BlueTech Blog

New York could be first state to ban controversial drilling practice

Laura Shenkar — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:21:18 +0000

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

New York’s state assembly passed a limited ban on hydraulic fracturing
Also known as “fracking,” it’s a controversial method of drilling for natural gas
The EPA is studying whether fracking contaminates ground water

New York Gov. David Paterson, left, with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

(CNN) — New York could be the first state in the country to impose a limited ban on a controversial method of drilling for natural gas.

This week, the state assembly passed a hydraulic fracturing moratorium bill, which is currently en route to New York Gov. David Paterson’s desk. He will have 10 days from then to take action.

In the past, Paterson has expressed concern about hydraulic fracturing, which involves cracking thousands of feet beneath the earth’s surface to get at valuable natural gas. It is unclear if the governor will sign or veto the legislation.

“He’ll hear what everybody has to say,” a representative of the governor’s office told CNN. She would not provide her name.

Read the full story.

SAP on Water Strategy

Laura Shenkar — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 14:30:01 +0000

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by Garrett Miller, Director of Sustainability Solution Management, SAP

Many of us have heard pundits claiming, “water is the new gold.” If that were the case, my home state, Washington, would be emerging as the next global super power—without the support of Bill or Boeing. While it may not be the next gold, water’s emergence as a focal point for business should not come as a surprise. It should also not come as a surprise that SAP is well positioned to help you manage this critical resource regardless of whether you sell it in a bottle or just flush it in a toilet.

Typically businesses think about water for three primary reasons: quality, quantity, and location. Increasingly, a fourth driver is emerging: efficiency. Just as businesses have used carbon and energy as bellwethers to identify inefficiencies in business processes, so too can certain industries use water as a similar type of efficiency barometer.

Water quality surfaces in two areas of a business’s operations—with very different degrees of importance depending on your industry—either as an input or an output. Water used during the manufacturing process is very important to companies like Intel whose water purity requirements make bottled drinking water look like something siphoned out of a mud puddle. Chip manufacturers, such as Intel, use vast amounts of extremely pure water during very controlled, sterile, and precise chip manufacturing processes. These requirements on purity take a considerable amount of energy, and cost, to achieve—making water quality a paramount issue to these types of companies. Intel and their competitors are certainly not the only ones with water quality concerns. Take Disney as another example. Consider the millions of small children exposed to various water sources during visits to Disney theme parks—from Splash Mountain to drinking fountains. Pretty serious stuff.

On the other hand, are the industries that care more about water quality when it leaves the plant. Chemical manufacturers and pulp mills are two great examples of industries that have strict requirements placed on the water quality as a discharge, whether to a sewage treatment plant or body of water.

Water quantity sometimes surfaces as a mission-critical for businesses that do not use much water in their direct operations. Clothing companies like Patagonia have an extremely high water footprint when one considers the amount of water used to grow the organic cotton and produce the leather used to manufacturer Patagonia apparel. Clothing manufacturers’ extended water footprint found in their supply chain dwarfs the amount of water used elsewhere in their business operations.

Where water is located really makes an impact on the viability of certain businesses. Consider solar power generation that uses concentrating solar power technologies. These technologies require a not insignificant amount of water during their operations, but are often located in some of the most water scarce locations—deserts.

While your particular industry may not have been mentioned above, chances are that if you are a manufacturer (or not as we saw with Disney) you have water in your production process. An emerging area of water management treats water as an indicator of waste (read inefficient). Taking this lens to your operations can result in significant cost savings identification.

So, how can a company go about managing their specific water-related concerns? A lot of it depends on where you find yourself within the water supply chain. Working at a company like SAP means that I have a unique vantage point to view water across our different Line of Business and Industry segmentations. We literally help customers along every step of the process. We help customers manage the infrastructure of water delivery while working with Utilities who use our Enterprise Asset Management solution. Our footprint in the Utility space means that we not only help with delivering that water but also profitably managing that distribution process. From gate to gate, we also provide our customers with visibility and insight into how they use water in their own operations via solutions like Carbon Impact—which can also help companies evaluate the financial return of different abatement projects across your entire company. Once it has run its course (pun!), water leaves a business as wastewater discharge and we help our customers there too through our Environmental Compliance solution. Overlying all of this is the general risk associated with water quality, quantity, and location requirements. We as SAP have many different risk management tools that help our customers proactively manage all types of risks.

