Category: Water

Thoughts On U.S. Energy Policy – Updated

In October 2008, just prior to the U.S. presidential election, I drafted a piece entitled ‘Thoughts on an Energy Policy for the New Aministration’. It was published about a month later and republished as my first blog post in May 2013. I said at that time “What I find interesting about this piece is that I could have written it today and not changed too many words, an indication that our country is still struggling to define an energy policy.” This post is my attempt to look back at what I said in 2008 and 2013 and see if my perspectives and views have changed.

In that piece I started off by listing 14 items that I labeled as ‘facts’ on which most can agree. These ‘facts’ are reproduced below, followed by my comments on what may have changed since 2008.

1. People do not value energy, they value the services it makes possible – heating, cooling, transportation, etc. It is in society’s interest to provide these services with the least energy possible, to minimize adverse economic, environmental and national security impacts.

2. Energy has always been critical to human activities, but what differentiates modern societies is the energy required to provide increasingly high levels of services.

3. Population and per capita consumption increases will drive increasing global energy demand in the 21st century. While not preordained, this increase will be large even if others do not achieve U.S. per capita levels of consumption.

4. Electrification increased dramatically in the 20th century and will increase in the 21st century as well. The substitution of electricity for liquid transportation fuels will be a major driver of this continued electrification.

5. Transportation is the fastest growing global energy consumer, and today more than 90% of transportation is powered by petroleum-derived fuels.

6. Globally energy is not in short supply – e.g., the sun pours 6 million quads of radiation annually into our atmosphere (global energy use: 460 quads). There is considerable energy under our feet, in the form of hot water and rock heated by radioactive decay in the earth’s core. What is in short supply is inexpensive energy that people are willing to pay for.

7. Today’s world is powered largely by fossil fuels and this will continue well into the 21st century, given large reserves and devoted infrastructure.

8. Fossil fuel resources are finite and their use will eventually have to be restricted. Cost increases and volatility, already occurring, are likely to limit their use before resource restrictions become dominant.

9. Increasing geographic concentration of traditional fossil fuel supplies in other countries raises national security concerns.

10. The world’s energy infrastructure is highly vulnerable to natural disasters, terrorist attacks and other breakdopwns.

11. Energy imports, a major drain on U.S. financial resources, allow other countries to exert undue influence on U.S. foreign policy and freedom of action.

12. Fossil fuel combustion releases CO2 into the atmosphere (unless captured and sequestered) which mixes globally with a long atmospheric lifetime. Most climate scientists believe increasing CO2 concentrations alter earth’s energy balance with the sun, contributing to global warming.

13. Nuclear power, a non-CO2 emitting energy source, has significant future potential but its widespread deployment faces several critical issues: cost, plant safety, waste storage, and weapons non-proliferation.

14. Renewable energy (solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, ocean) has significant potential for replacing our current fossil fuel based energy system. The transition will take time but we must quickly get on this path.”

What has changed in my opinion are items 9, 11, and 12. The availability of large amounts of home-grown natural gas and oil at competitive prices via hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of shale deposits has turned the U.S. energy picture upside down. It may do that in other countries as well. Whereas the U.S. was importing over 50% of its oil just a few years ago, that fraction is now under 40% and the U.S. is within sight of becoming the largest oil producer in the world, ahead of Russia and Saudi Arabia. Whereas in recent years the U.S. was building port facilities for the import of LNG (liquified natural gas) these sites are being converted into LNG export facilities due to the glut of shale gas released via fracking and the large potential markets for U.S. gas in Europe and Asia (where prices are higher than in the U.S.).

The phenomena of global warming and climate change due to mankind’s combustion of carbon-rich fossil fuels are also becoming better understood, climate change deniers have become less and less visible, and the specific impacts of climate change on weather and water are being actively researched. An important change is the substitution of natural gas for coal in new and existing power plants, which has reduced the share of coal from 50% just a few years ago to less than 40% today. This has reduced U.S. demand for domestic coal, which is now increasingly being sold overseas.

The second part of the 2008 article was a set of 10 recommendations that are reproduced below:

1. Using the bully pulpit, educate the public about energy realities and implications for energy, economic and environmental security.

