Transcript source
Science and Technology to Secure the Future for Water and EnergyTranscript
[Music plays and CSIRO logo appears with the text: Dr Robert Price Lecture – Prof Benny Freeman
]
Anita Hill: : Welcome everyone, guests and friends and family. First I’d like to start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today and acknowledge their elders past and present. I would like to acknowledge colleagues past and present, the Price family, our event partners which are ASCII, the RACI and Chemistry Australia. Samantha Reid, the CEO of Chemistry Australia, couldn’t be here with us tonight at the last minute so on behalf of Samantha Reid, CEO of Chemistry Australia, I’d like to let you know that PACIA, the Plastics and Chemical Industry of Australia, has just changed their logo and their name to Chemistry Australia and you’ll see that new name and logo appearing here tonight as they are becoming sponsors of the Price Lecture.
Chemistry Australia remains the pre-eminent national body representing the Australian Chemical Industry, while also working to create a strong interface between industry and the research and the academic sector. Their collaborative approach is crucial in leveraging Australia’s valuable STEM, which is science, technology, engineering and mathematics capabilities and in delivering innovative solutions to problems such as the energy crisis. And they’re quite excited to have the speaker in the topic tonight and that’s why they’ve joined us to be perpetual sponsors. CSIRO has a strategic relationship with Chemistry Australia and we look forward to continuing to work with that team.
I’d now like to introduce Tom Spurling to say a few words about the history of this event. Tom is the former chief of CSIRO’s Division of Chemicals and Polymers which was also called the Division of Molecular Science. Tom has been a CSIRO Board member, he’s a Professor at Swinburne University of Technology, and he has a strong history with our event partners tonight. He’s a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, AATSE. He’s a past President of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, RACI. And so who better to provide us with an introduction to the history of the event and also to introduce the speaker than Professor Tom Spurling.
[Audience applause]
Tom Spurling: Thanks very much Anita. So I never give up the opportunity to talk about Jerry Price because he was such an important figure in Australian chemistry. So Jerry Price was recruited to CSIRO back from England in the 1940’s to lead the CSIRO’s phytochemical project. And he was very successful in that and he’s made an enormous contribution to organic chemistry in Australia by doing that project, enlisting the aid of pretty much every organic chemistry department at all the universities around the country. So professors of organic chemistry in Western Australian, South Australia, Sydney, Tasmania and Melbourne all involved in Jerry Price’s phytochemical project. And this was one of his characteristics of being able to develop teams to work for a particular purpose
His second contribution which is relevant to one of the sponsors of tonight’s lecture is that when he was President of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute he decided that the Institute should become a much more professional society and he started working on the divisions within the Institute, so particular one that he was interested in became the Division of Organic Chemistry. But he sponsored nationwide discipline based divisions as well as the state ranges(?) which were the more qualifying aspect of the Institute.
And thirdly he made an enormous contribution to Australia as the Chairman of CSIRO. Those of you who remember this, back this far will remember the Whitlam government and the Minister for Energy of the Whitlam government Rex Connor wanted to hive off part of CSIRO, the mineral part of CSIRO into a separate organisation and Jerry, a Senior public servant of the time, campaigned against the government in this and there are letters on his file to his wife Lady Joyce Price saying this might be the end of my career, you might find that I’m sacked when I get back to Australia. But he wasn’t, he succeeded in maintaining the integrity of CSIRO and he will always be remembered in the history of Australian science for that achievement.
When I was the Chief of the Division of Chemicals and Polymers I looked around the buildings and areas of CSIRO and I could see no acknowledgement of this great contributor to the organisation. There was the Ian Woolf Laboratory, the Lloyd Reece(?) Laboratory, there were buildings and lectures named by other people around the country but nothing to remember Jerry Price’s contribution. So in 1990 the Division of Chemicals and Polymers commenced the, what we called, not the Jerry Price Lecture but the Sir Robert Price Lecture and I hope that in future we might correct that. So the Sir Robert Price Lecture was started in 1990 and there’ve been some very distinguished lecturers. The first was Rod Rickards, one of the country’s most distinguished synthetic, organic chemists from the ANU. A feature that I remember was when Sir John Cornforth, Australia’s only Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, gave the lecture in 1992. John Cornforth was a great friend of Jerry, of the Price family when they were students in England. And various other people. The last one was Professor David Solomon who gave the lecture in 2001. I was very pleased last year when the organisation decided to name a laboratory [indistinct - 07:15] the Sir Robert Price Laboratory and simultaneously with that revived the Sir Robert Price Lecture. And Dr Larry Marshall was the lecturer that year and we hope that the organisations involved in this will continue this lecture series so that we have a continuing recognition of the contribution that Jerry Price made to Australian chemistry and Australian society.
So that brings me to our 20017 Sir Robert Price Lecturer who is Benny Freeman. Benny Freeman is the Richard B. Curran Centennial Chair in engineering at the University of Texas in Austin in the Department of Chemical Engineering. Professor Freeman’s research is in polymer science and engineering specifically in the mass transport of small molecules in solid polymers. So he is very interested in gas and liquid separations using polymer and polymer based membranes and this is obviously going to be of great importance in hydrogen separation in natural gas purification, of what Prime Minister Turnbull thinks is going to be important carbon tax [indistinct - 08:38] storage and in desalination and developing fouling resistant membranes. He’s come to Australia and will be here ‘til July as the Fulbright U.S. Distinguished Chair in sales technology and innovation sponsored by CSIRO and I‘ve been assured that also is going to have an office at the Swinburne University of Technology. So I’m very pleased to be able to introduce Professor Freeman to you and invite him to give the 2017 Sir Robert Price Lecture.
[Audience applause]
Professor Benny Freeman: Thank you Jerry for that very kind introduction. I would like to also thank Anita for her opening remarks and also Clare for all of the logistic support and Erica who may be in the audience as well. I’d like to start by saying that it is an extraordinary honour to be the 2017 Sir Robert Price Lecturer and particularly after the list of laureates that Tom just read I’m very humbled to be in the company of these people and also to be in your company, I appreciate your taking time out of your day to come to this lecture and I hope at the end we’ll have a good discussion around some of the issues I’ll talk about today.
My research is in the area of polymer membranes for separation and so this impacts applications such as desalinisation and also gas separation such as air purification and natural gas purification. And today I’ll talk about a topic that has been of great importance in our country and elsewhere and that is the so-called water energy nexus and I would like to share with you some background on the water energy nexus, what it is, what some of its implications are and then I’d like to tell you three different stories that are related to various aspects of the water energy nexus and where work from my field, from the membrane science field, is playing a role in helping advance our state of understanding and our technology and civilisation in these areas.
[Image changes to show Water-Energy Nexus slide]
So the first slide shows a cartoon of a connection between water and energy. And the point of this is that in many activities that we undertake related to fossil fuel production both extracting and refining, generation of biofuels, hydropower and thermoelectric cooling we use an enormous amount of water for energy applications. On the other hand, the other side of that coin, we also require massive amounts of energy in order to move water around, to generate drinking water and waste water treatment.
[Image changes to show Water-Energy Nexus cartoon slide]
A more localised cartoon of this concept is shown here where large amounts of water are required to run power stations that in turn provide the electricity that runs our life including water purification systems as well as many other systems and these thermoelectric power plants generate a large fraction of the carbon dioxide that’s associated with global warming and this has prompted activities related to carbon capture that we’ll talk about later in the presentation.
[Image changes to show Water Withdrawal in the U.S. – 2010 pie chart slide]
To put this on a somewhat more quantitative scale this shows values for water withdrawal in the U.S. for various applications and you can see that the largest two pieces of this pie are the use of water or withdrawal of water from the environment for thermoelectric power generation, this is largely to cool power plants, and also for irrigation or for farming. And so not only are water and energy strongly connected but water, energy and food are very strongly connected. And this is an activity that is carried out on a massive scale both in my home country and abroad. And what I’m going to assert to you is that if we could weaken the very strong linkages between water and energy, carbon dioxide generation and food, that we would be able to live in a much more sustainable fashion.
[Image changes to show Water Crisis in the U.S. slide]
And so right now in the U.S. we are in a water crisis. Some might argue that we’re in other types of crises but we are for sure in a water crisis. And this is being brought about in large measure, though not exclusively, by the fact that the population continues to grow and we continue to put more and more people in arid regions such as the south west and California, in places that are historically water stressed. But across the U.S., not just in those regions, we find that we have declining groundwater levels and this leads to all sorts of implications, just a few of which are listed here, so in the middle of the farming country in the U.S. as the groundwater levels are depleted we need deeper wells to access them, more energy to bring it to the surface. We find an intensified competition between food and energy for water, I’ll come back to that again in a moment, and it’s increasing the cost of generating goods for on farms.
[Image changes to show Water Crisis in the U.S. slide]
We also find that there are, we’re seeing increasing levels of climate change induced variability and this is not only droughts but it’s also floods and more and more intense storms and these are leading in a variety of ways to increase energy usage and some of the largest water demands occur in regions for us where groundwater aquifers are used for water and these are being depleted. It’s causing the earth to settle, foundations to crack, buildings to be damaged. And I’d like to give you just from the area where I leave, when I’m not living in Melbourne, examples of this connection between water and energy. So in around 2011 and 2012 we had a historic drought in the south west and in Texas and one of the consequences of that was because electric power plants need huge amounts of water. At the height of summer when the drought was at its worst, in Austin Texas we had more than 100 days above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, power plants had to slow down their operation because they didn’t have access to enough water to run.