While water may not be the new gold (at current prices, a gallon of water would cost north of $165k), it is certainly a resource to be managed carefully.

Making Every Drop Count

Laura Shenkar — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 19:52:13 +0000

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Artemis Project Top 50 winner Takadu was mentioned in the Economist special report titled “It’s a Smart World” highlighting emerging technologies and trends around the use of sensors, data and analytics. A special section in the report is dedicated to ‘the Smart Water Utility’.

A special report on smart systems

Making every drop count

Utilities are getting wise to smart meters and grids

Nov 4th 2010

LONDON’S streets can be a bit of a maze, but below ground things are even more complex. Water pipes crisscross the city in all directions. Some areas used to have competing water companies, each of which built its own system. Not even Thames Water, the utility that operates the British capital’s water-supply network today, knows exactly where all the pipes run.

Moreover, the network is ageing. Only a few years ago more than half of the 10,000 miles (16,000km) of water pipes below the streets of London were over a hundred years old and often burst. It did not help that over many years Thames Water, which was privatised in 1989, failed to invest enough. By the mid-2000s London had one of the leakiest water-supply systems in the rich world. Every day nearly 900m litres of treated water were lost and 240 leaks had to be fixed.

Over the past five years, though, Thames Water has replaced 1,300 miles of cast-iron Victorian mains, those most likely to break, with plastic ones, reducing leakage to 670m litres per day. And when the firm puts in new pipes, it also installs additional wireless sensors, giving it a better view of its network. “We can now tell where we have a broken main even before customers call us,” says Bob Collington, its head of asset management.

In this special report

Thames Water not only needs to know what is going on in its network, but to be able to act quickly on the information. The same is true of infrastructure operators around the world. Whether in water, power, transport or buildings, all are trying to turn their dumb infrastructures into something more like a central nervous system. That makes them pioneers of the convergence of the physical and the digital world.

Putting sensors and actuators (devices to control a mechanism) into physical infrastructures is not exactly new. Known as “supervisory control and data acquisition”, such systems have been around for decades. But many still require human intervention: workers have to be sent out to download sensor readings or to fix problems. And even if sensors and actuators are connected, different types often feed into incompatible systems, so they cannot be easily combined to automate processes.

The operations centre of Thames Water in Reading, to the west of London, is a good place to see both the old and the new—and soon the future. A big video screen shows expected precipitation over the next few hours, and workers monitor the water level of reservoirs on their own screens. But if one of the pumps fails, they may still have to make a call: not all the valves can be remotely controlled.

Thames Water is investing £100m ($158m) so it can take action remotely and automate a lot of its processes. If the project works, the system will not only automatically deal with leaks but also schedule work crews and send text messages to affected customers. Employees in the operations centre, explains Jerry White, the utility’s head of operational control, will then spend less time monitoring the network and more on making the utility’s processes more efficient.

A big chunk of this work will be analysing the data collected by all the systems and correlating them with other information. Not every unexpected spike in the water flow is the result of a leak, says Mr White. For instance, water use leaps after dark during Ramadan and at half-time during World Cup football matches.

One day soon Thames Water may even be able to send out work crews before a main actually breaks. In early 2010 the firm began using a web-based service provided by TaKaDu, an Israeli company, that acts as the network’s “eyes and ears”, in the words of Amir Peleg, its founder and boss. The firm analyses historical and online data to provide a basis for comparison, enabling its algorithms to detect things that are about to go wrong.

Similar progress is being made all over the world. The scope for preventing waste is enormous, in the water industry and elsewhere. Power utilities are well ahead, not least because they can use the grid itself to collect sensor data and control switches. Transport systems are behind, particularly roads, which often use nothing more than traffic cameras. Even buildings are getting more automated, with continuous checks on their energy use.

At the edge

For infrastructures to become truly smart, however, it is not enough to put more intelligence into the core of a network. The edge—the interface with users and devices—also has to become clever. This is the idea behind smart metering, which has made a good deal of progress in the power industry. According to Accenture, a consultancy, there are about 90 smart-grid projects around the world today. By the end of last year more than 76m smart meters had been installed worldwide. That number will almost treble by 2015, to 212m, estimates ABI Research.