2. Work with Congress to establish energy efficiency as the cornerstone of national energy policy.

3. Work with Congress to provide an economic environment that supports investments in energy efficiency, including appropriate performance standards and incentives, and setting a long-term, steadily increasing, predictable price on carbon emissions (in coordination with other countries). This will unleash innovation and create new jobs.

4. Consider setting a floor under oil prices, to insure that energy investments are not undermined by falling prices, and using resulting revenues to address equity and other needs.

5. Work with Congress to find an acceptable answer to domestic radioactive waste storage, and with other nations to address nuclear power plant safety issues and establish an international regime for ensuring nonproliferation.

6. Establish a national policy for net metering, to remove barriers to widespread deployment of renewable energy systems.

7. Provide incentives to encourage manufacture and deployment of renewable energy systems that are sufficiently long for markets to develop adequately but are time limited with a non-disruptive phaseout.

8. Aggressively support establishment of a smart national electrical grid, to facilitate use of renewable electricity anywhere in the country and mitigate, with energy storage, the effects of intermittency.

9. Support an aggressive effort on carbon capture and sequestration, to ascertain its feasibility to allow continued use of our extensive coal resources.

10. Remove incentives for fossil fuels that are historical tax code legacies that slow the transition to a new, renewables-based, energy system.

I still support these recommendations, buttressed by the following observations:

– more public education on global warming and climate change has taken place in recent years, and a majority of Americans now accept that global warming is driven by human activities.

– there is a lot of lip service given to the need for increased energy efficiency, and President Obama’s agreement with the auto industry to increase Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards over the next decade is an important step forward. What is lacking, and slowing needed progress toward greater efficiency, is a clear policy statement from the U.S. Congress that identifies and supports energy efficiency as a national priority.

– with the shutting down of the Yucca Mountain long-term radioactive waste storage facility in Nevada, the Obama Administration is searching for alternatives but believes the country has time to come up with a better answer. This may be true, or may not, and only time will tell. It is not a uniquely American problem – other countries are struggling with this issue as well and most seem to favor deep geological storage. This is a problem we will definitely be handing down to our children and grandchildren,

– net metering as a national policy, as is true in several other developed countries, has gone nowhere in the six years since 2008. It is another example of a lack of Congressional leadership in establishing a forward-looking national energy policy.

– progress has been made on moving renewable energy into the energy mainstream, but we have a long way to go. NREL’s June 2012 report entitled ‘Renewable Electricity Futures Study’ made it clear that renewables could supply 80% of U.S. electricity by 2050 if we have the political will and make appropriate investments. The study puts to rest the argument used by the coal and other traditional energy industries that renewables can’t do the job. The public needs to understand that this canard is inaccurate and not in our country’s long term interests.

– the need for a national grid, and localized mini-grids (e.g., on military bases), has been recognized and appropriate investments are bring made to improve this situation. A national smart grid, together with energy storage, are needed to assure maximum utilization of variable clean energy sources such as wind and solar. Other renewable energy sources (geothermal, biomass, hydropower, ocean energy) can be operated as baseload or near base load capacity. And even intermittent wind and solar can supply large amounts of our electricity demand as long as we can transfer power via the national grid and use averaging of these resources over large geographical areas (if the wind isn’t blowing in X it probably is blowing in Y).

– the carbon capture and sequestration effort does not seem to be making much progress, at least as reported in the press. My blog post entitled ‘Carbon Capture and Sequestration: Is It a Viable Technology?’ discusses this issue in some detail.

– with respect to reducing long-standing and continuing subsidies for fossil fuel production, no progress has been made. Despite President Obama’s call for reducing or eliminating these subsidies the Congress has failed to act and is not likely to in the near-term future. This is a serious mistake as these industries are highly profitable and don’t need the subsidies which divert public funds from incentivizing clean energy technologies that are critical to the country’s and the world’s energy future.

– today’s electric utility sector is facing an existential threat that was not highly visible just a few years ago. This threat is to the utility sector’s 100 year old business model that is based on generation from large, centralized power plants distributing their energy via a radial transmission and distribution network. With the emergence of low-cost decentralized generating technologies such as photovoltaics (PV), these business models will have to change, which has happened in Germany and will eventually happen in the U.S. Keep tuned as this revolution unfolds.