[Image changes to show Examples of Water-Energy Nexus slide]
And this is when you have peak power demand you get forced into a situation where electric generation capacity needs to be reduced because of lack of water. This is prompting the Department of Energy and other organisations to look into the possibility of waterless thermoelectric power generation. Are there new ways that we can address heat transfer so that we don’t need as much water or don’t need any water in order to generate electricity, in other words trying to weaken the linkage between water and energy generation.
This is another concept that occurred very close to where I live and that is that in some towns in Texas during this drought ran out of water and got to the point where water was being trucked in or it’s brought in and people are using bottled water for all of their water needs because their wells had run dry. And one of the places that we start to turn to is to take waste water from sewage treatment plants and subject it to advanced water purification in order to generate drinking water. We call this in the scientific terminology a DPR, Direct Potable Reuse. It’s also been labelled in the vernacular press as toilet to tap and with all the implications that that might have. However if you look around the world there are places that are way ahead of us in this area. For example Singapore which has an enormous investment in water purification to protect its political stability has probably the most advanced systems, the so-called Singapore NEWater which is a large effort at using reclaimed waste water.
There is however not just in Texas or in the United States a scarcity of water. This is a global problem.
[Image changes to show Global Scarcity of Clean Water slide]
If you look worldwide about 40 percent of the population lives in water stressed areas and there are a billion people according to the World Health Organisation who live without clean piped water. However many arid regions are located in places near impure water where one might purify that water and help alleviate some of these concerns. This water scarcity map that’s shown indicates the extremity of deprivation in water and the darker the colours are on it the more intense the water shortage is. Ad you can see that it’s not just limited to the Middle East or to a few places that you might regard as being highly arid but it’s a worldwide problem.
Another indication of this is the quotes at the bottom of the page, one form Andrew Liveris who’s an industrial leader in the U.S. talking about water being a key issue in this case for the chemical industry. And also the quote from the former U.N. Secretary General which is talking about the importance of water to political stability. And if you read through history there have been many wars fought over water. And this may occur again.
Now a lot of this is being driven, some of it’s being driven not just by climate change but also by increasing population.
[Image changes to show Increasing Population Drives Increases in Water, Energy and Food Consumption slide]
Right now the population of the world is growing by 80 million people per year and so that is enough people to populate a city the size of Melbourne every 22 days, every three weeks roughly. And so as a result, as there are more people around, then we need more food, estimated to rise by 50 percent in 2030. We also need similar increases in energy and a large increase in water. It turns out that the CO2 emissions are largest from thermoelectric power stations and so as we generate more energy we generate more CO2 that has the potential to bring about climate change. There are other ways that one might, that one can bring about climate change as well from denuding forests and so forth that are also part of this broad equation.
Now one more piece of information by the World Economic Forum, they publish every year a plot of likelihood and impact of global risks, and so what’s on the X axis in this plot is the likelihood of some calamity occurring and on the Y axis is the impact that that would have on the world economic situation.
[Image changes to show 2016 Global Risks slide]
So weapons of mass destruction has relatively low likelihood but if it happened it would have an enormous impact. And if you look over in the right hand side, that is events that are highly likely but would have an enormous impact, you find up in the top right-hand corner water crises. And in addition you find not far behind it food crises, and related to that you find issues related to extreme weather which may be thought to be brought about in part by climate change, the failure to address climate change and also energy crises. So all of these concepts are viewed as high impact potentially global risks and some of them are viewed as having high likelihood. And so again this illustrates the connection between water, energy and food and how important it is to the economic stability the world.
[Image changes to show Energy Use Increases as Economic Activity Increases slide]
However the fact that these resources are highly interconnected is not a bad thing and in some cases it is a sign of the economic progress of… this graph shows the gross domestic product which is a broad measure of the economic output per person in a country as a function of the amount of energy consumed in tonnes of oil equivalent. And what you find is that in societies that produce large amounts of economic activity, like Australia, Canada, U.S., you have large amounts of energy consumption. And this ought to make sense, that as you have manufacturing activity that generates economic activity you require energy input into that in order to bring that about. And it will be very interesting for the types of stressors on water, energy and food to see what happens when some of these countries decide that they would like to be more productive and potentially use more energy because then with the high population this is going to explode water and energy use.
[Image changes to show Economic Activity Increases Water Consumption slide]
Additionally since water and energy are strongly coupled it shouldn’t be surprising that economic activity correlates with water use. And these are projections over a long rate of time based on historical values that show increasing levels of global water use being driven by increasing levels of GDP and it’s estimated that every million U.S. dollars of GDP requires about 22,000 cubic metres per year of water. And as we have increased economic activity, increased manufacturing activity, we run computers, we run factories more intensively and open more of them we need more electricity and the generation of electricity by and large requires massive amounts of water.
Now it’s not that we don’t have enough water. We have an abundance of water. The vast majority of the earth’s surface is covered with water.
[Image changes to Distribution of Water on Earth slide]
The problem is that most of the water, 96½ percent of it, is locked up in the ocean where it is too saline to drink and too saline for many industrial activates or other beneficial use activities. Of the fresh water a large fraction of that is tied up in glaciers and ice caps which are largely inaccessible. So the amount of water that is accessible to us as fresh water requiring very little treatment in order to be used is relatively small. This knowledge has been around a very long time and it has prompted for many years the idea or the notion or the dream of desalinating the sea as a way to access water.
[Image changes to show Desalination slide]
And at least in the United States we not only think about it for desalinating the sea, inland we have also brackish water supplies and aquifers that if we could desalinate them we could access enormous supplies of water.
And so the first story that I’ll tell you about is the story of desalination, how it came about, where we’re at today and potentially where the future is. And so for me the story of desalination began at this time, at least modern desalination, membrane based desalination which is one of my loves.
[Image changes to show Desalination JFK slide]
And it was President John F Kennedy in the early 60’s who recognised how important it would be to be able to separate water from salt and how important it would be not only from a humanitarian and scientific point of view but also from a point of view of keeping world peace. And this particular photo is a picture of him turning on a desalination plant in Texas from the White House. I don’t have one of those buttons on my desk.
Now it wasn’t in 1960 that we first thought about desalinating water. We’ve known how to desalinate water for thousands of years and humans have done that.
[Image changes to show Thermal Desalination slide]
The way you do it is you take water, salt water and heat it up. Only the water will evaporate and not the salt and then you condense it and you have fresh water. It works, we’ve been practicing it forever. However it’s extraordinarily energy intensive as is indicated by these figures here. Now in modern times with a little bit of engineering, that is some energy recovery between these heating and cooling streams, we do something similar to this called multistage flash distillation and we can reduce the energy input by more than an order of magnitude relative to simple distillation. This is the way water has been desalinated in large amounts around the world for many years.
Now as a result of the programs that President Kennedy put in place in the 60’s the Office of Saline Water in the U.S. was formed and it sponsored very basic research in the area of desalination to have improved methodologies for this. In 1977 out of that program John Cadot(?) discovered the first organic polymer with the best properties for desalinating water. And John Cadot’s discovery of organic polymers, so-called polyamides for desalinating water have gone on to dominate the industry. And the discovery that came from that has literally changed this field and changed the world and I think it’s appropriate as we are here in honour of Sir Jerry Price to acknowledge that this was a discovery in organic chemistry.
[Image changes to show Reverse Osmosis Membrane Desalination slide]
And out of that was produced the modern reverse osmosis membrane which has been the technology that has come to dominate this field and now instead of boiling and condensing the water which has an enormous energy penalty we take the water, pump it to high pressure, pump it across a membrane where the membrane separates the water from the salt and we get fresh water out and a brine discharge that must be managed as a waste stream. Over time with additional improvement in terms of energy recycling current reverse osmosis energy utilisation is on the order of two kilowatt hours per cubic metre. This is far less than any of the thermal technologies. And as a result of this reverse osmosis membrane separation has taken off, it now dominates this field, it’s been a huge success story for the membrane field, for my field.
[Image changes to show Reverse Osmosis Membrane Desalination Ashkelon desalination plan slide]
And to show you an example of what these plants look like this is a view inside the Ashkelon desalination plant on the Mediterranean in Israel and the membranes are contained in rolled up coils in these white plastic pipes. And there’s a million and a half square metres of membrane area in this plant. And Tony, where are you? I told Tony I would ask him to do a conversion, how many Australian Rules football fields is that? I’ll come back to you in a moment.
This plant produces about six percent of Israel’s total water needs. It came online in 2005. After it there were a succession of larger and larger facilities, more and more efficient built along the Mediterranean coast including the Hadera Plant at 400,000 cubic metres per day and the Sorek plant in 2013 at 624,000 cubic metres per day. As of last summer Israel gets more than 50 percent of its water by desalinating the Mediterranean. And what this has done is it has given them a sense of energy security that has not existed since the foundation of that nation. And now farmers in Israel don’t have to watch every day in the newspaper to see the level of the Red Sea to see whether they’re going to get water for their crops, they always know that they’ll get it from this reliable technology. And so this has simplified life and has improved efficiencies in things like farming.
[Image changes to show Desalination is a Large Scale Process slide]
Now it’s also today practiced on a very large scale and to provide some vernacular comparison I put on here the rate at which we process crude oil every day because this is something that you can see on TV, the oil tankers, it’s a fluid that we process in very large quantities. And you can see that the amount of water that we desalinate every day is on the order of six or seven times as much. And so this is already practiced in a very large scale, we don’t move it around because of its value in large tankers but it’s happening in an extraordinarily large scale.
However this is not the end of this story, it’s really the beginning of the story. Desalination is too expensive. It consumes too much energy, generates too much CO2 based on the electricity that you use. And so we need another approach, another program to improve the efficiency of desalination.
