Calera Captures Carbon in Concrete, Produces Clean Water
In Gimhae, South Korea, concrete apartments extend to the horizon. / Photo: oceandestoiles on flickr
Concrete. There’s a lot of it on earth. Pretty much every paradise has its parking lot. And its big-box store, high-rise condos, sidewalks, stadiums and office parks. Bridges, tunnels, jetties, locks, canals, station platforms: all require concrete.
Concrete is the second most consumed substance on earth (pdf), after water: three tons of it per year, per person on earth.
Manufacturing all that concrete is the second largest source of carbon emissions in the world, after energy generation, accounting for 5% of world CO2 emissions.
But a Californian company, Calera, has developed a solution.
Calera’s process, called Mineralization via Aqueous Precipitation, makes producing cement – the binding ingredient in concrete – remarkably efficient, by tackling multiple problems in one play.
Ostara Gets Three With One Blow
Toxic cyanobacteria Bloom on Lake IJsselmeer / Photo: Stefe on flickr
At The Artemis Project, we tend to prefer solutions that solve multiple problems at once. Hence we love Ostara‘s nutrient recovery technology. (And we like no-mix toilets.)
The Problems:
- Peak phosphorous
- Struvite scaling
- Eutrophication
Peak Phosphorous
Peak phosphorous is the dilution of necessary-to-all-life phosphates and the exhaustion of concentrated caches. Estimates give us 30-40 years.
Peak phosphorous more important to human life than Peak Oil: whereas there are alternatives energy sources, there is not an alternative to phosphorous. Phosphorous is created when two oxygen atoms fuze above 1,000 megakelvins (that’s 1.8billion Fº), so humans can’t make any more of it.
Five countries own 90% of the known phosphorous deposits. Yet, most well-fed countries have a consistent source of the element: wastewater. That’s where Ostara steps in.
In my previous post I introduced the PLUS framework for water-technology scalability, and expanded upon the first two attributes: Software and Usability. Let’s explore the other two: Leverage and Partners.
Leverage means capitalizing — to exponential effect — on assets, processes and data already existing in the organizations you are serving. Water utilities, for example, have plenty of ‘leverageable’ assets, primarily deep and rich knowledge, held by experienced people. Tapping into this resource is not easy, but best-practices are a power-multiplier, and baking the combined experience of hundreds of professionals into an automated decision-support system is a great way to make your solution scalable. It’s the famous network effect. A great example: SmartMap by Thomson Mapping is a Water-specific CAD software that implements existing models as a baseline for new designs.
Extracting Money from Wastewater
Copper Mining in China / Photo: tzachernuk on Flickr
Speaking of Resource Recovery, Canadian company BioteQ Environmental Technologies, Inc has announced plans to build a wastewater treatment plant at a copper mine in China. The plant will be a joint-venture with Jiangxi Copper Company. Construction is slated to begin Q3 2010 and cost $3 million, to be shared equally.
The plant will purify produced water from the copper mine at the rate of 800 cubic meters per hour. It will extract up to 50,000 pounds of nickel and 60,000 pounds of cobalt annually from the site’s wastewater and rainwater runoff. Nickel is a corrosion resistant element used in alloys and plating. Cobalt is widely used in components of lithium-ion batteries, among other uses.
Another BioteQ and Jiangxi joint-venture treatment plant extracted 700,000 pounds of copper from wastewaster streams on-site in its first six months of operations. The acidic wastewater left untreated would have damaged the environment.
BioteQ’s process uses a proprietary ion exchange technology called ChemSulphide to extract metals from water with a 99% recovery rate, purifying the water for reuse on-site or discharge into the environment.
Not only will the treated water pass strict standards for release into the environment, but the partners gain two additional revenue streams, compensating for the cost of treating the water.
Webinar: Mineral and Resource Recovery from Waste Water
Around the globe, a growing number of advanced water technologies are recovering valuable minerals and resources from waste water. The O2 Environmental Technology Assessment Group (TAG) will outline the size and value of the market opportunity, drivers for change, the business models used, major players and some of the innovative technologies being developed.
The webinar will occur at July 22 at 10am PST.
Register now
Companies providing some of the leading innovative solutions to the market will discuss overviews of their approaches.
Calera has a technology platform which can simultaneously sequester carbon, desalinate water and produce concrete. This highly dispruptive approach deals with meeting demand for the worlds most widely traded commodity, water, reduces the carbon footprint for the worlds second most widely traded commodity, concrete and also offers to the potential to sequester carbon from stack emissions.
Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies has a technology platform the Pearl™ which is used to ‘mine’ wastewater for Phosphorus, which is a non-renewable and essential resource. Ostara help municipalities and industry meet their regulatory requirements, while at the same time, producing a valuable slow release fertilizer product, Crystal Green™ which is sold to the fertilizer industry.
The CASTion Corporation is mining ammonia from wastewater with its Ammonia Recovery Process (ARP) and can recover this from municipal and industrial wastewaters and produce a raw material for sale back into the fertilizer industry, thereby generating a revenue stream.
Oberon FMR, Inc has been researching and developing the production of single cell protein (SCP) from un-utilized food processing by-product streams for over five years. Oberon’s vision is to become the premier supplier of high-quality SCP meal destined for use in animal feed diets.
Learn more
Register now
Webinar Tomorrow: Last Chance to Register
The Artemis Project, our parent firm, is hosting a webinar tomorrow that will gather an diverse group of experts to explore the challenges, solutions and investment opportunities surrounding efficient water management in energy exploration.