As a final word I repeat what I have said in earlier posts: we need to put a long-term, steadily increasing price on carbon emissions that will unleash private sector innovation and generate revenues for investments in America’s future. This is a critical need if we are to successfully address climate change, create new U.S. jobs in the emerging clean energy industry, and set an example for the world.

Human Wastes: Another Energy Resource Waiting to Be Tapped

Recently I posted a blog entitled ‘Animal Wastes: An Energy Resource That Is Win-Win’. The Washington Post article reproduced below may be considered a follow-up to that blog but focused on using human wastes to generate energy. It usefully points out the several beneficial uses to which human wastes can be put and the economic benefits of doing so. It is worth reading!

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WASTE, NOT WASTED
By Ashley Halsey III
Washington Post (April 6, 2014)

This is a topic that one must approach delicately so as not to offend the reader’s sensibilities, but since it is a matter of importance for which you may receive a bill for some portion of $470 million, we start out with an analogy.

You need energy, so you eat. Through the miracle of digestion, your body sorts what you have eaten, say, a pastrami on rye with a glob of coleslaw and a dill pickle, and plucks out the nutrients — proteins, carbohydrates and sugars it needs to generate power. Then it jettisons the rest.

What your body jettisons disappears forever, carried along in a huge network of sewers to a plant in the southeastern corner of Washington.

Just like you, that plant needs energy. Through a miracle called thermal hydrolysis, it soon will be able to sort through what you have jettisoned and use it to generate electricity.

Yes, from poop will come power — 13 megawatts of it. Enough electricity to light about 10,500 homes.

Ben Franklin never dreamed of this one.

While Ben may have denounced the scheme as impossible sorcery, he also noted that a penny saved is a penny earned, so he might have been at least intrigued by this notion.

More than a few pennies may be saved for the citizens of the District and for some Virginians and Marylanders. Those people — 2.2 million of them — get a monthly bill for the privilege of sending their thoroughly digested nutritional intake to the plant in Southeast Washington operated by D.C. Water.

A chunk of that monthly bill is passed on to another local utility — Pepco. D.C. Water is the electricity company’s No. 1 customer. By converting poop to power, the water company will cut its Pepco bill by about one third and reduce by half the cost of trucking treated waste elsewhere.

But enough about poop, a subject that makes many a reader a bit squeamish. Because we’d rather not drive you away from the description of a wholly remarkable plan that is very likely to affect your pocketbook, henceforth we will refer to the matter that flows through the sewage plant as “the product.”

In fact, you soon will learn, it is going to be turned into a genuine product. One with a price tag. One that you may buy back.

Think about it.

The product has shed the label “wastewater” to morph into something called “enriched water,” a term laden with many more intriguing possibilities.

“It could be a game changer for energy,” said George Hawkins, an environmentalist who became general manager of D.C. Water. “If we could turn every enriched-water facility in the United States into a power plant, it would become one of the largest sectors of clean energy that, at the moment, is relatively untapped.”

What’s nearing completion outside Hawkins’s office window, however, is something never built on this scale anywhere in the world. A decade of study came first, and to see whether the system would work here, D.C. Water paid smaller European utilities that use the same process to modify their product so it more closely matched that which Washington produces.

“We’re confident that this model will work,” Hawkins said.

Something called the Cambi, for the Norwegian company that builds it, sits at the heart of it.

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When the product flows into the more than 150-acre plant known as Blue Plains, it goes through a couple of mesh filters to shed the debris swept up in the sewer system. Then it goes through a treatment process that turns it into what the Environmental Protection Agency categorizes as class B waste, enough to fill 60 big dump trucks with 1,600 tons of product every day.

And out the gate it goes, at a cost of $16 million a year.

That will change in May and June, as D.C. Water begins a phase-in intended to get the new system into full service by January.

Here’s how it works:

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A centrifuge drains off the liquid, and then the screened product will flow into four pulpers, tall stainless steel vats that look like Gulliver’s soda cans. Steam recycled from farther down the process is used to preheat it, and then it flows into one of the two dozen Cambis. They sit like a row of gleaming, blunt-nosed rockets, but they serve as pressure cookers.