[Image changes to show Moon shot for Water slide]
This is a program that was launched in the previous administration and we don’t know what’s going to happen with the current administration but presumably they will also be thirsty at some point. And it’s called a moon-shot for water and what it means is this is a very aggressive program that’s being implemented across the U.S. federal research agencies to improve the efficiency and capability to desalinate and otherwise to purify water. And it revolves around a notion called pipe parity.
[Image changes to show “Pipe Parity” slide]
So if you take water out of a river or lake or stream and you run it through a conventional water filtration plant and distribute to peoples’ homes the filtration and the clean-up of that water requires a certain amount of resources. There’s money, electricity and carbon dioxide generated.
For desalination to reach pipe parity what that means is that we can desalinate sea water or brackish water for the same cost as drawing fresh water out of a reservoir, purifying it and sending it to your home. This will require a 4X reduction in the cost of sea water desalination, a 3X reduction in energy usage and a 2X reduction in CO2 emissions so these are very aggressive targets and this is called the moon-shot for water in the U.S.
[Image changes to show Cost Reductions Needed to Achieve “Pipe Parity” slide]
And an estimate of the kinds of changes that are needed technologically and in terms of policy to bring this about are shown here. It shows the current cost of desalinating water and the cost of purifying water from a municipal lake or aquifer. It’s estimated that so-called soft costs have to go down enormously. These are the costs associated if you will with the bureaucracy and the red tape, project financing and so forth that are slighted for enormous reduction. And we believe that a lot of this can happen as we attack the regulatory framework of overlapping jurisdictions where water plants go in, with local, state, federal rules that are often conflicting and take years to sort out. We think that if those policies can be made more efficient that this will help enormously in this area.
Operating expenses for a desalination plant are primarily electricity and chemicals, electricity to run the pumps, to feed the membranes and chemicals and keep the membranes clean. If we develop new types of membranes, and there’s research underway on this now, we could reduce those costs. The capital expenses, about 40 percent of that is in the membranes and about 60 percent in the plant and so again if we could develop improved membranes we believe we can reduce the capital costs. If we can develop advanced manufacturing processes to make the other parts of the plant, all of the tubing, the piping, the pumps then this may also contribute to reducing these costs. The energy cost is slighted to go down by a factor of three. We will not get there alone with membranes. There is a certain minimum amount of energy that’s required in order to desalinate water by thermodynamics and we’re at about two to three times that now. We’re unlikely to do an awful lot better. However if we can turn to other parts of the process like make the pumping more efficient around the plant, and this is happening as the plants get larger and larger and the motors get more efficient and it helps drive those costs down, substituting some of that electricity with renewable energy could be another way to get at this cost target.
And finally the system integration is how do we manage the system so that it would be more efficient. And one thought there is that one could take that concentrated brine stream that’s coming out and use it as either a potential energy source or use other technologies like membrane technologies, like electro dialysis or reverse osmosis to improve the yield of water or extract energy from that concentrated brine. So that’s the end of the story on desalination. It’s been a very successful technology and we believe that there’s room for extraordinary improvement.
[Image changes to show Hydraulic Fracturing slide]
And now I’d like to turn to another topic that’s related and that is hydraulic fracturing.
[Image changes to show Hydraulic Fracturing + Horizontal Drilling slide]
And here this has been an event, the hydraulic fracturing plus horizontal drilling in the state where I live, in Texas, has made an extraordinary impact on the economic activity within the state. And for those of you who may not know an awful lot about it historically when we drill an oil or gas well we drill it down into a formation and the formation with oil or gas is rather large and we extract the oil and gas almost like a straw out of that formation. However it has long been known that that is not where most of the oil and gas is. Most of it are in very thin layers of shale and to give you an idea of that they can be on the order of eight to ten to twenty metres thick and they’re positioned two to three thousand metres under the ground. That’s where most of the oil and gas is. It has been previously impossible to extract because as soon as you drill down through it vertically you get access to only a small amount of oil and gas.
However in the 2000’s, mid-2000’s we discovered how to drill down two to three thousand metres and then make a sharp turn and drill horizontally for a mile or more. And this allows you access to very long runs of this very thin shale. This involves precise G.P.S. positioning of the drill bits, it involves advanced control systems and it involves a lot of water because once you have that well drilled you then pump two the three million gallons of water, about eight to eleven million litres of water, in each well. You then use explosives to crack the shale and this releases the oil and gas. You get at the end of that process about twenty percent, ten to thirty percent of the water comes back up as a contaminated flow back or produced water. We’ll talk about that in just a moment.
[Image changes to show Shale Gas/Oil Well Fracturing Occurs 2,000-3,000 Meters Underground slide]
This is giving just another more precise look at where hydraulic fracturing comes and how far underground it occurs and where that sits relative to the water table and aquifers. So this is occurring at very, very great depths, far below places where you get water currently.
[Image changes to show George P. Mitchell: Father of Hydraulic Fracturing slide]
I also thought that while I was here I would introduce you to the father of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, George Mitchell, who lived until his death in Galveston Texas. And George Mitchell faced an existential crisis in his life. His father had built an energy company called Mitchell Energy Company and they had oil and gas holdings throughout Texas but the oil fields and the gas fields were being depleted, they were running out of the easy to get oil. And George Mitchell took on the task of figuring out how to extract the vast majority of the oil and gas that he knew was still in the ground. And his colleagues in the industry mocked him for trying to drill deeply and drill horizontally. When he figured out how to do it they all copied him. And George Mitchell passed away a very wealthy man and has been a great philanthropist in Texas and elsewhere. And a lot of his philanthropy is directed towards sustainability because although he is in the oil and gas business he was a strong believer in sustainable development.
I wanted to share with you a couple of the impacts of hydraulic fracturing and these are from newspaper articles.
[Image changes to show Some Economic Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing slide]
One is that inexpensive natural gas has really energised our manufacturing sector. So when the cost of natural gas goes down that means the cost of energy goes down and that means energy intensive industries like aluminium and steel and glass become more economical. And in fact the still industry in the U.S. has been revived as a result of the shale gas. Additionally we’re starting to produce a lot of oil and this has geopolitical implications. It’s helped keep the price of oil low these past few years because the U.S. shale oil production has come on so strongly.
[Image changes to show Recent Economic Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing slide]
A more recent example, one that I read about just since I’ve been here in Melbourne, is talking about the manufacture of fertiliser. If you take the gas that comes up from shale gas wells it’s methane, ethane, propane, these are the basic building blocks of virtually all organic compounds that we use in life and many compounds like fertiliser. So again in honour of Jerry Price the organic chemistry has benefitted enormously in the United States by this resource. And one of the largest winners has been the U.S. chemicals industry. There’s been an extraordinary revitalisation in the chemicals industry and that has created vast numbers of jobs and economic security for broad regions of the country.
[Image changes to show Switch from Coal to Natural Gas in Power Plants Reduces CO2 Emissions slide]
There’s another benefit of this technology is it reduces carbon dioxide emissions and so as the cost of natural gas has been very low power plants have started to switch from coal to natural gas not because of government regulation but because of market driven forces. And as they switch to methane or natural gas their CO2 emissions go down. It’s a mathematical fact that the carbon emissions go down as the ratio of hydrogen to carbon in the molecule that you’re burning goes down. Methane has four hydrogens for every carbon and that’s the most that you can have in nature. And so methane has the lowest, if we’re going to burn fossil fuels we should burn methane because it has the lowest CO2 generation capacity.
[Image changes to show Worldwide Shale Resources slide]
Now we’re not the only people in this game and this is a map from a few years ago from a presentation that Bill Banholzer gave to the National Academy of Engineering in the U.S., he was the Chief Technology Officer of Dow Chemical at that time, and it shows the size of, at that time, economically producible shale gas reserves and the total estimated shale gas reserves and you can see that Australia like America has a large number, large quantity of these. This is now out of date, there’ve been several new finds in the U.S. that have markedly expanded the amount of shale gas that we have.
Now that’s not the end of this story either because you don’t get all of this without some problems and some of them have been reported in the newspapers that are related to faulty well development and so forth but there are also some real issues with exploitation of shale gas reservoir that we’ve beginning to learn the hard way.
[Image changes to show Deep Well Injection of Flow-back Water Linked to Earthquakes slide]
One of them is about earthquakes. And so if I think about a state in the U.S. that has a lot of earthquakes I would automatically think of California. It is always rocking and rolling out there and if you stay there for a week or two you’re going to have a high probability of being involved in a minor tremor and we talk about eventually part of California breaking off and floating out into the Pacific Ocean and having new beachfront property in Nevada.
However there are almost no earthquakes in Oklahoma, until recently. And the number of earthquakes in Oklahoma now in the middle of the U.S. surpass those of California. What has brought this about has been the injection of massive amounts of waste water from hydraulic fracturing back into deep well injection sites. That is you take the waste water that flows back up from hydraulic fracturing from perhaps 100 wells and you put it into one deep well injection site where that well is even deeper than the hydraulic fracturing well. And you put, they’re putting enough water into the ground in certain places that it lubricates the geological formations and the ground starts to move. And so there will be I believe room for regulatory intervention here to help us manage the waste water from these processes in a way that does not cause seismic activity.
[Image changes to show Fracking Water Cycle slide]
One possibility would be to change the way that we use the water cycle in fracking. Today we take fresh water, transport it in trucks if you can believe that, and that’s a huge energy cost, to the fracturing site, add the chemicals, put it down a hole and we get about ten to thirty percent of that back. Currently we transport that waste water to a deep well injection site. However if we could purify that water perhaps we could reuse it in fracking and if we could purify it enough and under the right conditions perhaps we could release it and make it available again for other beneficial use.