The webinar will occur tomorrow, July 16 from 11:00am EST to 12:30pm. The webinar will be divided into two sessions.
Learn more about the webinar.
Water PLUS – Keys to Building a Scalable Water Business
The first in a two part series, Guy Horowitz shares experience gained from TaKaDu’s recent successes scaling their water technology in partnership with Schneider. The second part will follow later this week.
For many years, water technology was a venture capitalist’s nightmare. What could be less enticing than capital-intensive, integration-heavy project-driven companies with long sales-cycles in the public utility space? Can you build a scalable water technology business without investing dozens or even hundreds of millions en route to scale?
Times are changing, and we are in the beginning of a new era. Quick-tongued investors have already nicknamed it ‘Cleantech 2.0’, though past attempts to use this term have been received with cynicism. Two-point-Oh or not, there is definitely a sense of inherent scalability baked into the next generation of cleantech startups, and water is not lagging behind.
How can one build a scalable business in a space characterized by one-offs? The answer has four pillars: Partners, Leverage, Usability and Software. Yes, to make things easy for investors, it also has a nice acronym. Forget about 2.0 – this is the Water PLUS.
Ecosphere’s Ozonix Deployed to Gulf, but not for Oil
Ecosphere Technologies’ agreement with Mid-Gulf Recovery Services has developed into a contract announced July 8th.
The contract stipulates two Ozonix mobile water treatment units will be deployed on barges carrying housing quarters, to purify grey and black water generated by the personnel deployed to clean portions of the gulf. One unit has been deployed, and the second is slated to deploy by July 22.
This is unexpected news indeed, and while I’m glad the personnel on the two barges won’t contribute to the environmental disaster via untreated grey or black water, I had hoped advanced technology would be deployed to directly address the oil spill itself.
However, Ecosphere may have just stumbled on a new opportunity: if Ozonix can be used to purify grey and blackwater for reuse, Ozonix could potentially be deployed in other humanitarian and military missions, remote oil and mining camps, and other personnel-heavy, water-starved situations. The UN could deploy Ozonix in Haiti to save money trucking water to IDP camps.
We’ll keep watching Ecosphere to see how the contract with Mid-Gulf progresses.
Editor’s note: The energy exploration industry is the first to demand advanced water technology for economic reasons: water efficiency during hydraulic fracturing means cost savings. Advances in on-site water treatment for energy exploration will drive down costs for the technology to a point where it can be implemented in break-even or non-profitable situations, like personal housing and small to medium-size businesses, where demand will grow as current water infrastructure decays. Vikram Rao and peers will present on topics surrounding water use in energy exploration at an upcoming Artemis Project webinar.
MIT’s most recent report on energy is on the Future of Natural Gas, following similar reports on coal and nuclear energy. It is co-edited by Ernest Moniz and Tony Meggs. The latter recently left BP as CTO. As reported in Forbes recently, the report emphasizes the role of shale gas in enabling natural gas substitution of coal. The authors see this as a transitional strategy for a low carbon future. We agree with that and have expressed similar ideas in the Directors Blog.
However, the report is surprisingly shy about discussing the environmental issues seen as facing shale gas exploitation. While we believe these are indeed tractable, they merit much more discussion than they were given. Accordingly we repair some of that omission here.
The most significant issues center on three matters: fresh water withdrawals, flow back water and collateral issues, and produced water handling and disposal.
Webinar: Managing Water Use in Energy Exploration
There’s an increasing concensus that natural gas will be America’s half-way house as we kick our fossil fuel habit. The difficulties lie in managing water use while extracting the transitional fuel.
Because of the near surety of a long-term natural gas industry, technologies devoted to treating produced water form one of the few sectors where regulation and commercial interests are combining to create significant and immediate market demand for advanced water technologies, especially on-site water management systems, which will be critical to sustained hydraulic fracturing operations during shale gas extraction.
However, as of yet, there isn’t a comprehensive description of the critical, functional elements of an on-site system capable of reliably, safely treating water produced by shale gas exploration.
We do understand some of the requirements, including rugged design, reliable remote telemetry, and the capability to identify and remove salts and minerals, but we also recognize the necessity of gathering leading minds to further develop specifications that will meet the challenges inherent in shale gas drilling.
For that purpose the Artemis Project is hosting a webinar that will gather an appropriately diverse group of experts to explore the challenges, solutions and investment opportunities surrounding efficient water management in energy exploration.
The webinar will occur on July 16 from 11:00am EST to 12:30pm. The webinar will be divided into two sessions.
Session 1: Trends and issues surrounding shale gas drilling.
- Bob Puls, Director of Research for the EPA’s Ground Water and Ecosystems Restoration Division, will brief the audience on current research into the impact of shale gas drilling on drinking water.
- Dr. Vikram Rao, the Director of the Research Triangle Energy Consortium and the former CTO of Halliburton, will discuss expected trends in shale gas exploration.
- Kathleen McGinty, Operating Partner at Element Partners and the former head of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection and the White House Council on Environmental Quality, will speak on how regulation and commercial forces are driving use of new approaches in shale gas drilling.
- Kate Sinding, Senior Attorney at the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) will speak on concerns that have emerged as shale gas drilling has begun in the United States.
Session 2: Relevant advanced water technologies addressing drilling issues.
- Precision design tools for rugged, reliable on-site water reclaim.
- Sensors to provide accurate remote oversight in rugged environments.
- Advanced water treatment approaches — from forward osmosis to electrolysis to remove contaminants from produced water.
