A Thermal Distillation Process for Expanding Water Resources

Most of the world's freshwater usage--as high as 70%--goes to agriculture. Unfortunately, in many of the country's major farming regions secure sources of agriculture water are threatened: freshwater aquifers are being over pumped, coastal saltwater intrusion is tainting freshwater supplies, agricultural run-off is dumping nitrates into the environment, and severe droughts are periodically interrupting supplies. And, although may farm regions have large underground reserves of brackish water, the mineral content of this water cannot be tolerated by most crops.The proposed work will convert the country's large brackish water reserves into an agricultural water resource by overcoming the major obstacle to this conversion: the cost and environmental impact of waste brine disposal. In past work, AIL Research has proven a very efficient, thermal distillation process that could convert 90% of a brackish water reserve into agricultural grade water. This conversion also produces a small, but significant, volume of waste brine that has all the minerals originally in the brackish water. In the proposed work, we will prove a modified, patent-pending version of our distillation process that recovers essentially 100% of the water in the waste brine leaving a residue of solid salt crystals that can be much more easily disposed. (Ideally, the solid waste would be sold to a processor that recovers minerals for resale to industry). The economic viability of the new Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD) will be assessed in the context of proposals for agricultural-grade water that have been submitted to growers by our commercialization partner,