The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $18.5 million over five years to fund a new Engineering Research Center in Houston whose goal is to develop compact, mobile off-grid systems that provide clean water to millions of people around the world.

Rice University Professor of Environmental Engineering Pedro Alvarez will head up Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT), which will partner with researchers at Arizona State University (ASU), Yale University and the University of Texas at El Paso.

Pedro Alvarez, director of Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment. Image credit: Rice University.The consortium has set as its first goal the development of modular water treatment systems that can deploy almost anywhere in the world. But Alvarez says the potential to make a significant impact is already expanding, with opportunities to address wastewater treatment at oil and gas drilling sites, nano-infused desalination in urban environments and improved water treatment through more efficient filtration at existing plants.

According to Alvarez, treated water is too often unavailable in parts of the world that cannot afford large treatment plants or miles of pipes to deliver it. Moreover, large-scale treatment and distribution uses a great deal of energy. "About 25% of the energy bill for a typical city is associated with the cost of moving water," he says.

Among NEWT's first products will be an adsorbent filter now under development by the center's deputy director, Paul Westerhoff, of ASU. "It's a block of carbon with embedded nanoparticles," says Alvarez. "These particles adsorb—that is, they grab onto and hold—oxyanion contaminants like nitrate, arsenic and chromate and effectively remove them from the water supply. [Oxyanions are negatively charged ions that contain oxygen.] It will be part of a drinking-water treatment unit."

Although such a technology could be applied to large water treatment plants, the group first intends to "carve a niche in the decentralized water treatment market," Alvarez says.

According to Alvarez, the municipal water treatment community "can be a difficult industry to penetrate" because of its (behaviorally) conservative nature. Municipal water managers need to be convinced that a technology is going to save them a significant amount of money and that they won't have to change much of the infrastructure or the configuration of their plants, he adds.

"We have some very good ideas of things that will fit them," Alvarez notes. "If they're already using membranes for filtration, for example, our membranes may offer better rejection of contaminants and perhaps less susceptibility to being fouled, so they will last longer without having to be replaced. They won't clog up as easily. They will not use as much energy."

Another NEWT goal is to help make U.S. energy production more sustainable and cost-effective with respect to its water use.

"A major challenge for our energy industry is that they need to operate and extract oil and gas in areas that are relatively dry and semi-arid, where water is scarce and they need relatively large quantities of water to obtain this energy." Alvarez says. Producing a barrel of oil in Texas requires about 10 barrels of water, he notes. Fracking a well to produce shale gas or shale oil may require up to 6 million gallons of water, again typically in areas where water is scarce.

Once that water is used, disposal becomes a major challenge and a potentially serious source of pollution. "So the solution to both scarcity and minimizing impact is to reuse this water," Alvarez says. "That's one of the things we're trying to do: develop systems that are small and easily deployed that can enable industrial wastewater reuse in remote areas."