The product is heated to more than 320 degrees under as much as 138 pounds of pressure for 22 minutes. Then it moves to a flash tank, where the temperature and pressure drop dramatically and a critical change takes place.

“Because of that pressure difference, the cells burst,” said Chris Peot, director of resource recovery at D.C. Water.

When the cells burst, the methanogens can have their way with them.

That happens in the digesters. They are four huge concrete vats, 80 feet tall and 100 feet in diameter. Right now, their interiors are like vast cathedrals, with domed ceilings and a shaft of light glancing through a hole in the top.

When the whole operation gets rolling, inside them is not a place you would want to be. The product will flow in from the four flash tanks, mixing with the methanogen microorganisms. Methanogens create marsh gases. In the digestive tracts of animals and humans, they also create gas, to the particular delight and fascination of middle-school boys.

That’s what this is all about — creating methane to generate electric power.

The temperature inside the digesters is kept at about that of the human body: 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Each digester chamber has five vertical blue tubes, as big around as manhole covers, that suck the product from the bottom and recycle it to near the top. After the product stews there for about two weeks, the methane produced by the process will vent out a 12-inch diameter pipe in the crown.

After a bit more purification, the methane will be used to fire three jet turbine engines that create electricity. A byproduct of that process: steam, which is funneled back to the pulper.

The power portion of the plant will be operated under contract by Pepco. The deal doesn’t allow D.C. Water to sell the power it generates, a moot point since the process of creating it eats up 3 megawatts and the remaining 10 megawatts will be sucked up by operations at Blue Plains.

Once the digester’s work is done, the remaining product will be drained out into dump trucks, but their total load will be cut in half to about 600 tons a day.

Remember that we told you earlier that what you jettison disappears forever? Let’s reconsider that, because there’s actually a chance you’ll see it again. In a strikingly different form. Right back where you saw it first: on your dinner table.

The product that has been trucked from Blue Plains is rated class B. But the product that comes out of the digester will be rated class A.

The difference?

Class B still has some bad stuff in it. Most of it is shipped to farmers, some in Maryland but most of them in Virginia. They get it free, but unless they let it sit for at least a month, and sometimes up to 18 months, the only things they can use it to fertilize are trees and sod used by landscapers.

Class A product can be used right away on anything, including fields that grow the fruits and vegetables you buy at the grocery store and serve for dinner.

That’s because, Peot says, in the Cambi, “All the pathogens are completely obliterated.”

“Our product has these super-elevated levels of these naturally occurring, extremely important plant hormones,” Peot said.

It is a more environmentally sound choice than the chemical fertilizer alternatives. In the raw, the class A product is so potent it needs to be cut with other materials before it is used to fertilize crops.

“We can blend this with sawdust and sand and make a topsoil substitute for use in green infrastructure projects,” Peot said. “We’re still going to go to farms while we try to build the market for this product.”

Hawkins, D.C. Water’s general manager, chimed in: “It’s clean, organic fertilizer. Conceivably, we could sell this product at Home Depot. ”

Unlike most innovations in waste treatment locally and nationwide, this project was not mandated by a federal court order. D.C. Water’s board decided it was a worthwhile investment of ratepayers’ money.

“This was one of the easier $500 million decisions that we’ll ever ask the board to make,” Hawkins said, ticking off the value: a savings in electrical costs of about $10 million a year; lowering the cost of hauling away treated waste; the potential to generate a profit by selling the product; a reduction by one third in the plant’s carbon footprint; and one more critical virtue.

For about three days a month ago, residents of part of Northwest Washington were told to boil their drinking water for fear it might be contaminated. That scare was caused by a power problem that shut down a pumping station.

“It wasn’t Pepco’s problem. It was internal to us,” Hawkins said. “We have great fears here about what would happen if there was a catastrophic power failure and Blue Plains stopped.”

Generating power internally will provide enough juice to keep the basics running, were that to happen, he said.

“This is the rare combination of both environmentally and economically positive,” Peot said.

