamically adjusts watering to suit weather patterns. Greenleaf says it can do away with weather tracking and get similar (or at least good enough) results for less.