And so in our laboratory we’ve worked on membranes for this purpose. The problem with treating this flow back in produced water is it’s really dirty. It can have a lot of salt in it, it has oil in it and other components that may come from under the ground. And so if you try to filter it with any sort of filter membrane or otherwise you get the filter very dirty.
[Image changes to show Engineering Membrane Surfaces to be Fouling Resistant When Purifying Flow-back Water slide]
As a result we’ve developed technology to apply polymers, again organic chemistry in the spirit of Jerry Price, to membranes to make nanometre thick layer coatings on the membranes that give them an anti-stick property. We call this one polydopamine and it will improve the performance of membranes when filtering dirty water.
Here we’re removing 55 litres per square metre per hour of clean water through a membrane and as it fouls in time or as it processes water in time the amount of pressure drop required to keep this flow rate the same goes up as the membrane gets plugged and gets dirty. With the coating on it that amount of pressure drop goes down by a factor of four. That’s a savings in energy, an increase in productivity. This was then reduced to practice in a start-up company and we’ve done tests in the Barnett shale region, this is results of a frack water test site, and it’s comparing the performance of one of our modified membranes with the surface coating on it to the performance without the surface coating and within a few hours we’re up to a factor of 2X better, more improvement. Now this flow back water doesn’t last forever, it only occurs at the very beginning of the lifetime of the well and so these systems are mounted on trailers so that you can move them from one site to another as needed.
[Image changes to show Mobile Frack-water Purification Unit slide]
The last short story I wanted to talk about related to water and energy is related to carbon capture.
[Image changes to Carbon Dioxide – World Emissions by Sector in 2007 slide]
There’s been wide reports of the increase in CO2 content in the atmosphere. It’s shown in this graph, it’s up over 400 parts per million now. And the emissions come, the largest sector of emissions are from electricity and heat. So again we come back to those thermoelectric power stations that generate electricity and they also generate the largest point source of carbon dioxide emissions. And so it would be natural if one were to talk about carbon capturing sequestration, that this would be a place that would be of interest. There are also activities that I’ve been exposed to here at CSIRO where people are looking at capturing CO2 from the air and I think that’s a very elegant idea that will be fun to watch it develop. The vast majority today of carbon capture research is related to power plants.
And I want to tell you two short stories about that or one short story and one sub chapter of it.
[Image changes to show W.A. Parish Power Station, Houston Texas Petra Nova Carbon Capture System slide]
And for this I’ll ask you to go with me to the WA Parish power station in Houston Texas. This is almost a 2500 megawatt coal fired power plant. This is the coal out here and the conveyors to run it back to the boilers to generate electricity. And it’s one of the largest power plants in the U.S. A typical power plant would be on the order of 500 to 750 megawatts so this is a behemoth. And in recent years the owners of this plant undertook a carbon capture system and have built that and put it in and they call it their Petra Nova carbon capture system. This billion dollar project was financed with 900 million dollars of private investment and 100 million dollars from the U.S. Department of Energy. And it takes the carbon dioxide generated by about one tenth of that power station and that turns out to be about 2500 kilograms of CO2 per minute so it’s a lot of CO2. And it takes that CO2 and pipes it 81 miles to a depleted oil field where the use of CO2 can help extract oil. The value of the CO2 to this advanced oil recovery process is so high that it pays for all of the carbon capture system. The electricity cost out of this plant does not go up as a result of CCS. And what that suggests are that other locations in places around the world where there would be beneficial use of CO2 and so that we didn’t view it simply as a waste that had to be captured at cost. Are there other ways that we can, places where we can find beneficial use for CO2 and make the economics of this process be market driven rather than policy driven or less policy driven.
[Image changes to show The Carbon Capture and Enhanced Oil Recovery Project slide]
To give you a little perspective of how this works, flue gas is generated in the combustion of coal with air and it’s largely carbon dioxide, nitrogen, mostly oxygen has gone in the combustion process, and some water vapour. And it’s taken around the plant to a system that removes the CO2 from that flue gas and then lets the nitrogen and the water vapour leave the process. The CO2 is then subsequently compressed and sent 81 miles to the oil field. I’d like to talk about that CO2 process for a second.
[Image changes to show CO2 Capture by Amine Absorption slide]
The conventional technology and the way Petra Nova works is that flue gas is fed to a so-called amine absorption system and again chemistry, organic chemistry comes into the picture. And in here there is an aqueous solution that has compounds in it called amines.
Amines like CO2, they will react with carbon dioxide and bind to CO2. And then the nitrogen and water vapour and other components are allowed to leave. The aqueous solution that has the CO2 in it is taken to another column where it’s heated up and then the amines let go of the CO2, it can be compressed and it goes on to the oil field.
[Image changes to show Captured CO2 Used for Enhanced Oil Recovery slide]
Once it gets there it’s pumped underground into the formation and this helps keep the pressure up in the well, it helps reduce the viscosity and encourages the oil to come out of its nooks and crannies and so you get the oil and CO2 mixture coming up, the CO2 is removed and again put back underground. And what this has the effect of doing in this particular field is that it increases by a factor of 30 the rate of oil production. And that increase in oil production is valuable enough to pay for all of the carbon capture system.
What I’d like to talk to you about in the last couple of slides is a potential alternative to the amine absorption system or a potential technology to complement it and in case you haven’t guessed it would be membrane based. And so we’ll start this story by talking about hydrogen separation membranes.
[Image changes to show H2 Separation Membranes slide]
I’ll take you back to 2005/2004 to another administration, the George W. Bush, and Bush was in favour of clean coal and so he was going to take coal and turn it into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. At that time the administration did not recognise the potential for CO2 to contribute to global warming and so the CO2 would be released, it would take the hydrogen to run fuel cells and to burn for power. And so we and others were looking at ways to separate CO2 from hydrogen. And we discovered organic polymers, again in the spirit of Jerry Price that had exceptional combinations of properties to remove CO2 from hydrogen. At the time it had the best combination of fast throughput which we measure as permeability and high fidelity of separation which we measure in terms of selectivity. It had the best combination of properties that were known.
The lead student on this project, Haiqing Lin, went to work at a company in California called Membrane Technology and Research, it’s a small company in Silicon Valley, and he continued work on this. And gradually he was able to scale these membranes up from laboratory or bench scale in this test device to full size modules that are on the order of a metre long and 30 centimetres in diameter and he validated their performance properties at the National Carbon Capture Centre in the U.S. and based upon that performance the membranes were commercialised for a number of applications. They went into, have gone into applications for a so-called synthesis gas purification which is a system shown here, but also for clean-up of natural gas. And if you can separate CO2 from hydrogen it is really easy to separate CO2 from nitrogen, nitrogen is a larger molecule, it is slower in the way it transports through all membranes and so the membranes that have very good CO2 hydrogen separation properties have very good CO2 nitrogen separation properties for flue gas rectification or purification.
And these membranes now have been run at scales of 20 tonnes per day at the National Carbon Capture System.
[Image changes to show Installation of Membrane System to Capture 20 tons of CO2 per Day at the National Carbon Capture Centre slide]
This is just a couple of photos showing the membranes coming to install that system at the National Carbon Capture System. This is one floor of the membrane units. One of the things that we like about this is that they’re modular, they can be assembled offsite and then put together like Legos onsite with very little labour. So you can centralise the manufacturing of the devices and then take them quickly to the site to install them. And this is showing the second floor of the membranes going in. The membranes are in these long tubes.
[Image changes to show 20 Ton per Day (1 Megawatt) Co2 Capture System slide]
This is showing the system in its final operational configuration. And I want to focus your attention on the size of this unit relative to the size of these two units that stand beside it. And I’m going to show you an engineering [indistinct – 55:11] diagram of this particular picture on the next slide and talk about it just a second.
[Image changes to show Comparison of CO2 Capture Systems at National Carbon Capture Centre slide]
So this is an engineering diagram of the 20 tonne per day, which is about one megawatt equivalent of generating capacity, membrane system. Over here that you saw in the far right is the amine absorption system. This is the Petra Nova system. This is standard technology. And despite a massive difference in complexity and size it can only treat ten tonnes of CO2 per day, half a megawatt equivalent. Advances in amine scrubbing or amine purification have led to smaller systems but still the one megawatt equivalent system is much larger and more complex than the membrane system.
If you were to build carbon capture and sequestration using conventional technology like this the carbon capture system would be larger than the power plant. And we believe that the modularity and simplicity of membranes may play a large role in helping them take the next generation of this technology forward or operate in conjunction with amines or other technology for carbon capture and sequestration. This also gives you a way to reduce the capital costs of the system, reduce the complexity, increase the operational reliability and all of those factors contribute to increased efficiency.
And so with that I will close the lecture by noting that water and energy and additionally food and CO2 emissions have historically been very closely coupled.
[Image changes to show Implications and Outlook slide]
However fundamental science and research and development is weakening these linkages and is also providing increasingly efficient technologies to capture CO2. And the last plug for my field is that membranes are playing an important role in this area and we are working very hard to see that they have a wider role in the future.
[Image changes to show Acknowledgements slide]
I’d like to finally acknowledge the folks who have been critically responsible for helping me be here with you today but also over the next few months at CSIRO. I’d like to thank the Australian American Fulbright Commission for their generous Distinguished Chair appointment and also a number of other organisations that are contributing in many ways to my stay here and to helping me have the most productive time I can here. I’d like to close finally by again offering a word of thanks and humility for the legacy that Sir Robert Price created here at CSIRO and for chemistry in Australia. Thank you for your time.