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A Cambi installation in the UK

Animal Wastes: An Energy Resource That Is Win-Win

I first became aware of the animal waste issue in 1995 when a lagoon of liquid pig wastes in Iowa overflowed its banks and contaminated a nearby waterway. It made the national news, including the Washington Post, and resulted in one of my DOE colleagues asking me if we had a program to generate fuels/energy from such wastes. This was a logical question as I then headed DOE’s renewable electricity programs and biomass issues were under my purview. I answered honestly, no, but immediately headed to the offices of my biomass program and directed that such a program be started. I designated one of the senior biomass staff to head it up, it started the next day, and the new program head, a Ph.D, was unofficially given the title “Dr. Poop”.

Not having such a program earlier was clearly an oversight on my part, and I began to educate myself on the realities of animal wastes and their possibilities for productive application. One step was tracking down people in the DOE national laboratory system that knew about such things, and I found an expert at Oak Ridge. He directed me to useful information, of which there was quite a bit, and helped me organize an all-day meeting at the University of Tennessee with animal waste experts that explored these issues in detail. It was illuminating to say the least, especially for this boy from the Bronx who didn’t see his first bull until he was 16 and his first pig until he was in graduate school. I’ve never been the same since.

A few facts and numbers will put the issue in context. The U.S. produces lots of livestock (cows, chickens, turkeys, etc.) and therefore lots of animal wastes. Until recently the U.S. was the leading global meat producer but is now #2 behind China (42 million metric tons/MMT vs. 83 MMT), with Brazil coming in third at 25 MMT. EPA, which plays an important role in animal waste management in the U.S., estimates that this waste is produced on 1.3 million farms across the nation. The numbers of animals raised each year in the U.S. is staggering – more than 9 billion chickens, 250 million turkeys, 100 million beef and dairy cattle, 65 million pigs, and other animals (sheep, goats, ..) that are raised as part of our food economy. The net result of all this is about one billion annual tons of animal wastes – about ten times the amount of municipal sewage – that have to be dealt with in a way that does not jeopardize human, fish, or ecosystem health.

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Why are animal wastes a threat? Agriculture, including livestock, is a major source of nitrates that pollute water supplies. Animal wastes also contain disease-causing pathogens such as E coli, Salmonella, and Cryptosporidium that can be many times more concentrated than in human waste. “More than 40 diseases can be transferred to humans through manure.” Antibiotics added to animal feed to project against infection and speed up llivestock growth (about 30 million pounds annually, or 80% of antibiotic use in the U.S.) gets into human foods and contributes to the evolution of anti-biotic resistant bacteria. In addition, wastes at pig farms emit hydrogen sulfide, a corrosive gas that if inhaled at high concentrations can lead to brain damage and death.

Can’t we just contain this stuff so it doesn’t get into our water supplies? The facts are that some waste lagoons are as big as several football fields and are prone to leaks and spills.

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To quote the Natural Resources Defense Council:
“In 1995 an eight-acre hog-waste lagoon in North Carolina iburst, spilling 25 million gallons of manure into the New River. The spill killed about 10 million fish and closed 364,000 acres of coastal wetlands to shellfishing.

In 2011, an Illinois hog farm spilled 200,000 gallons of manure into a creek, killing over 110,000 fish.

In 2012, a California dairy left over 50 manure covered cow carcasses rotting around its property and polluting nearby waters.

When Hurricane Floyd hit North Carolina in 1999, at least five manure lagoons burst and approximately 47 lagoons were completely flooded.

Runoff of chicken and hog waste from factory farms in Maryland and North Carolina is believed to have contributed to outbreaks of Pfiesteria piscicida, killing millions of fish and causing skin irritation, short-term memory loss and other cognitive problems in local people.

Nutrients in animal waste cause algal blooms, which use up oxygen in the water, contributing to a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico where there’s not enough oxygen to support aquatic life. The dead zone fluctuates in size each year, extending a record 8,500 square miles during the summer of 2002 and stretching over 7,700 square miles during the summer of 2010.

Ammonia, a toxic form of nitrogen released in gas form during waste disposal, can be carried more than 300 miles through the air before being dumped back onto the ground or into the water, where it causes algal blooms and fish kills.”

