Salt Water Battery Cuts Desalination Energy Use by 80%

Desalination is big business. Worldwide, thirteen thousand plants currently produce more than 12 billion gallons of purified water a day. Experts predict the market is worth US$103 billion in capital investment to 2016 and accelerating.

The need for additional capacity is obvious. Over that half of the world’s population is affected by poor water quality, and water borne disease claims the lives of 1.5 million children every year.

But conventional desalination techniques such as reverse osmosis or distillation use large amounts of energy, meaning existing technologies may remain out of reach for many of the world’s poorest.

An increasing number of cities and countries are also struggling to deliver clean water, and demand worldwide is projected to increase 50% by 2025.

An innovative Vancouver start-up is aiming to change this situation with a novel idea using a “salt-water battery” to power their desalinization system.

Saltworks harnesses atmospheric dryness and solar energy to use 80% less energy than conventional technologies. The system starts with drying salt water using evaporation or waste heat to produce a hyper saline solution. This is used to drive a concentration gradient that powers desalination using a proprietary process.

EnergyBoom spoke to President Joshua Zoshi about the company and where they want to go. “Interest from the investment community has been strong. It’s sustainable green desalination technology in a time of increasingly volatile energy prices and growing concerns around carbon foot print.”

How does it work?

“It’s a new desalination technology and the energy source is concentration difference energy between solutions at different salinity. The only electricity we need is to run pumps and move fluids around so it uses about 80% less electricity than reverse osmosis.”

What are the applications?

“They include desalination for industrial water, agricultural water, and potable water. It’s also an excellent technology for hybridizing with conventional desalination to either improve the overall recovery or reduce the brine discharge volume.”

What do you think the potential market is?

“Tremendous. Water is a growing concern in many parts of the world including America, the Middle East and Australia, obviously, but a lot of other countries as well.”

The company is seeking investors and values their potential target market at $2 billion in 2012 and growing to $6.5 billion by 2016. They are focusing on small plants less then 100,000 L/day capacity for initial uptake that they estimate represent 60% of the global market.

The technology has been favorably assessed by the National Research Council of Canada and they hope to have a 1,000 l/day pilot project operational in Vancouver in the near future.