[Audience applause]
[Music plays and CSIRO logo appears with the text: Big ideas start here. www.csiro.au]
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Anita Hill: : Welcome everyone, guests and friends and family. First I’d like to start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today and acknowledge their elders past and present. I would like to acknowledge colleagues past and present, the Price family, our event partners which are ASCII, the RACI and Chemistry Australia. Samantha Reid, the CEO of Chemistry Australia, couldn’t be here with us tonight at the last minute so on behalf of Samantha Reid, CEO of Chemistry Australia, I’d like to let you know that PACIA, the Plastics and Chemical Industry of Australia, has just changed their logo and their name to Chemistry Australia and you’ll see that new name and logo appearing here tonight as they are becoming sponsors of the Price Lecture.
Chemistry Australia remains the pre-eminent national body representing the Australian Chemical Industry, while also working to create a strong interface between industry and the research and the academic sector. Their collaborative approach is crucial in leveraging Australia’s valuable STEM, which is science, technology, engineering and mathematics capabilities and in delivering innovative solutions to problems such as the energy crisis. And they’re quite excited to have the speaker in the topic tonight and that’s why they’ve joined us to be perpetual sponsors. CSIRO has a strategic relationship with Chemistry Australia and we look forward to continuing to work with that team.
I’d now like to introduce Tom Spurling to say a few words about the history of this event. Tom is the former chief of CSIRO’s Division of Chemicals and Polymers which was also called the Division of Molecular Science. Tom has been a CSIRO Board member, he’s a Professor at Swinburne University of Technology, and he has a strong history with our event partners tonight. He’s a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, AATSE. He’s a past President of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, RACI. And so who better to provide us with an introduction to the history of the event and also to introduce the speaker than Professor Tom Spurling.
[Audience applause]
Tom Spurling: Thanks very much Anita. So I never give up the opportunity to talk about Jerry Price because he was such an important figure in Australian chemistry. So Jerry Price was recruited to CSIRO back from England in the 1940’s to lead the CSIRO’s phytochemical project. And he was very successful in that and he’s made an enormous contribution to organic chemistry in Australia by doing that project, enlisting the aid of pretty much every organic chemistry department at all the universities around the country. So professors of organic chemistry in Western Australian, South Australia, Sydney, Tasmania and Melbourne all involved in Jerry Price’s phytochemical project. And this was one of his characteristics of being able to develop teams to work for a particular purpose
His second contribution which is relevant to one of the sponsors of tonight’s lecture is that when he was President of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute he decided that the Institute should become a much more professional society and he started working on the divisions within the Institute, so particular one that he was interested in became the Division of Organic Chemistry. But he sponsored nationwide discipline based divisions as well as the state ranges(?) which were the more qualifying aspect of the Institute.
And thirdly he made an enormous contribution to Australia as the Chairman of CSIRO. Those of you who remember this, back this far will remember the Whitlam government and the Minister for Energy of the Whitlam government Rex Connor wanted to hive off part of CSIRO, the mineral part of CSIRO into a separate organisation and Jerry, a Senior public servant of the time, campaigned against the government in this and there are letters on his file to his wife Lady Joyce Price saying this might be the end of my career, you might find that I’m sacked when I get back to Australia. But he wasn’t, he succeeded in maintaining the integrity of CSIRO and he will always be remembered in the history of Australian science for that achievement.
When I was the Chief of the Division of Chemicals and Polymers I looked around the buildings and areas of CSIRO and I could see no acknowledgement of this great contributor to the organisation. There was the Ian Woolf Laboratory, the Lloyd Reece(?) Laboratory, there were buildings and lectures named by other people around the country but nothing to remember Jerry Price’s contribution. So in 1990 the Division of Chemicals and Polymers commenced the, what we called, not the Jerry Price Lecture but the Sir Robert Price Lecture and I hope that in future we might correct that. So the Sir Robert Price Lecture was started in 1990 and there’ve been some very distinguished lecturers. The first was Rod Rickards, one of the country’s most distinguished synthetic, organic chemists from the ANU. A feature that I remember was when Sir John Cornforth, Australia’s only Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, gave the lecture in 1992. John Cornforth was a great friend of Jerry, of the Price family when they were students in England. And various other people. The last one was Professor David Solomon who gave the lecture in 2001. I was very pleased last year when the organisation decided to name a laboratory [indistinct - 07:15] the Sir Robert Price Laboratory and simultaneously with that revived the Sir Robert Price Lecture. And Dr Larry Marshall was the lecturer that year and we hope that the organisations involved in this will continue this lecture series so that we have a continuing recognition of the contribution that Jerry Price made to Australian chemistry and Australian society.
So that brings me to our 20017 Sir Robert Price Lecturer who is Benny Freeman. Benny Freeman is the Richard B. Curran Centennial Chair in engineering at the University of Texas in Austin in the Department of Chemical Engineering. Professor Freeman’s research is in polymer science and engineering specifically in the mass transport of small molecules in solid polymers. So he is very interested in gas and liquid separations using polymer and polymer based membranes and this is obviously going to be of great importance in hydrogen separation in natural gas purification, of what Prime Minister Turnbull thinks is going to be important carbon tax [indistinct - 08:38] storage and in desalination and developing fouling resistant membranes. He’s come to Australia and will be here ‘til July as the Fulbright U.S. Distinguished Chair in sales technology and innovation sponsored by CSIRO and I‘ve been assured that also is going to have an office at the Swinburne University of Technology. So I’m very pleased to be able to introduce Professor Freeman to you and invite him to give the 2017 Sir Robert Price Lecture.
[Audience applause]
Professor Benny Freeman: Thank you Jerry for that very kind introduction. I would like to also thank Anita for her opening remarks and also Clare for all of the logistic support and Erica who may be in the audience as well. I’d like to start by saying that it is an extraordinary honour to be the 2017 Sir Robert Price Lecturer and particularly after the list of laureates that Tom just read I’m very humbled to be in the company of these people and also to be in your company, I appreciate your taking time out of your day to come to this lecture and I hope at the end we’ll have a good discussion around some of the issues I’ll talk about today.
My research is in the area of polymer membranes for separation and so this impacts applications such as desalinisation and also gas separation such as air purification and natural gas purification. And today I’ll talk about a topic that has been of great importance in our country and elsewhere and that is the so-called water energy nexus and I would like to share with you some background on the water energy nexus, what it is, what some of its implications are and then I’d like to tell you three different stories that are related to various aspects of the water energy nexus and where work from my field, from the membrane science field, is playing a role in helping advance our state of understanding and our technology and civilisation in these areas.
[Image changes to show Water-Energy Nexus slide]
So the first slide shows a cartoon of a connection between water and energy. And the point of this is that in many activities that we undertake related to fossil fuel production both extracting and refining, generation of biofuels, hydropower and thermoelectric cooling we use an enormous amount of water for energy applications. On the other hand, the other side of that coin, we also require massive amounts of energy in order to move water around, to generate drinking water and waste water treatment.
[Image changes to show Water-Energy Nexus cartoon slide]
A more localised cartoon of this concept is shown here where large amounts of water are required to run power stations that in turn provide the electricity that runs our life including water purification systems as well as many other systems and these thermoelectric power plants generate a large fraction of the carbon dioxide that’s associated with global warming and this has prompted activities related to carbon capture that we’ll talk about later in the presentation.
[Image changes to show Water Withdrawal in the U.S. – 2010 pie chart slide]
To put this on a somewhat more quantitative scale this shows values for water withdrawal in the U.S. for various applications and you can see that the largest two pieces of this pie are the use of water or withdrawal of water from the environment for thermoelectric power generation, this is largely to cool power plants, and also for irrigation or for farming. And so not only are water and energy strongly connected but water, energy and food are very strongly connected. And this is an activity that is carried out on a massive scale both in my home country and abroad. And what I’m going to assert to you is that if we could weaken the very strong linkages between water and energy, carbon dioxide generation and food, that we would be able to live in a much more sustainable fashion.
[Image changes to show Water Crisis in the U.S. slide]
And so right now in the U.S. we are in a water crisis. Some might argue that we’re in other types of crises but we are for sure in a water crisis. And this is being brought about in large measure, though not exclusively, by the fact that the population continues to grow and we continue to put more and more people in arid regions such as the south west and California, in places that are historically water stressed. But across the U.S., not just in those regions, we find that we have declining groundwater levels and this leads to all sorts of implications, just a few of which are listed here, so in the middle of the farming country in the U.S. as the groundwater levels are depleted we need deeper wells to access them, more energy to bring it to the surface. We find an intensified competition between food and energy for water, I’ll come back to that again in a moment, and it’s increasing the cost of generating goods for on farms.
[Image changes to show Water Crisis in the U.S. slide]
We also find that there are, we’re seeing increasing levels of climate change induced variability and this is not only droughts but it’s also floods and more and more intense storms and these are leading in a variety of ways to increase energy usage and some of the largest water demands occur in regions for us where groundwater aquifers are used for water and these are being depleted. It’s causing the earth to settle, foundations to crack, buildings to be damaged. And I’d like to give you just from the area where I leave, when I’m not living in Melbourne, examples of this connection between water and energy. So in around 2011 and 2012 we had a historic drought in the south west and in Texas and one of the consequences of that was because electric power plants need huge amounts of water. At the height of summer when the drought was at its worst, in Austin Texas we had more than 100 days above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, power plants had to slow down their operation because they didn’t have access to enough water to run.