Complicating all this is the reality of ‘intensification’, the fact that “..smaller family farms have been replaced by corporate operations hounding thousands of animals in assembly-line conditions.” For example, the number of pig farms in the U.S. in 2011 was one tenth the number in 1980 but the number of pigs sold was about the same. Ten companies today produce more than 90% of the nation’s poultry and 70% of U.S. beef cattle come from farms with at least 5,000 head of cattle.

This concentration of livestock growing in factory farms, called concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) is driven by economic imperatives. It leads to a buildup of animal wastes in small land areas, which if properly stored and used, can be a valuable resource. If not properly managed the waste produced by CAFOs can pollute the environment, especially water sources. Waste is often pumped into open-air lagoons from which liquid manure is sprayed onto fields as fertilizer. The amount of waste applied often exceeds what the crops can absorb, leaving the rest to escape into the air or as runoff into surface waters.

There are many productive uses of manure, including fuel and energy production. These include recovery of undigested anti-biotics, recovery of solid materials for use in building materials, and production of dry plant and crop fertilizer that is the byproduct of biodigestion. It is this latter activity that offers a ubiquitous and large energy resource.

As reported by the Agriculture Extension Division of Colorado State University: “The demand for clean energy, coupled with concern for management of livestock wastes, has revived an interest in generating methane from livestock manures. The most widely accepted technology currently available for converting organic wastes present in livestock manure is anaerobic digestion (AD). AD is a biological process by which microorganisms convert organic material into biogas, containing methane and carbon dioxide. Biogas produced by this process can be utilized to generate electricity or can be cleaned up and supplied to natural gas lines. Collection and utilization of methane generated from livestock manure offers the potential to reduce global emissions of methane (a greenhouse gas), reduce CO2 released from fossil fuels, diminish odor from agricultural facilities, and improve water quality. In many cases, anaerobic digestion either decreases on-farm energy costs or increases revenues from energy resale.” An interesting number is that, on average, “..a single dairy cow produces approximately 120 pounds of wet manure per day” which has an energy value of about 14,000 BTU. Thus, “It would take manure from approximately 50 cows to produce enough biogas for heating a typical home.”

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Proper management and use of animal wastes is clearly a ‘win-win’ if we can prevent water and air pollution and tap into a potentially large energy resource. For example, China is actively pursuing biodigestion of human and animal wastes, particularly in rural areas that lack grid connections, for producing biogas for lighting and cooking. The International Energy Agency’s CADDETT Reneable Energy Program (http://www.caddett-re.org) “..gathers information on full-scale commercial projects which are operating in the member countries..”. Its Renewable Energy Register, a database of demonstrated renewable energy projects, contains many biodigestion entities – e.g., ‘Poultry Litter as a Fuel for Electricity Production’, ‘Electricity and Heat from the Aanaerobic Digestion of Farm Wastes’, and ‘Centralized Manure Digestion Plant’. Information is readily available; what is now needed is widespread implementation.

Gender Issues and Sustainable Development: We Need to Pay More Attention

The term ‘sustainable development’ was first used by the Brundtland Commission in its 1987 report Our Common Future. It defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Two factors critical to sustainable development are access, at reasonable coats, to adequate supplies of energy and clean water. It is in this context that we consider issues of gender equity, which is a core development objective in its own right. It is also clear that gender equity is a key to successful development.

For purposes of development gender is a social and not a biological construct. It refers to a set of relations, including power relations, which define social function on the basis of sex. Thus, gender relations can be changed, and while gender relations are not inherently oppressive, all too often they are oppressive of women. Where gender equity (equality) is missing, meaning that women and men do not have equal conditions for realizing their full human rights and potential to contribute to national, political, economic, social and cultural development, and to benefit from the results, there are serious negative consequences for development.

