Rice gets new center for water research
$18.5M grant allows university to develop advanced systems
Be it droughts, dried up wells or growing populations, access to water is one of the biggest problems facing the world.
Now, thanks to an $18.5 million federal grant, a new research center at Rice University should allow researchers and industry to develop portable, clean water systems and make fracking more environmentally responsible.
About 200 research groups applied for the prestigious awards from the National Science Foundation, announced Monday, but there were just two winners from around the country.
The Rice effort was led by Pedro Alvarez, a professor of environmental engineering at Rice University. It will bring together experts from Rice, Arizona State University, Yale University and the University of Texas at El Paso to work with more than 30 partners, including Shell, Baker Hughes and NASA.
Speaking in a deep, avuncular voice, Alvarez explains that he’s been interested in water for nearly his entire life.
Growing up in a small Nicaraguan town, he learned a lesson about clean water at a young age that’s stuck with him.
“I remember, when I was four or five years old, watching kids play with water balloons,” he recalled. “I wanted to play, too.”
His grandfather was a doctor in the town, and Alvarez grabbed a couple of his grandfather’s
handkerchiefs, filling them with water.
Of course the water ran out. But he recalls being shocked by the grime that remained on the white handkerchiefs. He went running to his grandfather, the doctor, who hadn’t realized the town’s water was so polluted.
In college, Alvarez would be struck by the fact that engineers, by successfully treating water, had the power to save more lives than doctors. He’s lived by that ever since.
When he arrived at Rice University a dozen years ago the college was in the midst of a nanotechnology revolution. Rick Smalley, who had won a Nobel Prize in 1996 for co-discovering the buckyball, had built a research institute and was pulling down lots of funding from Rice and the federal government to study the properties of tiny, human-made nanomaterials.
Remarkable discoveries
Since then, scientists have worked to better understand this new area of science and have made some remarkable discoveries.
For example, the lab of Naomi Halas at Rice has designed tiny particles that, when formed into a filter of sorts, can simultaneously collect solar energy, desalinate water and remove organic contaminants.
This is the seed technology for a water system Alvarez hopes to develop, which can fit into the back of a semi-trailer. Ideally, this machine will be able to produce drinking water from any source, including pond water, seawater and floodwater, using solar energy, for up to 150 people.
The applications of such a system range from hurricane recovery to armed forces operations.
“We are hoping to develop the smartphones of the water industry,” he said.
One of the center’s main goals is to tap into the nanotechnology and other kinds of cutting edge research percolating in labs at Rice and other institutions and move it into commercial and industrial use.
According to the National Science Foundation, the federal agency has funded 64 of these Engineering Research Centers since the program’s inception in 1985. More than 80 percent have become self-sufficient after government funding ends after 5 or 10 years.
“These awards are meant to develop the technologies of the future,” said Don Millard, the foundation’s Acting Division Director for the Division of Engineering Education and Centers. “They provide the nation with its competitive edge.”
Another component of Rice’s effort is to seek to develop better ways of dealing with the voluminous amounts of water used during the fracking process, when water is injected into the ground at a high pressure in order to fracture shale rocks to release natural gas or oil inside.
Alvarez said he intends to work on both reusing that water as well as treating it so that it can be safely discharged into the natural environment.
Deadly ‘things in there’
With the state of Texas’ recent drought, which only ended this spring, Alvarez said he would like to help develop technologies that will allow residents and farmers to recapture and reuse water. Of the water used in Texas, only 3 percent is used for drinking, bathing and cooking. Alvarez hopes to find out if the other 97 percent — used to grow food, obtain energy or for other industrial uses — needs to be purified to the same extent as drinking water.
He’s also interested in modernizing water treatment technology, some of which dates to the Victorian age. Sand filters are all well and good at filtering known contaminants, but there are new and emerging threats that are a byproduct of modern industry, such as endocrine disruptors, that people are drinking without knowing their true effects.
“There are things in the water that could kill you tomorrow, and there are things in the water that are going to kill you in 20 years,” Alvarez said. “Those things that are going to kill you in 20 years, well, we aren’t even sure what they might be.”