The search for the Holy Grail

An Ottawa firm is refining a process that extracts precious freshwater from the sea, a potential godsend for the world's parched regions.

Philip Lee
The Ottawa Citizen

Roger Humphries

Stephen MacGillivray, The Ottawa Citizen / Co-project engineer Tamara Djokic, collects a sample of fresh water from the output of the reverse osmosis seawater desalination machine, at CANDESAL Technologies.

The seas and oceans contain about 97 per cent of the world's water, an abundant source of freshwater if only an efficient, affordable method of desalination can be found.

The search for the Holy Grail of the water world ends inside a nondescript white tractor-trailer in the rear of a parking lot in Fredericton, N.B.

The trailer houses a tank of seawater, a high-pressure pump, gauges that measure water temperature and pressure, and a long, white plastic pipe filled with a secret combination of filter membranes.

When engineer Richard van Driest flips a switch, the seawater is pumped at high pressure into one end of the pipe. It is forced through the membranes until, seconds later, freshwater runs out the other end.

This seawater desalination machine is a new $200,000 testing unit for a system pioneered by Ottawa-based CANDESAL Technologies Inc.

It is the dream of the company's founder, Roger Humphries, who for the past six years has dedicated himself to developing technology to transform seawater into freshwater.

Mr. Humphries claims his company's system is now producing the lowest-cost desalinated seawater in the world.

As the world's population rises and supplies of freshwater continue to be overused, depleted and polluted, the search for new sources of freshwater is becoming increasingly desperate.

One of the solutions to the global water crisis may be found not in exporting bulk water from countries such as Canada, but in extracting freshwater from the sea.

About 97 per cent of the world's supply of water is in the sea, a tantalizing source on the doorstep of some of the populations most in need of new supplies of fresh water, such as communities in the southwestern United States and the Middle East.

Marq de Villiers, whose award-winning book Water explores the global water crisis, calls the contentious debate over whether Canada should export water a "phony issue," simply because desalination technology is becoming more affordable.

"My view of this debate about Canadian water exports is that in the long term, there's no business, because it will be cheaper to desalinate water on site than it will be to import water over long distances," Mr. de Villiers says.

Desalination has been used as a freshwater source for decades, but it has been prohibitively expensive, confined mainly to oil-rich countries such as Saudi Arabia.

The desalination technology chosen by CANDESAL, called reverse osmosis, is not new. However, reverse osmosis has been expensive and has required enormous inputs of energy.

Mr. Humphries has been working to refine the technology to reduce both energy inputs and the final cost of desalinating water.

CANDESAL's goal is to convert seawater to freshwater at a cost of 50 cents U.S. a cubic metre (1,000 litres), a price at which desalted water could even be used for agriculture irrigation in some countries.

After a series of successful tests this spring, Mr. Humphries says he is confident he can meet his 50-cent target. Desalination has traditionally cost anywhere from $1 to $8 U.S. per cubic metre of water.

"We've taken the philosophical viewpoint that if we really want to make this successful, we've got to be able to find ways to substantially reduce the price, that we need to apply some creative thinking to desalination design methodology," Mr. Humphries says.

"We didn't feel that we wanted to try to go commercial and sell plants until we really demonstrated to ourselves that our concepts were valid."

Mr. De Villiers says if CANDESAL can produce water for less than $1 a cubic metre, the technology has great potential. "If their business plan is right, then they're onto something really big," he says.

As CANDESAL moves from research and development into the commercial market and puts its new technology to the test in the field, the Canadian company will join dozens of companies aggressively marketing desalination technology.

As an increasingly thirsty world searches for more water, desalination is emerging as a real option. This year, the water authority in Tampa, Florida, plans to open the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere, using a distillation process to produce water at less than $1 a cubic metre. (Tampa has the advantage of having less salty water to desalinate, and the project is hooked up to an existing power plant, which will further reduce costs.)

The San Diego County Water Authority in California recently voted to start spending money on desalination studies. San Diego County is a desert and imports 90 per cent of its water from the beleaguered Colorado River.

A Connecticut-based company called Poseidon is conducting a feasibility study on creating a desalination plant near a San Diego power plant, using the same technology as the new plant in Tampa Bay.

If California doesn't turn to desalination, it will have no choice but to drastically reduce its consumption of water, or find new sources. Mr. De Villiers points out that millions of tonnes of water are mechanically shifted across the southwestern United States every year. The Colorado River, the subject of huge political and legal battles, has been used up. There are more than a dozen dams on the Colorado, and as it flows downstream its water becomes more and more salty as it is pumped onto farmland and then drains back into the river. There is little water left in the Colorado by the time it crosses into Mexico and discharges into the sea.

The Sumitomo Corporation of Japan is now in the process of building a desalination plant in Saudi Arabia's Gulf city of Jubail. The project will cost $2 billion U.S. and produce 720,000 cubic metres of water a day.

Saudi Arabia's Saline Water Conversion Corp. says the country will have to spend $50 billion U.S. over the next two decades on water projects. The country is now short 424,000 cubic metres of desalinated water a day.

Meanwhile, CANDESAL is preparing to enter the commercial market.

"We've really made the step from a company that is in the experimental stage to one that is actively pursuing the commercial market," Mr. Humphries says.