Women head one-third of the world’s families (in parts of Latin America families headed by women are the majority) and frequently are the financial mainstays of and principal energy and water providers for their families. They are responsible for half of the world’s food production, and produce between 60 and 80 percent of the food in most developing countries. To produce adequate sanitation, food, and energy for cooking, women and girls must first ‘produce’/gather water, firewood, charcoal and dung. It is known that in developing countries women and girls spend many hours each day doing so. This reduces significantly the time they might otherwise use for education, community involvement and cottage industries that generate revenue. If safe and reliable water sources do not exist nearby they are forced to pay exorbitant prices to street vendors or rely on unsafe local water resources. This has major implications for hygiene and the spread of diseases among poor women and their families. They are also harmed by inhaling the smoke and particulates associated with burning biomass and cooking in confined spaces. Finally, poor women’s access to energy and water is less than that of poor men because decisions are most likely made by men and the needs of women are often ignored or undervalued. This has led to a situation where women are among the poorest of the poor in most parts of the world, leading to a ‘feminization of poverty’. ​

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While it is true that the lives of many women and girls has changed dramatically in some areas over the past several decades, it is also true that progress toward gender equity has been limited in others, including developed countries. The different positions of men and women in societies are influenced by historical, religious, economic, and cultural factors, all of which are difficult and slow to change.

Two international development organizations committed to improving gender equity are the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank. Many UN programs either focus on gender equity (e.g., UN Women: UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women) or recognize the central role of women in many development activities (e.g., the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation arising from the 2002 Rio World Summit on Sustainable Development, and the activities of the Food and Agriculture Organization/FAO of the UN).
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The World Bank has a broad range of programs as well, including the 2007 launch of its Gender Action Plan which provides support to women and girls in traditional economic sectors, GenderStats, a compilation of data at the country level on key gender topics, and an Advisory Council on Gender and Development. Another organization worth mentioning here is Energia, “an international network on gender and sustainable energy which links individuals and groups concerned with energy, sustainable development, and gender.” It was founded in 1985 and is now active in many countries on several continents.

Aside from the immorality of denying women equality with men, it is also bad economics. To quote the World Bank’s Gender Overview: “Under-investing in women puts a break on poverty reduction and limits economic and social development. Gender equality is a long-term driver of competitiveness and equity that is even more important in an increasingly globalized world. No country can afford to fall behind because it is failing to enable women and men to participate equally in the economy and society.”

A few numbers will help to illuminate the problem: “Of the estimated two million annual deaths attributed to indoor air pollution generated by combustion of fuels such as coal, wood, charcoal and dung, 85% are women and children who die from cancer, acute respiratory infections and lung disease.” (World Health Organization and UNDP, 2009). “..illnesses from indoor pollution results in more deaths of women and children annually than HIV/AIDS, malaria! tuberculosis and malnutrition combined.” (International Institute for Sustainable Development, 2013).

The good news is that two-thirds of all countries have now reached gender parity in primary education, and in over one-third girls significantly outnumber boys in secondary education (see World Development Report: Gender Equality and Development, World Bank, 2012). Unfortunately, these gains have not been universal and too many women are still dying in childbirth, lack the ability to participate in decisions that affect them, their families, and their communities, and are limited in their economic opportunities. There is still much work to be done.

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Water Disinfection: It Is Saving Lives

Every hour hundreds of people are dying unnecessarily of waterborne diseases, mostly children under the age of five. This is unforgivable.

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To repeat some words from an attachment to an earlier blog (‘Water and Energy: A Critical Nexus’): “The implications of too little fresh water are significant. The World Health Organization estimates that, globally, more than 1 billion people lack access to clean water supplies and more than 2 billion lack access to basic sanitation. The amount of water deemed necessary to satisfy basic human needs is 1,000*cubic meters per capita annually. In 1995, 166 million people in 18 countries lived below that level. By 2050, experts project that the availability of potable water will fall below that level for 1.7 billion people in 39 countries. Water shortages plague almost every country in North Africa and the Middle East.
(*Note: this number is very uncertain and depends strongly on how ‘minimum requirement’ is defined. To illustrate the problem I quote from an article entitled ‘Minimum water requirement for social and economic development’ by Jonathan Chenowth of the University of Surrey: “There is no common understanding of the minimum per capita fresh water requirement for human health and economic social development. Existing estimates vary between 20 liters and 4,654 liters per capita per day, however, these estimates are methodologically problematic as they consider only human consumptive and hygiene needs, or they consider economic needs but not the needs of trade.” To clarify the situation somewhat most people who study the issue consider 10-20 liters per capita per day to be the right range for minimum drinking requirements.)