[Image changes to show Examples of Water-Energy Nexus slide]
And this is when you have peak power demand you get forced into a situation where electric generation capacity needs to be reduced because of lack of water. This is prompting the Department of Energy and other organisations to look into the possibility of waterless thermoelectric power generation. Are there new ways that we can address heat transfer so that we don’t need as much water or don’t need any water in order to generate electricity, in other words trying to weaken the linkage between water and energy generation.
This is another concept that occurred very close to where I live and that is that in some towns in Texas during this drought ran out of water and got to the point where water was being trucked in or it’s brought in and people are using bottled water for all of their water needs because their wells had run dry. And one of the places that we start to turn to is to take waste water from sewage treatment plants and subject it to advanced water purification in order to generate drinking water. We call this in the scientific terminology a DPR, Direct Potable Reuse. It’s also been labelled in the vernacular press as toilet to tap and with all the implications that that might have. However if you look around the world there are places that are way ahead of us in this area. For example Singapore which has an enormous investment in water purification to protect its political stability has probably the most advanced systems, the so-called Singapore NEWater which is a large effort at using reclaimed waste water.
There is however not just in Texas or in the United States a scarcity of water. This is a global problem.
[Image changes to show Global Scarcity of Clean Water slide]
If you look worldwide about 40 percent of the population lives in water stressed areas and there are a billion people according to the World Health Organisation who live without clean piped water. However many arid regions are located in places near impure water where one might purify that water and help alleviate some of these concerns. This water scarcity map that’s shown indicates the extremity of deprivation in water and the darker the colours are on it the more intense the water shortage is. Ad you can see that it’s not just limited to the Middle East or to a few places that you might regard as being highly arid but it’s a worldwide problem.
Another indication of this is the quotes at the bottom of the page, one form Andrew Liveris who’s an industrial leader in the U.S. talking about water being a key issue in this case for the chemical industry. And also the quote from the former U.N. Secretary General which is talking about the importance of water to political stability. And if you read through history there have been many wars fought over water. And this may occur again.
Now a lot of this is being driven, some of it’s being driven not just by climate change but also by increasing population.
[Image changes to show Increasing Population Drives Increases in Water, Energy and Food Consumption slide]
Right now the population of the world is growing by 80 million people per year and so that is enough people to populate a city the size of Melbourne every 22 days, every three weeks roughly. And so as a result, as there are more people around, then we need more food, estimated to rise by 50 percent in 2030. We also need similar increases in energy and a large increase in water. It turns out that the CO2 emissions are largest from thermoelectric power stations and so as we generate more energy we generate more CO2 that has the potential to bring about climate change. There are other ways that one might, that one can bring about climate change as well from denuding forests and so forth that are also part of this broad equation.
Now one more piece of information by the World Economic Forum, they publish every year a plot of likelihood and impact of global risks, and so what’s on the X axis in this plot is the likelihood of some calamity occurring and on the Y axis is the impact that that would have on the world economic situation.
[Image changes to show 2016 Global Risks slide]
So weapons of mass destruction has relatively low likelihood but if it happened it would have an enormous impact. And if you look over in the right hand side, that is events that are highly likely but would have an enormous impact, you find up in the top right-hand corner water crises. And in addition you find not far behind it food crises, and related to that you find issues related to extreme weather which may be thought to be brought about in part by climate change, the failure to address climate change and also energy crises. So all of these concepts are viewed as high impact potentially global risks and some of them are viewed as having high likelihood. And so again this illustrates the connection between water, energy and food and how important it is to the economic stability the world.
[Image changes to show Energy Use Increases as Economic Activity Increases slide]
However the fact that these resources are highly interconnected is not a bad thing and in some cases it is a sign of the economic progress of… this graph shows the gross domestic product which is a broad measure of the economic output per person in a country as a function of the amount of energy consumed in tonnes of oil equivalent. And what you find is that in societies that produce large amounts of economic activity, like Australia, Canada, U.S., you have large amounts of energy consumption. And this ought to make sense, that as you have manufacturing activity that generates economic activity you require energy input into that in order to bring that about. And it will be very interesting for the types of stressors on water, energy and food to see what happens when some of these countries decide that they would like to be more productive and potentially use more energy because then with the high population this is going to explode water and energy use.
[Image changes to show Economic Activity Increases Water Consumption slide]
Additionally since water and energy are strongly coupled it shouldn’t be surprising that economic activity correlates with water use. And these are projections over a long rate of time based on historical values that show increasing levels of global water use being driven by increasing levels of GDP and it’s estimated that every million U.S. dollars of GDP requires about 22,000 cubic metres per year of water. And as we have increased economic activity, increased manufacturing activity, we run computers, we run factories more intensively and open more of them we need more electricity and the generation of electricity by and large requires massive amounts of water.
Now it’s not that we don’t have enough water. We have an abundance of water. The vast majority of the earth’s surface is covered with water.
[Image changes to Distribution of Water on Earth slide]
The problem is that most of the water, 96½ percent of it, is locked up in the ocean where it is too saline to drink and too saline for many industrial activates or other beneficial use activities. Of the fresh water a large fraction of that is tied up in glaciers and ice caps which are largely inaccessible. So the amount of water that is accessible to us as fresh water requiring very little treatment in order to be used is relatively small. This knowledge has been around a very long time and it has prompted for many years the idea or the notion or the dream of desalinating the sea as a way to access water.
[Image changes to show Desalination slide]
And at least in the United States we not only think about it for desalinating the sea, inland we have also brackish water supplies and aquifers that if we could desalinate them we could access enormous supplies of water.
And so the first story that I’ll tell you about is the story of desalination, how it came about, where we’re at today and potentially where the future is. And so for me the story of desalination began at this time, at least modern desalination, membrane based desalination which is one of my loves.
[Image changes to show Desalination JFK slide]
And it was President John F Kennedy in the early 60’s who recognised how important it would be to be able to separate water from salt and how important it would be not only from a humanitarian and scientific point of view but also from a point of view of keeping world peace. And this particular photo is a picture of him turning on a desalination plant in Texas from the White House. I don’t have one of those buttons on my desk.
Now it wasn’t in 1960 that we first thought about desalinating water. We’ve known how to desalinate water for thousands of years and humans have done that.
[Image changes to show Thermal Desalination slide]
The way you do it is you take water, salt water and heat it up. Only the water will evaporate and not the salt and then you condense it and you have fresh water. It works, we’ve been practicing it forever. However it’s extraordinarily energy intensive as is indicated by these figures here. Now in modern times with a little bit of engineering, that is some energy recovery between these heating and cooling streams, we do something similar to this called multistage flash distillation and we can reduce the energy input by more than an order of magnitude relative to simple distillation. This is the way water has been desalinated in large amounts around the world for many years.
Now as a result of the programs that President Kennedy put in place in the 60’s the Office of Saline Water in the U.S. was formed and it sponsored very basic research in the area of desalination to have improved methodologies for this. In 1977 out of that program John Cadot(?) discovered the first organic polymer with the best properties for desalinating water. And John Cadot’s discovery of organic polymers, so-called polyamides for desalinating water have gone on to dominate the industry. And the discovery that came from that has literally changed this field and changed the world and I think it’s appropriate as we are here in honour of Sir Jerry Price to acknowledge that this was a discovery in organic chemistry.
[Image changes to show Reverse Osmosis Membrane Desalination slide]
And out of that was produced the modern reverse osmosis membrane which has been the technology that has come to dominate this field and now instead of boiling and condensing the water which has an enormous energy penalty we take the water, pump it to high pressure, pump it across a membrane where the membrane separates the water from the salt and we get fresh water out and a brine discharge that must be managed as a waste stream. Over time with additional improvement in terms of energy recycling current reverse osmosis energy utilisation is on the order of two kilowatt hours per cubic metre. This is far less than any of the thermal technologies. And as a result of this reverse osmosis membrane separation has taken off, it now dominates this field, it’s been a huge success story for the membrane field, for my field.
[Image changes to show Reverse Osmosis Membrane Desalination Ashkelon desalination plan slide]
And to show you an example of what these plants look like this is a view inside the Ashkelon desalination plant on the Mediterranean in Israel and the membranes are contained in rolled up coils in these white plastic pipes. And there’s a million and a half square metres of membrane area in this plant. And Tony, where are you? I told Tony I would ask him to do a conversion, how many Australian Rules football fields is that? I’ll come back to you in a moment.
This plant produces about six percent of Israel’s total water needs. It came online in 2005. After it there were a succession of larger and larger facilities, more and more efficient built along the Mediterranean coast including the Hadera Plant at 400,000 cubic metres per day and the Sorek plant in 2013 at 624,000 cubic metres per day. As of last summer Israel gets more than 50 percent of its water by desalinating the Mediterranean. And what this has done is it has given them a sense of energy security that has not existed since the foundation of that nation. And now farmers in Israel don’t have to watch every day in the newspaper to see the level of the Red Sea to see whether they’re going to get water for their crops, they always know that they’ll get it from this reliable technology. And so this has simplified life and has improved efficiencies in things like farming.
[Image changes to show Desalination is a Large Scale Process slide]
Now it’s also today practiced on a very large scale and to provide some vernacular comparison I put on here the rate at which we process crude oil every day because this is something that you can see on TV, the oil tankers, it’s a fluid that we process in very large quantities. And you can see that the amount of water that we desalinate every day is on the order of six or seven times as much. And so this is already practiced in a very large scale, we don’t move it around because of its value in large tankers but it’s happening in an extraordinarily large scale.
However this is not the end of this story, it’s really the beginning of the story. Desalination is too expensive. It consumes too much energy, generates too much CO2 based on the electricity that you use. And so we need another approach, another program to improve the efficiency of desalination.