"We believe we are at a stage with the technology now, that for a plant of substantial size with average seawater conditions, we can produce water for about 50 cents a cubic metre. We think we are on the order of eight to 10 cents a cubic metre less than the traditional approach to system design."

CANDESAL Technologies is a joint-venture company, in partnership with Atlantic Nuclear Services, a New Brunswick-based firm. Six years ago, Mr. Humphries took early retirement from a career in the nuclear industry and joined forces with Keith Scott, president of Atlantic Nuclear Services, to create the desalination test unit in New Brunswick.

Mr. Humphries became interested in desalination when he considered the possibilities of coupling the technology with CANDU reactors, which would provide the power and a source of warm sea water, which is produced as a byproduct at the plants. Warm water is more easily desalinated than cold water.

The CANDESAL technology has been designed so it can be coupled with a nuclear power plant, and also with traditional thermal power plants.

Tamara Djokic, a data analyst working with Mr. Van Driest on the experiment in Fredericton, says the system also has the potential to begin recovering energy from the water being expelled at high pressure. "We were very excited when the system confirmed our expectations," she says. "Now we know what to expect."

The company plans to build a larger prototype portable desalination plant that can be housed in a shipping container. One of these plants would produce enough fresh water to supply a resort hotel. If the experiment goes well, the portable desalination units will soon be manufactured and sold commercially.

Mr. Humphries recently became involved in a project called Euro-Desal, which is exploring the possibility of providing more water to southern Europe by constructing desalination plants. France is expected to be desperately short of water in its southern regions during the next decade.

Mr. Humphries says one of the problems he faces when trying to sell the concept of desalination plants to water-short countries is that the price appears high because they are used to subsidized water prices.

"They're used to getting water for 30 cents a cubic metre," he says. "Somewhere in the discussion people tend to forget that the subsidies are there and they want you to be able to produce it so it can be sold at those prices. And you just can't do that. You've got to recognize at some point that someone is paying production costs and they are subsidizing it."

Despite Mr. Humphries optimism, there are formidable skeptics of the role desalination will play in the global water shortage.

Sandra Postel, director of the World Water Project in Amherst, Massachusetts, thinks desalination will play a role in water supply, however she doesn't think the technology will become cost-effective for irrigated agriculture anytime soon. Seventy per cent of the world's freshwater is consumed by farm irrigation.

Water for irrigation is generally subsidized by governments and costs farmers far less than 50 cents a cubic metre. Some California farmers pay as little as $3.50 U.S. an acre foot (an acre foot is about 1,233 cubic metres). Desalination can't compete with these prices.

"I've seen very few desal plants that can generate water for 50 cents a cubic metre," she says. "There's only one that's getting close to that and that's the one that's being built off of Tampa Bay. It's not up and running yet."

She points out that Tampa Bay's water is less salty than ocean water and the company there is linked to a power plant that will greatly reduce its input costs.

"I don't use (Tampa Bay) as a benchmark in any way because I think the conditions there are somewhat unusual," she says. "Almost weekly I read about some new technology in the desalination field that claims to be making a huge breakthrough in cost. I've been watching this technology for many years. It's kind of the Holy Grail of water."

She notes that desalination now accounts for 0.2 per cent of world water use. Even if the industry experiences healthy growth, it's still going to have a tiny share of world water supply.

"I think people look to it too much," she says. "I think people are holding out for that hope. What frustrates me is that we have a whole host of proven and available conservation technologies that are on the shelf and ready to go and that are much cheaper, much more environmentally sound and could save a whole lot more water than desalination will produce, at less cost. And we're not turning to them as fast as we should or as much as we should."

Mr. Humphries agrees that conservation and efficiency are essential to address the water crisis. However, in his view, this will never be enough.

"We get the same arguments in the energy sector as in the water sector," he says. "There's no way it can fill the shortfall that's going to develop. It's not physically possible to create enough additional water availability through conservation. In the next 20 years we're going to need three times what we're producing now, and if our water consumption was 50 per cent inefficient, the best you could do is double the availability by completely eliminating that inefficiency, and that's not going to be enough.

"I think conservation absolutely is an essential element. We throw away a lot of water. It goes through factories once and then it's discharged. We need to do a lot more with water reuse, recycling water and sending it back through. But the fact is no matter how well you do that, it's not going to be sufficient to meet the shortfall.

"Desalination is a much more economic solution and a much more practical solution than water transfer arrangements."

Mr. Humphries argues that desalination will also address the problem of brackish water appearing in over-pumped aquifers.

"Aquifers are either being pumped out faster than they can be replenished, or in areas where they are close to the sea coast where water supplies can be replenished, they get replenished with salt water," he explains. "The salinity level in aquifers is getting increasingly high. In areas where they used to be able to pump drinking water, they are now pumping water that is basically brackish water. The salt levels far exceed those that are considered acceptable by the World Health Organization."

In the Gaza Strip, aquifers have been over-pumped and recharged with sea water and are now so salty that the water can no longer be used to grow oranges, Mr. De Villiers notes. Israel and Jordan are using more water than is being replenished by the hydrological cycle.

"We've got to find some way to get additional sources of fresh, potable water to where the people are," Mr. Humphries says. "Our view is that you can do that with desalination plants."

Special Report: The Global Water Crisis