Smart meters and other gear needed to make grids more intelligent will not come cheap. Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, predicts that the worldwide smart-grid market alone will grow from $20 billion last year to $100 billion in 2030. Yet the benefits also promise to be huge: power savings, reduced investment in electricity generation and lower carbon emissions.

The place to go to see the technology in action is Boulder, Colorado, home to what is considered the world’s first fully fledged “smart grid”. The local utility, Xcel Energy, did not skimp. It deployed equipment that automatically reports power cuts. It installed more than 20,000 smart meters, connected them via a fibre-optic network, launched a website to track power use and has started to offer pricing plans that encourage shifting consumption to off-peak hours. It has even equipped some households with gear that tells air-conditioning systems to turn themselves off when demand for electricity is high, a mechanism called “demand response”.

The results so far are mixed. The system has certainly helped Xcel to run its grid more efficiently. The utility now knows what is happening in its network and power cuts have become rare. Problems can be pinpointed and fixed much more quickly. But customers are not using much less power than they did before.

Yet it is early days. Some firms are already beginning to show what can be achieved with demand response. EnerNOC, an American energy middleman, for instance, pays other firms for allowing it to shut down their non-essential gear at times of peak demand, thus freeing up capacity. By mid-year some 3,300 customers, from steel plants to grocery stores, had signed up. Their combined consumption, which can be made available to other users if needed, is 4,800MW, exceeding the output of America’s largest nuclear plant.

The ultimate point of smart grids, however, is to allow dynamic pricing, with electricity charges fluctuating in response to demand. This could cut power demand by 10-15% during peak hours, estimates Ahmad Faruqui of the Brattle Group, a consultancy—more than twice the reduction likely to be achieved by just giving customers real-time information about their usage. That number could easily double again, he says, with a combination of dynamic pricing and demand response.

The main objective of smart power meters is to lower the peak load and thus enable utilities to keep down their peak generating capacity. In the water industry the economics are somewhat different, explains Stefan Helmcke, a water expert at McKinsey. Water can be easily stored and consumers have less discretion over when they use it (for instance, people cannot defer going to the toilet, which uses more water than any other activity at home), so the case for smart water meters is weaker.

Yet they are spreading all the same. Boston has long been the shining example. As early as 2004 the city’s Water and Sewer Commission had equipped almost all its customers with wireless smart meters. But it will soon be outdone by New York, which plans to install more than 800,000 of the devices at a cost of about $250m. Even Thames Water, most of whose customers have no meters of any sort, is now planning to install some of the smart kind.

Getting on board

In transport the equivalent of a smart meter is a vehicle’s on-board unit. That used to be a simple device, working like a radio-frequency identification tag when it passes under a gantry on a toll road, but it is also getting smarter. Germany’s Toll Collect system, which ensures that lorry drivers pay for using the country’s crowded motorways, relies on gadgets that are in some ways as clever as a smartphone. Among other things, they keep track of their position with the help of GPS, the satellite-based global positioning system.

Such toll systems are multiplying, particularly in big congested cities, including London and Stockholm. But it is Singapore that leads the pack. The city-state not only charges drivers for using much-travelled roads (driving on an expressway can be S$6, or $4.60); it also adjusts traffic lights to suit the flow of vehicles, uses data collected by taxis to measure average speed and is developing a parking-guidance system, noting that cars looking for somewhere to park are now a big cause of congestion.

Singapore may also become the first city to introduce real-time dynamic pricing on its roads. In 2006 the Land Transport Authority tested a traffic-prediction system built by IBM to set the tolls. And next year it plans to test a satellite-based system that does not require gantries and can charge according to how congested a road is at that particular time.

Another of the island’s infrastructure-management systems has become a model for the world: that for water. At the information centre at the southern tip of the island, next to the Marina Barrage, visitors can literally get a taste of it by picking up a bottle of “NEWater”, waste water that after extensive treatment has become potable again. But most of the treated water is fed back, via a separate distribution system, to Singapore’s factories and power plants—and then treated again.

This closed loop is part of a water-supply system in which “every drop counts,” in the words of Yap Kheng Guan, a director at the island’s Public Utilities Board (PUB). The Marina Barrage is another case in point. It was inaugurated in 2008 and acts as a tidal barrier to keep seawater out, thus turning the island’s most populated district into a water-catchment area and the harbour into a reservoir. When two other reservoirs are opened next year, more than two-thirds of Singapore’s territory will be used to catch rainwater.

