Report: Innovations in Desalination Promise to Lower Costs and Protect Oceans
Climate change and increasing population are putting the world’s drinking water at risk. One solution is to make saltwater potable with desalination. However, high costs and environmental damage have stalled the adoption of this potentially life-saving technology. A new report from Boulder-based venture capital and research firm Saoradh Enterprise Partners (SEP) explores innovations that promise to improve desalination and identifies the most investable companies.
Global water usage was over 6.5 trillion gallons of water per day in 2012. Approximately 16,000 desalination plants operate worldwide with a cumulative capacity of 25 - 34 billion gallons of freshwater per day. Considering that freshwater use grows by about 1% per year, that's less than half a percent of global water consumption. The industry must scale quickly and efficiently for desalination to impact water scarcity.
Barriers to Desalination
Desalination has failed to achieve mainstream acceptance for two main reasons: environmental damage and cost. Earlier this year, California rejected plans for a $1.4 billion desalination plant citing risks to the coastal ecosystem and the local community's concerns that the costs will fall on local taxpayers. Similar controversy faces many desalination projects.
Turning seawater into safe drinking water leaves behind brine, a hypersaline soup that contains materials like sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium. The cheapest and most common way to deal with brine is to pump it back into the ocean. Brine has unhealthy salinity levels and reduces ocean oxygen levels, damaging ecosystems and suffocating marine life.
Desalination is also energy intensive: energy costs account for 40-50% of total production costs. The industry aims to reduce costs to under $1 per cubic meter of freshwater, but current costs sit at about $2.50 per cubic meter.
Emerging Solutions
A new generation of desalination technology mitigates environmental damage by completely separating minerals, ions, and elements from water, creating a highly concreted waste byproduct called zero liquid discharge instead of brine. The University of Oklahoma, for example, is working on a freeze-desalination method that can filter the mineral byproducts down to a pure salt.
“Desalination already provides fresh water to millions of people worldwide, and expanding that capacity is critical to address water scarcity. SEP’s report is a comprehensive and informative analysis of the growing desalination market.”
Other technology in development will improve efficiency and substantially lower costs; most focus on improved filtration membranes and pressure exchangers. Until zero liquid discharge technologies reach the mainstream, the industry can utilize waste and offset production costs by recovering valuable minerals through brine mining.
Using renewable energy and recovered energy is critical to making desalination an effective climate change adaptation. Desalination has low carbon intensity relative to other industries – it generates about 1.3 kilograms of CO2 per cubic meter of freshwater compared to 400 kilograms generated per cubic meter of concrete – but clean energy and energy recovery are still crucial to scale production. The IPCC presents desalination as a "viable adaptation option" to water scarcity but states that "[d]esalination will be maladaptive if fossil fuel is used."
Companies
SEP identified 307 notable startup and growth companies – 110 in the US and 197 international. Although operating desalination plants source 71% of their water from seawater, the companies identified by SEP are focused fairly evenly on industrial wastewater, brackish water, and seawater. SEP found 20 companies to be especially interesting to investors. The complete database of companies is available upon purchase of the full report.
PURCHASE THE REPORT
The Desalination report is 115 pages and includes:
A global database of notable companies (with a US focus).
One hour of individualized support from the SEP team.
Find more details, including a full table of contents, and purchase the report on the SEP Marketplace.
ABOUT TOPIC REPORTS
Topic reports explore cleantech investment spaces with the aim to calibrate investors, uncover opportunities, and identify possible solutions to Solving Climate+ by 2050. SEP produces topic reports twice per quarter to gather data and insights important to evaluating key cleantech investment spaces as part of our Innovation Flow Reporting (IFR) service. Recent and upcoming reports include BattRe (lithium-ion battery recycling), Biochar, Bioplastics, Clean Food, Concrete and Cement, Desalination, and Refrigerants.
ABOUT INNOVATION FLOW REPORTING
SEP’s Innovation Flow Reporting (IFR) service is designed to illuminate innovation hubs and identify and capture the best cleantech commercialization opportunities for SEP and our corporate clients. More than just market research, Innovation Flow Reporting delivers actionable information. IFR uncovers new cleantech opportunities for corporate venture capital offices, innovation programs, product development teams, and R&D departments. We know it works because we use it to drive our investing.
ABOUT SAORADH ENTERPRISE PARTNERS
Saoradh Enterprise Partners (SEP) is a cleantech venture capital and research firm based in Boulder, Colorado. SEP partners with innovators, entrepreneurs, and corporations to find solutions at the magical intersection of science (what’s possible), finance (what’s bankable), industry (what’s needed), and planet (what matters). Learn more at www.saoradh.com.