Water Is Energy

More than 2,000 years ago, Greek and Roman engineers harnessed the power of water to drive grain mills, and the technology soon spread as far as China, where it was used to forge iron. By the 4th century, the Romans had scaled up water wheel technology to build a massive flour plant in Arles, France, powered by 16 overshot water wheels. During the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci sketched out visions of water-driven sawmills, forges, factories and spinning works.

Today's hydroelectric turbines are direct descendants of those early realizations that water is a highly efficient means of transferring kinetic energy. Industrial boilers and steam generating electrical plants take advantage of water's thermal properties and the force it can exert once enough energy has been invested in boiling it. In all, water is energy.?????

Uniquely Suited

Water is uniquely suited to be a source and conveyor of energy. At 8 pounds per gallon, it's heavy, so it delivers great momentum as it falls. It is non-compressible. It expands when heated into steam—or, for that matter, when frozen into ice. And because it takes a significant amount of energy to heat water, it is a powerful medium for storing and transferring energy.

Water is also vital in the effort to source and treat other sources of energy like oil and gas. According to the American Petroleum Institute, it takes 7.5 barrels of water to extract 1 barrel of oil from subterranean deposits. Those "nodding donkey" pumps you see in oil country are mostly pumping water. In fracking projects like those in the Marcellus Shale or Bakken Formation, heated, treated water is forcing bedrock layers apart and freeing oil and gas from tight deposits.

If it wasn't for water, we'd have no energy.

In the yin-yang relationship between water and energy, water is not only the source and conveyance of energy, it is the reason for a significant expenditure of energy, too.

Thomas Newcomen developed the first steam engine in 1712 to pump water out of the mine at the Coneygree Coal Works near Dudley Castle in Staffordshire, England. Of course, as philosopher and comedian Steve Bhaerman notes, a fair amount of fuel was burned to pump water so more fuel could be mined—a veritable perpetual motion machine of consumption. And as Michael Webber points out in Catch 22: Water vs. Energy, many of us are still running in a similar vicious circle when we expend energy to water our lawns during the week so we can burn energy mowing them on the weekends. Clearly, conservation of water and conservation of energy are linked, too. ????????????

Water Treatment

The next step in water and energy conservation may well be taken in the world of water treatment. Improvements in desalination—a notoriously energy-intensive process when evaporation or reverse osmosis filters are used—could make new supplies of fresh water available at a more reasonable cost.

On the wastewater treatment side, harvesting methane from anaerobic digesters could turn municipal utilities and industrial facilities into net-zero or net energy producers rather than net consumers of energy. I am particularly excited about Anaergia's anaerobic digesters and Cambrian's EcoVolt technology, which tap microbes to treat wastewater while creating energy at farms, food and beverage plants, and more.

There's also my own company's contribution to making water treatment more energy efficient, using the motive power of water to draw in and mix air and other gases in every step of the water processing cycle, from purifying drinking water to ozonating industrial process water to aerating wastewater.?

We in the water industry have the opportunity—and the imperative—to innovate our way to a more sustainable water/energy relationship. And we have plenty of precedent to consider. After all, we learned to hone microbial populations to make great beer. Surely we can apply ourselves to cultivate microbes that make the most cost-effective energy.???????????

Digital and Beyond

The Digital Age continues to put pressure on both water and energy. We are all addicted to electricity at home, at work and at play. And our devices are linked to massive manufacturing plants and server farms that require vast amounts of power as well as continuous water cooling to keep banks of computers functioning.

Power management in our devices, from our iPhones to electric cars, is also deeply tied to water. Like the coalfields of Staffordshire, Congolese cobalt mines and Australian lithium mines must be pumped free of water. Then there's the beneficiation stage of mineral processing, purifying the materials for use—a process that can be extremely water-intensive.

As we build the batteries that drive our devices, humankind is now looking for alternative fuels to deliver the electricity we need. Nuclear power is experiencing a bit of a renaissance in public image and our sense of its potential after bottoming out in the '70s and '80s. Like nuclear power, hydropower is fraught with baggage and spirited debate about its green cred and environmental costs.

Biofuels—grown with water in the case of woody biomass or crops like miscanthus, or grown in water in the case of algae—are in the spotlight. And hydrogen, the Holy Grail of clean-energy tech, is formed by splitting water through electrolysis. That is no small factor: for every 1 kg of hydrogen produced by electrolysis, 9 kg of water is consumed.

Finally, water energy itself could provide a substantial amount of electricity. Seaborne tidal generators harness the power of wave energy as—in the words of Leonardo da Vinci—"the body of the earth has its ocean, which rises and falls every six hours with the breathing of the world." Sir Isaac Newton recognized the power in the tides. The UK Marine Foresight Panel put a number to it, noting that "if 0.1 percent of the renewable energy available within the oceans could be converted into electricity it would satisfy the present world demand for energy more than five times over."

It's high time to tap into high tide.

New View of Water

The modern age comes with more than just growing demand for water and energy. It has sparked new concepts of water and energy themselves—for instance, in University of Washington bioengineer Gerald H. Pollack's concept of the fourth phase of water.

We're all familiar with the three phases of water we encountered in school: liquid, solid (ice) and vapor (steam). Pollack asserts that there is a fourth phase, a liquid-crystalline phase pushed into order by radiant energy from the sun. One of the properties of liquid-crystalline water is that it excludes solutes—much as ice does—so Pollack refers to it as "exclusion zone" or "EZ" water.

As Pollack describes it, EZ water has a negative charge that powers flow. He is developing electrodes that can tap the energy of fourth-stage water, and notes that EZ water does its own filtration by repelling solutes. I will be watching Pollack's research carefully in the years to come.

In the meantime, I am reminded of Leonardo da Vinci's favorite image, of ripples emanating after a stone falls into water. It's a perfect and beautiful illustration of one of the basic links of water and energy, the ripples conveying the kinetic energy of the stone to a wider and wider world. It's also an apt metaphor for the wide-ranging effects of our decisions—about water AND energy.

Next month:?Water Is Money