Water, Water Everywhere: Process and Economic Challenges of High Water Use Processes in Emerging Biological, Renewable and Environmental Technologies

Processes with high water usage, concentrations, and/or discharges present significant development and scale-up challenges from process, operations, and economic perspectives. Technologies with these characteristics are encountered in many of todays’ important emerging energy, environmental and renewable technologies. In this presentation the author discusses common challenges encountered in the commercialization of these types of technologies, and provides strategies to identify issues during early development work, plan for them in the design phase, and address issues that arise during commissioning, startup and operations.

The presentation will focus on learnings from four major development programs covering biologically based processes to produce chemicals and fuels, renewable feedstock based processes to produce chemicals or fuels, and environmental processes to maximize the recovery and reuse of industrially abused waters, while minimizing or eliminating liquid waste discharges (zero liquid discharge or ZLD). Common themes emerge from these programs around best practices to follow, the competing nature of ease of operations with attractive economics, and challenges due to the presence of solids even in the context of high water content.