Technology Baselines and Innovation Priorities for Securing Water Supply

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Sustainably securing water supplies for people, industry, and the environment remains a core mission of the ACS ES&T Engineering community. The scientific and engineering tools essential to meeting that mission, however, continue to change. Climate change, population growth, aging infrastructure, and urbanization are increasingly important variabilities in water supply, demanding that water users tap new sources and deploy different treatment technologies. Diverse water users, from agricultural growers to municipal users to computer chip manufacturers, each require different levels of water purity, have different treatment train constraints, and are willing to pay vastly different prices for clean water. This diversity of need means that the centralized infrastructure systems used to collect wastewater and supply freshwater are rapidly evolving into hybrid networks that integrate centralized treatment systems with decentralized ones. Finally, the cost and environmental impacts of residual management is driving treatment train design, thus blurring the line between water and wastewater treatment and demanding progress toward a circular water economy.

This special issue highlights recent work to define challenges and opportunities associated with tapping nontraditional source waters (a list of these is presented below) in the context of a circular water economy. The papers featured in this special issue fall into two categories. The first group of papers highlight the work of diverse teams of scholars, consulting engineers, and water users in analyzing the current state of water treatment technologies for eight nontraditional water sources. Surveying the current state of technologies, energy intensity, chemical inputs, failure modes, and costs that water users incur to tap nontraditional water sources is essential to clarifying the scientific and engineering challenges that our community works on for decades to come.

The eight source waters include:

To facilitate comparison between different nontraditional source waters, these eight papers employ common analysis tools and evaluation metrics. These tools are extensively documented on the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) website and are available for download and open source use by other researchers seeking to evaluate the value of innovation in nontraditional source water treatment. Readers are also encouraged to refer to roadmaps that NAWI has developed on the basis of the above baseline studies to define the highest priority research needs for emerging and existing desalination and advanced water technologies. In addition to the above eight papers, a couple of papers that focused on specific regions, inland desalination brine management in California (Tang et al.) and the evolution of municipal wastewater management in China (Qu et al.), are presented as regional case studies.

Broadly securing water systems for power, agricultural, municipal, industrial, and resource extraction end uses will require new technologies as well as new advances in existing technologies for distributed desalination and fit-for-purpose reuse of nontraditional waters. The second set of papers in this special issue introduce various new tools to enable the circular water economy goals, including wireless sensors (Martinez Paz et al.), data storage and management (Quay et al.), resource recovery (Noe-Hays et al.), and a framework to assess greenhouse gas emissions (Geglio et al.). It is noteworthy that these have been frequently identified as major technical needs by the first set of papers. The second set also includes the papers that provide critical insights on important questions such as whether direct potable reuse is ready for full-scale deployment (Keller et al.), how permeance and selectivity of a membrane system can be optimized (Yang et al.), and how we can achieve carbon benefit by electrifying water treatment systems (Gingerich et al.).

We believe this special issue provides many interesting articles that set milestones for future desalination and water treatment and reuse technology development and guidelines toward achieving circular water economy. We encourage you to continue to contribute to ACS ES&T Engineering along these themes, as we transition to the next generation of water innovation.

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This article is cited by 6 publications.

1. Manel Garrido-Baserba, David L. Sedlak, Maria Molinos-Senante, Irene Barnosell, Oliver Schraa, Diego Rosso, Marta Verdaguer, Manel Poch. Using water and wastewater decentralization to enhance the resilience and sustainability of cities. Nature Water 2024, 2 (10) , 953-974. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-024-00303-9
2. Walter P. Parker, Jordan D. Kocher, Akanksha K. Menon. Brine concentration using air gap diffusion distillation: A performance model and cost comparison with membrane distillation for high salinity desalination. Desalination 2024, 580 , 117560. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.desal.2024.117560
3. Daniel J. Miller. Transport and fouling in desalination membranes. 2024, 670-684. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-323-85669-0.00151-3
4. Jeffrey R. McCutcheon, Meagan S. Mauter. Fixing the desalination membrane pipeline. Science 2023, 380 (6642) , 242-244. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ade5313
5. Akanksha K. Menon, Mingxin Jia, Sumanjeet Kaur, Chris Dames, Ravi S. Prasher. Distributed desalination using solar energy: A technoeconomic framework to decarbonize nontraditional water treatment. iScience 2023, 26 (2) , 105966. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2023.105966
6. Walter P. Parker, Akanksha K. Menon. Wettability and durability of superhydrophobic-coated polymer surfaces for managed salt precipitation in desalination. MRS Communications 2022, 12 (5) , 616-623. https://doi.org/10.1557/s43579-022-00218-0