The city-state’s desalination plants are also among the world’s most efficient. All this means that the island—smaller than Luxembourg and home to nearly 5m people as well as an economy nearly as big as that of Hong Kong—is able to meet more than 60% of its water needs on its own. But it wants to go even further: 50 years from now it hopes to be self-sufficient.

Sensors play a relatively small part in Singapore’s water management because the infrastructure is so new. On average there is only one leak a day. The PUB puts sensors only in a few key spots, for instance where water leaves the reservoirs. Should the system detect a dangerous contamination, that part of the network can be shut down immediately. And if heavy rainfall in central Singapore threatens to flood the city during high tide, seven huge pumps next to the Marina Barrage start to push water into the sea at 40 cubic metres per second each.

So far Singapore has no smart water meters, and at the moment there is no pressing need. Most Singaporeans live in multi-storey apartment buildings, which makes it easy to read meters. But if the PUB wants to reach its target of cutting daily domestic water use per person from 155 litres in 2008 to 147 litres by 2020 (about the same as in India, and a quarter of the figure in America, see chart 3), Singapore will have to become smarter still—and set yet another example.

The Corporate View of Water Strategy – a Webinar with SAP, Intel and IBM

Laura Shenkar — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 22:56:48 +0000

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When water is cheap and abundant, why should corporations be planning their water management strategy for a thirsty future?

“The Corporate View of Water Strategy” webinar will bring together leaders from SAP, Intel and IBM to discuss why water management is important, how to implement a water management plan, and the practical application of water management in a large and successful corporation.

Speakers are:

Peter Williams, CTO, “Big Green” Innovations at IBM
Carrie Freeman, Director, Sustainable Business Innovation, Intel
Garrett Miller, Director of Sustainability at SAP Labs

Register for this webinar by Monday, November 8, and receive a complimentary copy of “Water 101: a primer for the corporate executive” by Laura Shenkar, Principal at The Artemis Project.

“The Corporate View of Water Strategy” takes place on Thursday, November 11 from 8-9:00 AM PST. Early registration price of $149 is valid through Monday, November 8. Space is limited.

Artemis Webinar: “The Art and Alchemy of the Exit”

Laura Shenkar — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 16:07:17 +0000

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The transaction that brings a premium to investors and founders of a great technology company is one of the company’s defining moments. Achieving a premium return on an early-stage investment requires communication, precision, and financial savvy.

* What are the most decisive challenges for water tech companies in transitioning from a start-up into an industry leader?
* What is key to ensuring that an acquisition is the beginning of a new chapter of rapid growth?
* When does an IPO offer the best future for a water tech company?

On October 21 at 8AM PST, the Artemis Project will host “The Art the Exit.” This webinar kicks off the 2011 Artemis Project Top 50 Company Competition – the only competition specifically designed to evaluate the investment potential of emerging providers of Water Tech solutions.

The webinar will bring together a group of panelists that have not only negotiated this process successfully, but are able to offer their insight and wisdom to investors and company leaders.

Speakers include:

* Judson Hill, NGP Global Adaption Partners
* Bill Malarkey, Boenning & Scattergood

We’ll also hear from CEOs of Artemis Top 50 companies:

* Carlos Perea, Miox
* Joel Bleth, Solarbee
* Brent Constanz, Calera

Registration for this webinar is limited to provide participants the opportunity to engage in the post presentation discussion. Early registration reduced pricing is available through 10/18.

Registration Link: http://tiny.cc/3invl

The Gatekeepers of Water Tech

Laura Shenkar — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 19:52:36 +0000

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Utility managers like Eric Rosenblum and Ron Zegers are part of a small cadre of experienced leaders within the water utility who have been facilitating new water management approaches for decades. They have ensured that, with very few exceptions, there is a steady supply of healthy and safe drinking water.

Like other water utility managers, these men play a quiet but essential role in our world. Our water infrastructure is not only the hard bound pipes and pumps that treat water and deliver it to us – it’s the lakes, streams and rivers that are our source of freshwater. Protecting these sources has become an essential part of the role of water utilities.

We want innovative video games and haircuts, but we want the same old water.

