Today’s World Water Day, which falls on March 22 each year and is often an occasion for plenty of “doom and gloom,” says Scott Bryan. That’s why Bryan, president of ImagineH2O, a nonprofit organization that runs a startup accelerator and other programs aimed at solving water challenges around the globe, holds his organization’s demo day and gala event in the run-up to the day, “in hopes that there might be a story out there that’s a little more positive.”
Looking over ImagineH2O’s 10th cohort—which includes a baker’s dozen of startups offering everything from high-efficiency faucets and showerheads to handheld water-quality scanners, devices to reduce water loss in cooling towers, trenchless water-pipe replacement technology, and more—there is certainly reason for optimism. But these entrepreneurs are inspired, at least in part, by the fact that the doom and gloom is real.
Rectifying that situation won’t be easy. The big challenges include not just providing more clean water, but understanding how much water is available in a given region in the first place, so that resources can be managed more equitably and efficiently for all those who need them.
A thirst for information
“The sparsity of information about groundwater is a global reality,” says Nick Hayes. “It really is an unmeasured resource, of all the resources humans depend on.” Hayes and Marian Singer are cofounders of Wellntel, a Milwaukee startup that makes networked well monitors that use a patented acoustic measurement technology to track groundwater levels and well use.
According to Wellntel, groundwater makes up more than 40% of both drinking water and irrigation supply in the U.S., and something like 70% of irrigation worldwide. It affects everything from crop production to local economic development to “whether or not you can have a city,” Hayes says. “There are all sorts of key outputs that depend on this input. There is measurement that goes on, but it happens at government-scale only.”
To rectify that, Wellntel wants to use the 15 million domestic and agricultural irrigation wells that exist across North America to create “a network of dense data that can support decision-making and conflict resolution,” Hayes says. That kind of data could be used by civil agencies as criteria in granting construction permits, or to help determine policy around water transfers, to take just two examples. And commercial customers can get detailed insights into their own water use and supply.
Wellntel so far has about 600 systems deployed across 35 states, according to Singer, with another thousand or more due to come online this year. Of its current systems, “a couple of hundred” are in California, a state where water politics have long made headlines (and feature films, like 1974’s Chinatown). Much of the state’s agriculture and development would not be possible were it not for an irrigation and water transfer system that dates back more than 150 years. Water scarcity has been an issue in the state for decades, climate change is driving more volatile weather patterns in California, and—despite the state’s leadership on many environmental issues—until recently it was the only state that did not regulate the use of groundwater.
As a result, many local water basins have been overdrafted by agricultural and other users—21 are considered “critically overdrafted” by the California Department of Water Resources. Groundwater depletion has in turn led to land subsidence—a sinking of the surface of the Earth. Some areas of the heavily farmed San Joaquin Valley have seen subsidence of almost 30 feet, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Wells have gone dry, and up to a million Californians do not currently have access to clean drinking water, says Adrian Covert, vice president of public policy for the Bay Area Council, a San Francisco-based business association that works with local companies and water agencies on a wide range of policy issues.
Weird weather ahead
Wellntel hopes to provide a ground-level perspective of the nation’s groundwater, but NASA is taking a different view. Its Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites (GRACE) spent 15 years measuring minute changes in the Earth’s gravitational field as a way to understand things like the water level of underground aquifers around the world, and the shift in water as places like Antarctica lose ice mass and sea levels continue to rise. The GRACE Follow-On mission (known as GRACE-FO) launched in May 2018 to continue that work, and to test technology that will enable future missions to make even finer measurements.
While the fundamental technology is not new—using existing bacteria to digest the pollutants in wastewater—Aquacycle has devised a modular system in which each of the reactor units that treat the water is about the size of a car battery. “The reactors can be stacked together like Legos to increase treatment quality or capacity,” Bretschger says.
By comparison, most wastewater treatment facilities utilize anaerobic digestion and can require a 15- to 40-day residence period, Bretschger says. And the anaerobic reaction produces not electricity but methane—a greenhouse gas—which then has to be captured and disposed of, itself a complicated and expensive process.
No silver bullet
A new Aquacycl pilot, at the Joshua Tree Brewery in the southern California desert, will start at 500 gallons a day and scale up to 1,500 gallons as the business grows. But Bretschger really wants to focus on industrial wastewater treatment at low volumes. “We want to be treating the really high-strength stuff, stuff that’s 300 times more concentrated than what you see in a sewer,” she says.
“Ultimately, our goal is emerging markets,” Bretschger continues. “Our mission is sanitation and water for all. One-third of the world population doesn’t have access to a toilet. Eighty percent of all the wastewater we generate, whether industrial waste or raw sewage or gray water, is discharged to the environment with minimal treatment or no treatment at all. This has devastating effects on public health and environmental health. What we’re developing is not a silver bullet, but we hope it can be part of a solution to improve sanitation throughout the world. As long as we can scale, we should be able to get to a price point that we can help emerging markets.”
As aquifers not just in California but in the Midwest and elsewhere come under increasing strain, and as climate change leads to more questions about the reliable availability of water, whether in California or elsewhere around the country or around the world, necessity has become the mother of invention. “It’s going to create new opportunities for technology to make things more efficient,” Covert says. Entrepreneurs are stepping up, but there’s still a long way to go.
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Mark Wallace (@markwallace) is a freelance journalist in San Francisco. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New York, Wired, and many other publications.