[Image changes to show Moon shot for Water slide]
This is a program that was launched in the previous administration and we don’t know what’s going to happen with the current administration but presumably they will also be thirsty at some point. And it’s called a moon-shot for water and what it means is this is a very aggressive program that’s being implemented across the U.S. federal research agencies to improve the efficiency and capability to desalinate and otherwise to purify water. And it revolves around a notion called pipe parity.
[Image changes to show “Pipe Parity” slide]
So if you take water out of a river or lake or stream and you run it through a conventional water filtration plant and distribute to peoples’ homes the filtration and the clean-up of that water requires a certain amount of resources. There’s money, electricity and carbon dioxide generated.
For desalination to reach pipe parity what that means is that we can desalinate sea water or brackish water for the same cost as drawing fresh water out of a reservoir, purifying it and sending it to your home. This will require a 4X reduction in the cost of sea water desalination, a 3X reduction in energy usage and a 2X reduction in CO2 emissions so these are very aggressive targets and this is called the moon-shot for water in the U.S.
[Image changes to show Cost Reductions Needed to Achieve “Pipe Parity” slide]
And an estimate of the kinds of changes that are needed technologically and in terms of policy to bring this about are shown here. It shows the current cost of desalinating water and the cost of purifying water from a municipal lake or aquifer. It’s estimated that so-called soft costs have to go down enormously. These are the costs associated if you will with the bureaucracy and the red tape, project financing and so forth that are slighted for enormous reduction. And we believe that a lot of this can happen as we attack the regulatory framework of overlapping jurisdictions where water plants go in, with local, state, federal rules that are often conflicting and take years to sort out. We think that if those policies can be made more efficient that this will help enormously in this area.
Operating expenses for a desalination plant are primarily electricity and chemicals, electricity to run the pumps, to feed the membranes and chemicals and keep the membranes clean. If we develop new types of membranes, and there’s research underway on this now, we could reduce those costs. The capital expenses, about 40 percent of that is in the membranes and about 60 percent in the plant and so again if we could develop improved membranes we believe we can reduce the capital costs. If we can develop advanced manufacturing processes to make the other parts of the plant, all of the tubing, the piping, the pumps then this may also contribute to reducing these costs. The energy cost is slighted to go down by a factor of three. We will not get there alone with membranes. There is a certain minimum amount of energy that’s required in order to desalinate water by thermodynamics and we’re at about two to three times that now. We’re unlikely to do an awful lot better. However if we can turn to other parts of the process like make the pumping more efficient around the plant, and this is happening as the plants get larger and larger and the motors get more efficient and it helps drive those costs down, substituting some of that electricity with renewable energy could be another way to get at this cost target.
And finally the system integration is how do we manage the system so that it would be more efficient. And one thought there is that one could take that concentrated brine stream that’s coming out and use it as either a potential energy source or use other technologies like membrane technologies, like electro dialysis or reverse osmosis to improve the yield of water or extract energy from that concentrated brine. So that’s the end of the story on desalination. It’s been a very successful technology and we believe that there’s room for extraordinary improvement.
[Image changes to show Hydraulic Fracturing slide]
And now I’d like to turn to another topic that’s related and that is hydraulic fracturing.
[Image changes to show Hydraulic Fracturing + Horizontal Drilling slide]
And here this has been an event, the hydraulic fracturing plus horizontal drilling in the state where I live, in Texas, has made an extraordinary impact on the economic activity within the state. And for those of you who may not know an awful lot about it historically when we drill an oil or gas well we drill it down into a formation and the formation with oil or gas is rather large and we extract the oil and gas almost like a straw out of that formation. However it has long been known that that is not where most of the oil and gas is. Most of it are in very thin layers of shale and to give you an idea of that they can be on the order of eight to ten to twenty metres thick and they’re positioned two to three thousand metres under the ground. That’s where most of the oil and gas is. It has been previously impossible to extract because as soon as you drill down through it vertically you get access to only a small amount of oil and gas.
However in the 2000’s, mid-2000’s we discovered how to drill down two to three thousand metres and then make a sharp turn and drill horizontally for a mile or more. And this allows you access to very long runs of this very thin shale. This involves precise G.P.S. positioning of the drill bits, it involves advanced control systems and it involves a lot of water because once you have that well drilled you then pump two the three million gallons of water, about eight to eleven million litres of water, in each well. You then use explosives to crack the shale and this releases the oil and gas. You get at the end of that process about twenty percent, ten to thirty percent of the water comes back up as a contaminated flow back or produced water. We’ll talk about that in just a moment.
[Image changes to show Shale Gas/Oil Well Fracturing Occurs 2,000-3,000 Meters Underground slide]
This is giving just another more precise look at where hydraulic fracturing comes and how far underground it occurs and where that sits relative to the water table and aquifers. So this is occurring at very, very great depths, far below places where you get water currently.
[Image changes to show George P. Mitchell: Father of Hydraulic Fracturing slide]
I also thought that while I was here I would introduce you to the father of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, George Mitchell, who lived until his death in Galveston Texas. And George Mitchell faced an existential crisis in his life. His father had built an energy company called Mitchell Energy Company and they had oil and gas holdings throughout Texas but the oil fields and the gas fields were being depleted, they were running out of the easy to get oil. And George Mitchell took on the task of figuring out how to extract the vast majority of the oil and gas that he knew was still in the ground. And his colleagues in the industry mocked him for trying to drill deeply and drill horizontally. When he figured out how to do it they all copied him. And George Mitchell passed away a very wealthy man and has been a great philanthropist in Texas and elsewhere. And a lot of his philanthropy is directed towards sustainability because although he is in the oil and gas business he was a strong believer in sustainable development.
I wanted to share with you a couple of the impacts of hydraulic fracturing and these are from newspaper articles.
[Image changes to show Some Economic Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing slide]
One is that inexpensive natural gas has really energised our manufacturing sector. So when the cost of natural gas goes down that means the cost of energy goes down and that means energy intensive industries like aluminium and steel and glass become more economical. And in fact the still industry in the U.S. has been revived as a result of the shale gas. Additionally we’re starting to produce a lot of oil and this has geopolitical implications. It’s helped keep the price of oil low these past few years because the U.S. shale oil production has come on so strongly.
[Image changes to show Recent Economic Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing slide]
A more recent example, one that I read about just since I’ve been here in Melbourne, is talking about the manufacture of fertiliser. If you take the gas that comes up from shale gas wells it’s methane, ethane, propane, these are the basic building blocks of virtually all organic compounds that we use in life and many compounds like fertiliser. So again in honour of Jerry Price the organic chemistry has benefitted enormously in the United States by this resource. And one of the largest winners has been the U.S. chemicals industry. There’s been an extraordinary revitalisation in the chemicals industry and that has created vast numbers of jobs and economic security for broad regions of the country.
[Image changes to show Switch from Coal to Natural Gas in Power Plants Reduces CO2 Emissions slide]
There’s another benefit of this technology is it reduces carbon dioxide emissions and so as the cost of natural gas has been very low power plants have started to switch from coal to natural gas not because of government regulation but because of market driven forces. And as they switch to methane or natural gas their CO2 emissions go down. It’s a mathematical fact that the carbon emissions go down as the ratio of hydrogen to carbon in the molecule that you’re burning goes down. Methane has four hydrogens for every carbon and that’s the most that you can have in nature. And so methane has the lowest, if we’re going to burn fossil fuels we should burn methane because it has the lowest CO2 generation capacity.
[Image changes to show Worldwide Shale Resources slide]
Now we’re not the only people in this game and this is a map from a few years ago from a presentation that Bill Banholzer gave to the National Academy of Engineering in the U.S., he was the Chief Technology Officer of Dow Chemical at that time, and it shows the size of, at that time, economically producible shale gas reserves and the total estimated shale gas reserves and you can see that Australia like America has a large number, large quantity of these. This is now out of date, there’ve been several new finds in the U.S. that have markedly expanded the amount of shale gas that we have.
Now that’s not the end of this story either because you don’t get all of this without some problems and some of them have been reported in the newspapers that are related to faulty well development and so forth but there are also some real issues with exploitation of shale gas reservoir that we’ve beginning to learn the hard way.
[Image changes to show Deep Well Injection of Flow-back Water Linked to Earthquakes slide]
One of them is about earthquakes. And so if I think about a state in the U.S. that has a lot of earthquakes I would automatically think of California. It is always rocking and rolling out there and if you stay there for a week or two you’re going to have a high probability of being involved in a minor tremor and we talk about eventually part of California breaking off and floating out into the Pacific Ocean and having new beachfront property in Nevada.
However there are almost no earthquakes in Oklahoma, until recently. And the number of earthquakes in Oklahoma now in the middle of the U.S. surpass those of California. What has brought this about has been the injection of massive amounts of waste water from hydraulic fracturing back into deep well injection sites. That is you take the waste water that flows back up from hydraulic fracturing from perhaps 100 wells and you put it into one deep well injection site where that well is even deeper than the hydraulic fracturing well. And you put, they’re putting enough water into the ground in certain places that it lubricates the geological formations and the ground starts to move. And so there will be I believe room for regulatory intervention here to help us manage the waste water from these processes in a way that does not cause seismic activity.
[Image changes to show Fracking Water Cycle slide]
One possibility would be to change the way that we use the water cycle in fracking. Today we take fresh water, transport it in trucks if you can believe that, and that’s a huge energy cost, to the fracturing site, add the chemicals, put it down a hole and we get about ten to thirty percent of that back. Currently we transport that waste water to a deep well injection site. However if we could purify that water perhaps we could reuse it in fracking and if we could purify it enough and under the right conditions perhaps we could release it and make it available again for other beneficial use.