We want innovative video games and haircuts, but we want the same old water. It is the responsibility of water utilities to avoid any unnecessary risks to water quality, and this makes them among the most risk adverse customers for new technology.

They demand that new approaches be well-proven in other utilities before they’re considered. As explained by Andrew Salveson of Carollo Engineers, “One of the major hurdles we face is the municipal copy-cat market, and this presents a hurdle to innovation.”

Promising technologies spend $500,000 to $1M just to prove their technology works full-scale at a single utility. Many of the seemingly most promising companies over the past few years have not been able to survive the long and expensive process of proving their solutions in the municipal market. As a result, the benefits of these solutions are often never seen by the general population.

Scarcity and infrastructure decay require new solutions for water resources management. The process for bringing water technology to market requires money, but more importantly it requires leadership. The few companies that make it through this arduous process are applying innovation to how they bring to their technology to market.

Bringing Water Design Vision to the “Rest of the Mess” in Real Estate

Laura Shenkar — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 22:50:14 +0000

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Shanghai Towers

The Shanghai Tower will serve as a mammoth 125-floor rainwater harvesting structure. The breathtaking outside shell borrows the best designs from nature, collecting rain to purify and replenish 675,000,000 liters of water each year. Combining stores, offices and apartments, the building will serve as an icon for water resource management in China, as the country struggles to find enough clean water for its people and its growing economy.

“Unfortunately, most of the buildings in the world are not Shanghai Towers – most of the buildings aren’t new,” noted Dave Pogue, Director of Sustainability for CB Richard Ellis in the Artemis Project webinar earlier today.

“While some of our buildings are new, we also need to be concerned about managing the ‘rest of the mess’,” David Pogue, CB Richard Ellis.

Shanghai Towers

“While some of our buildings are new, we also need to be concerned about managing the ‘rest of the mess’,” Pogue explained. CBRE manages over 1.2 billion square feet of property in the Americas, and the bulk of those buildings are not new. Environmental considerations must contend with budgets. “We have a lot of buildings struggling trying to find a way to be better in a water constrained world,” Pogue stated.

While water is vital, it is virtually free today. And water seldom gets attention until there is a crisis. Pogue noted that basic water saving devices such as toilets and urinals generate only a trickle of benefits and take 8 to 10 years to pay back. They’re better than nothing, but still just a small drop in the bucket.

We’re still waiting for the onsite appliance that reclaims water and treats rainwater with the precision and beauty of a miniature Shanghai Tower. Small-scale onsite waste water systems operate today, recycling water from sinks and toilets to save over half of the drinking water used by an apartment building. Companies like Dominic Sulik’s Natural Solutions Utilities are offering whole building solutions for onsite water management that match much of the savings from the Shanghai Tower. This offering is a service that pieces together existing solutions.

Property Chart

We can see the crises are coming, but we are still waiting for the Apple version of a building water system that matches the benefits of the Shanghai Tower.

“Its not about the cost of water, it’s about the downtime and the risk for the property,” John Macomber, Harvard Business School.

“Its not about the cost of water, it’s about the downtime and the risk for the property,” notes John Macomber, Professor of Sustainability at Harvard Business School. If there is a lower cost of capital for a better risk-adjusted return on the property, then onsite water management makes sense financially.

Sustainable Building Image

Professor Macomber suggests that real estate properties such as accommodations and hospitality operations—hotels, spas, and hospitals—are examples of some of the early candidates for water tech. “The beach head for water tech is where the landlord pays for the water, where the landlord can effectively measure the benefit of an intervention, and where the volume of water used really matters to the economics.”

Desalitech Reduces Costs of Desalination

Galen Sanford — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 18:51:57 +0000

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Efficient desalination can utilize alternative energy, like these Danish windmills, thus relying on the ocean twice. / Photo: andjohan on Flickr

The most common question I field when I mention desalination is, “Doesn’t that take a lot of energy?”

The truth is, yes, it does. That’s why you’ll not hear me advocate for desalination without strongly insisting on complementary conservation.

We must redouble our conservation efforts by upgrading infrastructure intelligently and in no way excuse wasteful water practices by pointing to the plentiful, historical ingredients of desalination: oceans of water and oceans of coal.

Each barrel of freshwater extracted from the ocean has costs, so we should use the water as efficiently as possible, recycling it and then remediating it into the water cycle.

