“Water Scarcity is making energy companies reconsider the value of reject water,” says Jordan Grose, Ionic Solutions’ VP of Commercialization
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From hard-and-fast water restrictions to image-boosting sustainability targets, an increasing number of energy companies are feeling the pressure to optimize water management or risk compromising profits, image or both. Jordan Grose, Ionic’s commercialization guy, talks about how technology is helping industry partners re-evaluate their industrial wastewater.
“Water scarcity and the increasing number of restrictions it’s imposing on sectors like power, light industrial, oil and gas and manufacturing, is driving a lot of companies to interrogate their water management practices, looking to see what can be used more efficiently. And what they’re discovering is that streams that were previously considered wastewater can be recycled back into their processes – with the right technology.”
In plants that use reverse osmosis (RO), one such wastewater stream is RO reject water.
“RO reject water is the highly salty stream that’s produced when any reverse osmosis system works as part of any industrial process. RO reject water is typically disposed of through discharge into a sewer system, evaporation ponds and/or evaporated using a Zero Liquid Discharge process. Either way, it can be costly to manage.
“An energy company desalinating their boiler feed water, for example, would produce a substantial volume of RO reject water and would have to manage that water out of their plant.”
Ionic Solutions’ C-EDR technology can desalinate RO reject water, using a small amount of energy, reclaiming up to 90% to be recycled back into the cycle as useful water.
“With C-EDR, for many applications, what was once considered a wastewater stream suddenly becomes a valuable untapped resource that helps our industry partners to draw less from shared groundwater sources and reduce their operating costs.
With one of our partners right now we’re desalinating their RO reject water to add back into their boiler feed water, and we can do it with less power than the original RO that created the waste stream. This helps them reduce their source water intake from a municipal system and reduces their water bills by hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.”
Are there any drawbacks to operators?
“No, none at all. Because our technology is a “bolt on” to an existing RO system, there’s virtually no risk. But the gains are potentially huge.”
How exactly do the numbers stack up?
“We’re currently working with industrial partners that need RO Reject processing of 1,000 litres / minute (300 gallon / min) or less. At this scale, our technology can generate over 500,000 cubic meters of useful water, that would otherwise have been processed as waste, to that partner, each year.”
Wow, that’s a LOT of water!
“You’re darn right it is. And our partners think so too. The potential savings for them are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and that’s just on a demonstration scale. When run at full scale, that becomes millions of dollars and billions of gallons of water that are being saved, every year.”
So, what are you waiting for? If you have RO wastewater, we can turn it into useful water, for a very small amount of energy, while saving you wastewater processing costs.