And so in our laboratory we’ve worked on membranes for this purpose. The problem with treating this flow back in produced water is it’s really dirty. It can have a lot of salt in it, it has oil in it and other components that may come from under the ground. And so if you try to filter it with any sort of filter membrane or otherwise you get the filter very dirty.
[Image changes to show Engineering Membrane Surfaces to be Fouling Resistant When Purifying Flow-back Water slide]
As a result we’ve developed technology to apply polymers, again organic chemistry in the spirit of Jerry Price, to membranes to make nanometre thick layer coatings on the membranes that give them an anti-stick property. We call this one polydopamine and it will improve the performance of membranes when filtering dirty water.
Here we’re removing 55 litres per square metre per hour of clean water through a membrane and as it fouls in time or as it processes water in time the amount of pressure drop required to keep this flow rate the same goes up as the membrane gets plugged and gets dirty. With the coating on it that amount of pressure drop goes down by a factor of four. That’s a savings in energy, an increase in productivity. This was then reduced to practice in a start-up company and we’ve done tests in the Barnett shale region, this is results of a frack water test site, and it’s comparing the performance of one of our modified membranes with the surface coating on it to the performance without the surface coating and within a few hours we’re up to a factor of 2X better, more improvement. Now this flow back water doesn’t last forever, it only occurs at the very beginning of the lifetime of the well and so these systems are mounted on trailers so that you can move them from one site to another as needed.
[Image changes to show Mobile Frack-water Purification Unit slide]
The last short story I wanted to talk about related to water and energy is related to carbon capture.
[Image changes to Carbon Dioxide – World Emissions by Sector in 2007 slide]
There’s been wide reports of the increase in CO2 content in the atmosphere. It’s shown in this graph, it’s up over 400 parts per million now. And the emissions come, the largest sector of emissions are from electricity and heat. So again we come back to those thermoelectric power stations that generate electricity and they also generate the largest point source of carbon dioxide emissions. And so it would be natural if one were to talk about carbon capturing sequestration, that this would be a place that would be of interest. There are also activities that I’ve been exposed to here at CSIRO where people are looking at capturing CO2 from the air and I think that’s a very elegant idea that will be fun to watch it develop. The vast majority today of carbon capture research is related to power plants.
And I want to tell you two short stories about that or one short story and one sub chapter of it.
[Image changes to show W.A. Parish Power Station, Houston Texas Petra Nova Carbon Capture System slide]
And for this I’ll ask you to go with me to the WA Parish power station in Houston Texas. This is almost a 2500 megawatt coal fired power plant. This is the coal out here and the conveyors to run it back to the boilers to generate electricity. And it’s one of the largest power plants in the U.S. A typical power plant would be on the order of 500 to 750 megawatts so this is a behemoth. And in recent years the owners of this plant undertook a carbon capture system and have built that and put it in and they call it their Petra Nova carbon capture system. This billion dollar project was financed with 900 million dollars of private investment and 100 million dollars from the U.S. Department of Energy. And it takes the carbon dioxide generated by about one tenth of that power station and that turns out to be about 2500 kilograms of CO2 per minute so it’s a lot of CO2. And it takes that CO2 and pipes it 81 miles to a depleted oil field where the use of CO2 can help extract oil. The value of the CO2 to this advanced oil recovery process is so high that it pays for all of the carbon capture system. The electricity cost out of this plant does not go up as a result of CCS. And what that suggests are that other locations in places around the world where there would be beneficial use of CO2 and so that we didn’t view it simply as a waste that had to be captured at cost. Are there other ways that we can, places where we can find beneficial use for CO2 and make the economics of this process be market driven rather than policy driven or less policy driven.
[Image changes to show The Carbon Capture and Enhanced Oil Recovery Project slide]
To give you a little perspective of how this works, flue gas is generated in the combustion of coal with air and it’s largely carbon dioxide, nitrogen, mostly oxygen has gone in the combustion process, and some water vapour. And it’s taken around the plant to a system that removes the CO2 from that flue gas and then lets the nitrogen and the water vapour leave the process. The CO2 is then subsequently compressed and sent 81 miles to the oil field. I’d like to talk about that CO2 process for a second.
[Image changes to show CO2 Capture by Amine Absorption slide]
The conventional technology and the way Petra Nova works is that flue gas is fed to a so-called amine absorption system and again chemistry, organic chemistry comes into the picture. And in here there is an aqueous solution that has compounds in it called amines.
Amines like CO2, they will react with carbon dioxide and bind to CO2. And then the nitrogen and water vapour and other components are allowed to leave. The aqueous solution that has the CO2 in it is taken to another column where it’s heated up and then the amines let go of the CO2, it can be compressed and it goes on to the oil field.
[Image changes to show Captured CO2 Used for Enhanced Oil Recovery slide]
Once it gets there it’s pumped underground into the formation and this helps keep the pressure up in the well, it helps reduce the viscosity and encourages the oil to come out of its nooks and crannies and so you get the oil and CO2 mixture coming up, the CO2 is removed and again put back underground. And what this has the effect of doing in this particular field is that it increases by a factor of 30 the rate of oil production. And that increase in oil production is valuable enough to pay for all of the carbon capture system.
What I’d like to talk to you about in the last couple of slides is a potential alternative to the amine absorption system or a potential technology to complement it and in case you haven’t guessed it would be membrane based. And so we’ll start this story by talking about hydrogen separation membranes.
[Image changes to show H2 Separation Membranes slide]
I’ll take you back to 2005/2004 to another administration, the George W. Bush, and Bush was in favour of clean coal and so he was going to take coal and turn it into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. At that time the administration did not recognise the potential for CO2 to contribute to global warming and so the CO2 would be released, it would take the hydrogen to run fuel cells and to burn for power. And so we and others were looking at ways to separate CO2 from hydrogen. And we discovered organic polymers, again in the spirit of Jerry Price that had exceptional combinations of properties to remove CO2 from hydrogen. At the time it had the best combination of fast throughput which we measure as permeability and high fidelity of separation which we measure in terms of selectivity. It had the best combination of properties that were known.
The lead student on this project, Haiqing Lin, went to work at a company in California called Membrane Technology and Research, it’s a small company in Silicon Valley, and he continued work on this. And gradually he was able to scale these membranes up from laboratory or bench scale in this test device to full size modules that are on the order of a metre long and 30 centimetres in diameter and he validated their performance properties at the National Carbon Capture Centre in the U.S. and based upon that performance the membranes were commercialised for a number of applications. They went into, have gone into applications for a so-called synthesis gas purification which is a system shown here, but also for clean-up of natural gas. And if you can separate CO2 from hydrogen it is really easy to separate CO2 from nitrogen, nitrogen is a larger molecule, it is slower in the way it transports through all membranes and so the membranes that have very good CO2 hydrogen separation properties have very good CO2 nitrogen separation properties for flue gas rectification or purification.
And these membranes now have been run at scales of 20 tonnes per day at the National Carbon Capture System.
[Image changes to show Installation of Membrane System to Capture 20 tons of CO2 per Day at the National Carbon Capture Centre slide]
This is just a couple of photos showing the membranes coming to install that system at the National Carbon Capture System. This is one floor of the membrane units. One of the things that we like about this is that they’re modular, they can be assembled offsite and then put together like Legos onsite with very little labour. So you can centralise the manufacturing of the devices and then take them quickly to the site to install them. And this is showing the second floor of the membranes going in. The membranes are in these long tubes.
[Image changes to show 20 Ton per Day (1 Megawatt) Co2 Capture System slide]
This is showing the system in its final operational configuration. And I want to focus your attention on the size of this unit relative to the size of these two units that stand beside it. And I’m going to show you an engineering [indistinct – 55:11] diagram of this particular picture on the next slide and talk about it just a second.
[Image changes to show Comparison of CO2 Capture Systems at National Carbon Capture Centre slide]
So this is an engineering diagram of the 20 tonne per day, which is about one megawatt equivalent of generating capacity, membrane system. Over here that you saw in the far right is the amine absorption system. This is the Petra Nova system. This is standard technology. And despite a massive difference in complexity and size it can only treat ten tonnes of CO2 per day, half a megawatt equivalent. Advances in amine scrubbing or amine purification have led to smaller systems but still the one megawatt equivalent system is much larger and more complex than the membrane system.
If you were to build carbon capture and sequestration using conventional technology like this the carbon capture system would be larger than the power plant. And we believe that the modularity and simplicity of membranes may play a large role in helping them take the next generation of this technology forward or operate in conjunction with amines or other technology for carbon capture and sequestration. This also gives you a way to reduce the capital costs of the system, reduce the complexity, increase the operational reliability and all of those factors contribute to increased efficiency.
And so with that I will close the lecture by noting that water and energy and additionally food and CO2 emissions have historically been very closely coupled.
[Image changes to show Implications and Outlook slide]
However fundamental science and research and development is weakening these linkages and is also providing increasingly efficient technologies to capture CO2. And the last plug for my field is that membranes are playing an important role in this area and we are working very hard to see that they have a wider role in the future.
[Image changes to show Acknowledgements slide]
I’d like to finally acknowledge the folks who have been critically responsible for helping me be here with you today but also over the next few months at CSIRO. I’d like to thank the Australian American Fulbright Commission for their generous Distinguished Chair appointment and also a number of other organisations that are contributing in many ways to my stay here and to helping me have the most productive time I can here. I’d like to close finally by again offering a word of thanks and humility for the legacy that Sir Robert Price created here at CSIRO and for chemistry in Australia. Thank you for your time.
[Audience applause]
[Music plays and CSIRO logo appears with the text: Big ideas start here. www.csiro.au]