Yet, conservation alone isn’t going to meet our water needs. The world’s population is expected to increase by 2.5 billion over the next 30 – 40 years, while the current, natural water cycle is not expected to increase its output.

Just as we must increase conservation, we must prepare for the impending water plateau by increasing our capacity to produce fresh water.

Hence my excitement in June when I heard about Desalitech’s successful pilot.

The test purified Mediterranean saltwater, using Desalitech’s proprietary Closed-Circuit Desalination saltwater reverse osmosis method (SWRO-CCD).

Using common components, without energy recovery, running a high-pressure pump at 81% mean efficiency and circulation pump at 37.5% mean efficiency, the pilot achieved 48% recovery at 2.05 – 2.40 kWh per cubic meter of fresh water. For comparison, Perth’s desalination plant using Energy Recovery from ERI achieves 43% recovery at 2.32 kWh/m3.

Desalitech aims to increase the mean efficiency of the off-the-shelf, high-pressure pump to 88%, to provide recovery at 1.75 – 1.95 kWh/m3 on Mediterranean saltwater. The same pumps used on ocean water could produce equal recovery at 1.5 – 1.7 kWh/m3.

Desalitech’s implementation reduces the cost of powering desalination processes. It also decreases capital expenditures. Nadav Efraty, CEO of Desalitech, told me, “This technology is reducing energy consumption by up to 50% when we utilize about twice the membranes, reduces energy by about 10-15% when we use only 40% of the membranes compared to a conventional plant, or reduces energy about 30% when we utilizes the same amount of membranes, but in this mode, since we don’t utilize any form of energy recovery, we still see a reduction in capital expenditures.”

Even with less than half the membranes, the technology still sees 10-15% energy reduction. That’s a 60% savings on capital expenditures for membranes.

As an added element of efficiency, plants utilizing Desalitech’s technology can turn plants up and down depending on demand: Nadav explained, “The very same unit can operate at very high production rates part of the day (when power rates are low for example) and in extremely low energy consumption the rest of the day.”

Desalitech does this by independently controlling component flow rates, recovery, pressures and cross flow irrespective of the other variables.

Following their successful pilot, Desalitech is addressing brackish water. Desalitech’s three BWRO installations are fully operational facilities, capable of producing 10,000 m3 fresh water per day.

Utilities Seek New Technologies

Laura Shenkar — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 22:21:03 +0000

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Bacteria digest waste at a water treatment plant / Photo: jumpingspider on flickr

Water treatment and delivery systems were built for steady, predictable operation. In the face of water scarcity and budget cuts, utility managers are challenged to squeeze more performance out of water infrastructure with advanced technologies.

“We have two perspectives on improving the way in which we run our infrastructure,” says Rick Holmes, Acting Deputy Manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority in Las Vegas. “First, we are bringing in technology to help us keep aging infrastructure working longer.”

“Second, we are seeking out new ways of ensuring water quality. We are looking for new ways of addressing pipe corrosion, disinfection by-products, biological monitoring and damage from invasive species like Quagga mussels.”

We look forward to hearing more from the Southern Nevada Water Authority, as well as other leading water utilities in our upcoming webinar “A Visionary View of Advanced Water Tech.”

Resource Recovery Companies Find Sustainable Advantage

Paul O’Callaghan — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:36:07 +0000

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Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant / Photo: roboppy on flickr

Everywhere you look people are trying to do more with less. Reduce costs, increase efficiency, reduce energy use, recover resources. There are strong economic drivers to do all of these things, which also happen to be sustainable.

On July 22nd, 2010 I moderated the first in the BlueTech Tracker(TM) Webinar series: Mineral & Resource Recovery from Wastewater. We featured four companies with innovative technologies, and perhaps even more importantly, innovative business models. The companies were Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies, Calera, CASTion and Oberon.

Ostara produces a slow release fertilizer product, Crystal Green(TM) from wastewater.

Calera, a Khosla Ventures backed company whose technology is part of a new infrastructure designed to view carbon, not as a pollutant, but as a resource. Calera might be accused of having a Superman complex in the cleantech sector, in that their technology simultaneously contributes to solving two of the most pressing environmental issues of our time: climate change and water scarcity. Calera sequesters carbon from power plants, produces a low carbon cement and helps to desalinate water.

