A real-time water monitor for contaminants in produced water

Access to clean, reliable water supplies is critical to our quality of life and our economy, and ensuring this access for generations to come will involve developing novel approaches to determining the safety and composition of water that are practical and affordable. A vast array of toxins are prevalent throughout the country’s drinking water, and the oil and gas industry has effects on water quality that are still not fully understood. For example, there has been increased interest and scrutiny into the impacts that the hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) water cycle has on drinking water resources in the United States, and there are numerous harmful chemicals that have been discovered in groundwater near fracking sites. However, current testing for most critical contaminants is typically limited to sporadic sample collection for laboratory analysis. Not only is this process costly, but it is inefficient, making it difficult to monitor water with high spatial or temporal resolution. Real-time, deployable sensing technologies are essential to address these needs as well as to contribute to a more quantitative understanding of the dynamics that contribute to the environmental sustainability of the Nation’s water and energy systems. The goal of this proposal is to develop and demonstrate the technical feasibility of an in-line sensor that can reliably provide real-time, continuous, quantitative measurements of a suite of contaminants. The Qube sensor can currently detect a suite of heavy metal and nutrient contaminants, but due to the use of microbes as sensor units and the team’s synthetic biology expertise, the platform can be expanded to detect a vast range of contaminants. A customized optics and image processing platform translates these cell signals into quantitative information about the level of each target present. This Phase I project will develop new sensing capabilities for methanol, toluene, and benzene as well as a highly trained AI-based computational platform to discern and discriminate between contaminants and quantify individual analytes in complex water backgrounds. The ability to detect many targets simultaneously and to do so in real time is a major advantage of the proposed sensor over existing technologies. Given the priorities of the DOE Advanced Remediation Technologies Program, which develops technologies to be applied to the remediation and prevention of environmental impacts from the recovery of fossil energy resources, the goal for this proposal will be to demonstrate technical feasibility of this sensor to quantitatively measure methanol, toluene, and benzene in a real-time, in-line platform capable of handling complex background water and running for long time periods without oversight or calibration needed. Ultimately, the goal of this project is to commercialize a robust sensor that not only meets the needs of the DOE programs and the growing needs for technologies to ensure safe drinking water, but is also broadly marketable.