These shortages have significant health effects. Water-borne diseases account for roughly 80 percent of infections in the developing world. Nearly 4 billion cases of diarrhea occur each year, with diarrheal diseases killing millions of childrenn. Another 60 million children are stunted in their development as a result of recurrent diarrheal episodes. In addition, 200 million people in 74 countries are infected with the parasitic disease schistosomiasis, intestinal worms infect about 10 percent of the population in the developing world, and an estimated 6 million people are blind from trachoma, with an at-risk population of 500 million.”

These are not small numbers. One billion people is one seventh of the world’s population. Two billion people is almost three out of every ten of our global co-habitants. The enormity of the problem was recognized by the United Nations: at its 2000 Summit the UN adopted two Millennium Development Goals related to water and sanitation: to reduce by half, by 2015, the proportion of people without access to (a) safe drinking water, and (b) basic sanitation. Assuming a world population in 2015 of 7.2 billion, to meet these goals 1.6 billion more people will need to be supplied access to safe drinking water and an additional 2.2 billion access to basic sanitation. Even if the 2015 goals are reached, which is still questionable, 600 million people in 2015 will still lack access to clean water and 1.5 billion to adequate sanitation.

The problem in many cases is not the availability of water – the earth is a water-rich planet. Unfortunately most of that water, 97%, is saline and found in the oceans, and too much of the fresh water available for human consumption is contaminated by microbial pathogens (bacteria, viruses,..) and agricultural and industrial runoff. The question then becomes, other than desalinating brackish and seawater which requires energy, how do we convert contaminated water into potable water suitable for drinking, cooking, and hygiene. Many people and organizations have worked on this effort for many years (e.g., see http://www.unicef.org/wash), and progress has been made, but the world’s population is increasing, especially in developing countries with significant levels of poverty, and the numbers of people suffering from inadequate supplies of clean water are still problematic. In the following paragraphs I will describe briefly some of the techniques for water disinfection, with a special focus on disinfection using ultraviolet radiation.

Treating water at the household level has been shown to be one of the most effective means of preventing waterborne diseases. Even collecting clean water at its source is problematic because of the possibility of fecal contamination during collection, storage, and use in the home. Chlorination is the most widely practiced means of treating water at home and community levels. Boiling water to kill microorganisms is also widely used, but requires fuel to heat the water. Passing water through sand filters to remove suspended solids and microbes, and through ceramic filters coated with silver, are other common means of disinfection. Other techniques use exposure to sunlight (a slow process) and flocculation in which common substances like alum are added to water to facilitate sedimentation of harmful substances.

In 1993 Dr. Ashok Gadgil, Director of the Environmntal Energy Technologies Divisin of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley, invented UVWaterworks as a means of disinfecting contaminated water using ultraviolet radiation. He was motivated by an outbreak of cholera in India, his native country, and focused on developing a technology that would be inexpensive and easily maintained without a skilled operator. It works by passing unpressurized water under an ultraviolet lamp which does not come in contact with the water and the radiation from which disrupts the DNA and RNA of bacteria and viruses, preventing their reproduction. The lamp can be powered by a single solar PV panel or another source of electricity. It has long been known that UV radiation in the wavelength range 240-280 nm has this hermicidal effect and recent research seems to pinpoint 260 nm as the most biologically active wavelength. UV lamps used in this application put most of their energy into this wavelength region.

uvwaterwork

A standard UVWaterworks unit can disinfect about one ton of water per hour at a cost of about five U.S. cents. An exclusive license for manufacture and sales has been granted by LBNL to International Health, Inc. (http://www.waterhealth.com), and units are now being used all over the world.

UVWaterworks - commercial unit

Dr. Gadgil’s work has already had a positive impact on millions of people in developing countries, will impact millions more in the years to come, and has led to several well-deserved awards for Dr. Gadgil. He has also done pioneering work in removal of arsenic from groundwater and in development of cookstoves for use in developing countries.

One further comment on use of UV radiation for disinfection: solid-state Light Emitting Diode (LED) technology has now been extended to the UV wavelength region and would be more energy efficient and potentially more reliable than broader spectrum UV lamps that have been used so far. If UV LEDs can be developed for emission at 260 nm and can be produced inexpensively, they should be attractive replacements for UV lamps in future UVWaterworks or similar disinfection units.