The CASTion Corporation has an Ammonia Recovery Process (ARP) which can produce an ammonia fertilizer product from wastewater and recently won a $27.1M contract with the City of New York to provide a cost effective method for the City to achieve compliance at its 26th Ward Wastewater Treatment plant.

Oberon FMR concluded the quartet. Oberon takes wastewater from the food processing industry, and through the application of some clever biotechnology (single cell protein synthesis), produces a value added, high protein, fish meal replacement for use in the aquaculture industry.

A few key take-aways:

1. This is about Costs
To get out of the starting gate with wastewater technologies in this area, you have to have a compelling value proposition. Resource recovery can enable a technology provider to off-set operational and capital costs and thereby provide a cost effective solution to their clients.

Ahren Britton, CTO with Ostara put it very succinctly with the observation, “as a standalone wastewater treatment technology, we won’t always be the cheapest way to remove phosphorus; as a fertilizer production company, we might not compete with current ore prices, but put the two together, and that’s what makes for the winning proposition.”

David Delasanta, President of CASTion noted that the decision by the City of New York to go with their ARP system on a new project was driven by economics. The City had a regulatory requirement to remove ammonia and the ARP system represented the lowest cost option occupying the smallest footprint. The City in fact sole-sourced this option from CASTion.

Fish Farm outside Shanghai / Photo: Ivan Walsh on flickr

The Sustainability and political angle can help to push these projects over the line, as the person who finally signs off on expenditure is likely to be a political animal. However, to get this far in the process, you first have to convince the people on the ground that this is a good idea, and their concerns tend to be less politically motivated and more related to, ‘Will this work and how much will it cost?‘.

Seth Terry, Oberon VP of Operations said they have found that the Corporate Sustainability angle of their approach to turn food processing wastewater into a feedstock for fish meal replacement production, has piqued the interest of a number of major Corporations and was one of the factors which helped them to secure a contract with Miller Coors to construct a full-scale demonstration facility at their site.

There is a monetary value to a company in terms of brand value to be able to show its shareholders that instead of generating a waste product which required disposal, they were able to ‘up-cycle’ the resources in their wastewater and in doing so, off-set the unsustainable harvesting of biomass from oceans to produce fish-meal for fish farms.

2. Resource Recovery is becoming a geo-political and security issue
Certain resources such as phosphorus are becoming a geo-political issue. China has recently put an export tax on phosphorus to discourage the export of this valuable commodity, to preserve it and keep it at home to enable food production. China is known for its ability to take a long-term view on things and this is an early indicator of how important this resource may become. It is worth noting that like oil, phosphorus resources are found in a number of unstable regions of the world.

3. Companies which succeed in this area need to know two markets
The flip side of producing a product while treating a waste, is that you need to simultaneously build an outlet and channels to market for your product, at the same time as you are developing the infrastructure to produce it. This is challenging when working with a variable feedstock (wastewater) and when the quantities you produce, initially, do not make a dent in the larger market for that commodity.

To succeed, companies need to understand the wastewater treatment market and also understand the market for the commodity they are producing.

In the case of Calera, this means they have to know the concrete and aggregate business. In the case of Oberon, they have to know the fish-meal business. Ostara and CASTion both have to understand the dynamics of the fertilizer industry. When you hear Calera CEO Brent Constanz speak about the nuances of the concrete and aggregate market, and then switch back to the importance of piloting on different wastewater streams, you get a feel for the level and depth of understanding required to succeed in straddling these divergent worlds.

At least a part of the sustainable business advantage these companies have, is their ability to understand and create a business model which meets customers needs on both sides of the fence. Companies that can do this are pulling away from the herd. When you combine this with technical know-how, continued innovation and a strong IP position, you have a sustainable first mover advantage which will be difficult for a ‘me-too’ to catch up with in the short term.

The next Webinar in our BlueTech Tracker(TM) Series is on Thursday July 29th at 12 noon PST and will put the spotlight on Microbial Fuel Cells and Bioelectrochemical systems. This group of technologies has the potential to generate electricity from wastewater and produce fuels and chemicals which can be sold.

Again the approach is the same, how to squeeze some value out of that wastewater.

Paul O’Callaghan is Principal of O2 Environmental, a consultancy group providing water technology market expertise, founder of the BlueTech Innovation Forum and co-author of ‘Water Technology Markets 2010′.