Without water, there can be no life.
No, seriously. About 60 percent of the adult human body is water, and some organs, like the heart, are over 70 percent water.
Without water, we would shrivel up like a raisin, our organs would fail, and we would die.
However, the importance of water often needs to be addressed, especially in places where water is readily available.
Water keeps us hydrated, helps us remove waste from our bodies, and plays an essential role in regulating our body temperature.
Outside our bodies, water provides us with endless recreational opportunities, helps farmers grow the food we rely on, and supplies many of the communities in the Rockies with power.
If you are reading this, you probably woke up, brushed your teeth, drank a glass of water, took a shower, and used the toilet without giving your water usage a second thought unless you live in Calgary and have had to put up with the water restrictions caused by the broken water main.
Dry and Getting Drier
You shouldn’t have to think about how much water you use, but not everyone has this privilege. Azar Yazdanbod realized this while living in his home country, Iran.
Iran is one of the driest countries in the world, suffering from uneven water distribution and the overexploitation of available water resources.
It is predicted that Iranians’ per capita water availability could drop below 500 cubic metres next year, marking absolute scarcity, which means there will be more demand than supply of water.
Per capita water availability refers to the average amount of water available to each person in a region, in this case, Iran.
Five hundred cubic metres is the same as 500,000 litres, which sounds like a lot. However, per capita water availability includes residential, industrial, commercial, agricultural, and other uses.
In Iran, agriculture is responsible for more than 90 percent of the country’s water usage. In 2018, only seven percent of the country’s water was used for domestic purposes like drinking and bathing.
Iran uses over 80 percent of its available freshwater resources, about twice as much as international standards say is sustainable.
Water Problems, Ionic Solutions
Having experienced Iran’s water crisis firsthand, Yazdanbod aimed to solve Iran’s and the world’s water woes.
With the hopes of securing water for generations, he pursued an education at the University of Houston, Texas, in the United States.
Yazdanbod studied hard and graduated with an MSc degree in civil engineering with a specialization in geotechnical engineering.
While researching water desalination, Yazdanbod brought his family to Calgary in 2007 and constructed a water lab in his basement. Talk about dedication!
Water desalination removes salt and other impurities from seawater or brackish water, making it safe for drinking and other uses.
It involves using special techniques, like reverse osmosis or distillation, to filter out the salt and produce fresh, clean water.
Desalination is especially important in areas where freshwater is scarce, providing an alternative water source for people and industries.
In 2009, Yazdanbod met Barry Johnson, an engineer and entrepreneur with three decades of experience in the oil and gas industry and the former president of Bunker Energy.
Johnson shared Yazdanbod’s passion for introducing significant innovations to the water technology sector.
Within 24 hours of their meeting, they started brainstorming ideas, eventually leading to Ionic Solutions’s creation.
Ionic Solutions is responsible for developing Capacitive Electrodialysis Reversal (C-EDR) to treat saline waters.
Tricks Of The Trade
Unlike traditional desalination processes, Ionic’s C-EDR does not use reverse osmosis. Instead, C-EDR works by creating an electric field.
This field mobilizes and captures positive and negatively charged mineral ions from a water flow through a specially developed membrane.
The company’s C-EDR process can selectively remove hard water minerals like calcium and magnesium, making the water safe for consumption and use.
Water softeners are usually used to remove hard water minerals. Depending on water usage, they undergo a process called regeneration every few days.
This process can use up to 25 gallons of water or more per day, equivalent to 10,000 gallons per year.
“Point-of-use water softeners are expensive to buy and run. Certain technologies are also very wasteful, some pouring as many as four gallons of water down the drain for every gallon of softened water that comes through the faucet,” said Kevin Slough, Ionic’s Vice President of Operations.
Unlike traditional water softeners, Ionic’s system uses very little electricity to recycle and reuse up to 90 percent of the water that water softeners would otherwise waste.
It sounds great on paper, but how does it work in the real world? Pilot projects are underway, starting with a successful water softening operation for the District of Taylor, British Columbia.
This six-month on-site operation used a trailer equipped with C-EDR technology to demonstrate the benefits and feasibility of municipal water softening in hard-water communities.
The Taylor region, known for its extremely hard water, was an ideal test site.
The technology effectively removed minerals like calcium and magnesium, processing 45 gallons of drinking water per minute!
Following this success, the unit has been relocated to Saskatoon for a five-month trial at a power plant.
Next month, a similar pilot project will begin in New York City with a power company that generates steam to heat Manhattan’s skyscrapers.
Currently, the company can only utilize 85 percent of the water flowing through its pipes, but with Ionic’s technology, it hopes to reclaim the remaining 15 percent.
Riding The Wave
Ionic’s system would be very useful in Iran, where environmental issues like decreased rainfall and low precipitation levels caused by a changing climate have significantly reduced the country’s water supply.
A study from last year showed that climate change was the prime cause of Iran’s water scarcity, depleting groundwater levels and drying lakes and rivers.
Since most of the country’s water usage is for agriculture, conserving as much water as possible in the industry is extremely important.
Farmers operate under strict water licenses in California, a US state constantly threatened by droughts. The same holds for southern Alberta, where water rights holders limit some farmers’ access to water.
Jordan Grose, Vice President of Commercialization at Ionic, is working with a partner in California to help an orchard production facility remove salt from a heavily salinated aquifer.
Currently, the waste salt must be transported back to the ocean, but Ionic’s technology can eliminate these shipping costs and water waste by treating the salt wastewater for reuse using C-EDR.
Most of Iran’s agriculture occurs in the western and northwestern regions, such as Tehran, the largest market for domestic agricultural products.
Crops are grown near rivers that flow into Lake Urmia, a hypersaline lake that is just getting saltier. This makes innovations like Ionic’s C-EDR even more important.
Ionic’s technology isn’t limited to desalination. The company’s C-EDR is helpful for freshwater recovery, brine concentration control, and wastewater reduction and reuse.
As water availability grows into a worldwide concern due to climate change, solutions like Ionic’s are needed, but there is no be-all and end-all fix.
Ionic’s C-EDR system is a more welcome option than other ideas like drinking treated wastewater.
