Over 4 billion people live under conditions of severe water scarcity at least one month of the year. Over a billion people spend several hours a day searching for water, wasting precious time and putting them in frequent danger.
A waste biomass-to-energy and water system that fits in a shipping container, the WEDEW water … [+]
Some of this scarcity has led to violence and conflict, especially in Africa, Southern Asia and the Middle East. The Syrian conflict was triggered by a years-long drought.
So it would go a long way to achieving global peace and ending global poverty if we could give these people water without a lot of cost and trouble, and without a lot of infrastructure.
Like, say, pulling water right out of thin air.
That’s just what a new technology does. Called WEDEW (wood-to-energy deployed water), it is a collaboration between Skysource and ALL Power Labs and uses local biomass gasification (see diagram below). It’s versatile, self-contained and sustainable, converting biomass or agricultural waste into water and biochar, and sequestering would-be greenhouse gases in the ground.
Easier and cheaper than solar, and certainly better than diesel in all ways, biomass gasification is not ordinary combustion. It converts the biomass into biochar, hot humid air and electricity. Water is condensed out of the hot humid air in a process that mimics the way clouds are formed (the hot humid air hits cold air and forms droplets of rain) and stored in a tank inside the shipping container.
The biochar is excellent for further agricultural use, eliminating a significant source of greenhouse gases and fertilizers.
The WEDEW process is based on biomass gasification, not ordinary combustion.
Housed in a single standard-sized container, the system can produce 2,000 liters of water every day for two pennies. In areas where biomass is less available, the system can run on solar and battery power rather than biomass, for about twenty pennies a day.
Whether helping developing countries prepare and adjust to global warming, wars and disasters, WEDEW works without regard to the weather, infrastructure or a hostile government.
Biomass can be used in forests devastated by drought and pests which will reduce future fire dangers.
It can provide on-demand water and power (25kWh) during emergency events in addition to refrigeration, cooling, and communication, acting as a microgrid solution. The next-generation WEDEW will be even more energy efficient and produce more power and/or water per day.
“It’s a carbon-negative technology,” says David Hertz, a California-based architect who helped lead the project. “I think the future of technologies is going to be moving to this restorative, regenerative model that actually helps to repair the damage we’ve done.”
Recently, WEDEW won the $1.5 million Water Abundance XPrize, and the 2018 World Technology Award, an indication of how primed the world is for this level of useful innovation.
While this technology is excellent for small, rural or devastated areas, large metropolitan water needs will still be best handled by desalination plants run by small nuclear reactors or large solar arrays.
What is becoming obvious from the plethora of new technologies and strategies available to us, from solar engineering to better batteries, from small nuclear reactors to neodymium magnets, is that we have the tools to address many, many of the problems facing our species and all others. And we are developing new tools all the time. But we need to move decisively and quickly to implement them on a global scale in order to save as much as we can of what made us tool-users in the first place.
