The National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) has released a pair of requests to carve out the future of secure, affordable water supply and reuse in industrial environments. Responses to the Industrial Water Reuse Request for Proposals (RFP) are due by Nov. 24, whereas responses to the Regional Water Systems Request for Information (RFI) are due by Sept. 9.
NAWI is a public-private partnership (P3) operated by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As one of the most essential resources in the world, water plays a critical facet of ensuring America’s industrial centers run effectively and safely. However, although water is crucial for countless processes, the availability of reliable water sources is growing scarce as industrial growth increases demand amid shrinking access to viable resources.
The RFP will provide up to $12 million for projects pertaining to innovating industrial water reuse. NAWI anticipates awarding between 12 and 16 awards in total, prioritizing pilots that tackle at least one of three topics:
- Treating and reusing water within a specific unit process.
- Treating wastewater from one process for use in other processes. These pilots should emphasize using advanced treatment technologies to upgrade water quality rather than transfer lower quality to a process with fewer quality constraints.
- Using nuisance or wastewater from one facility for high-value applications in an adjoining facility.
Pilots should target non-traditional water sources at industrial sites, including cooling water, process and rinse water and wastewater treatment effluent. These represent the highest priority options for reuse, providing industrial sites with a cost-effective alternative to maintain their facilities without resorting to dwindling or unreliable alternatives. Each recipient must demonstrate their ability to accelerate the development of onsite water reuse systems designed to curtail water demand in industrial settings.
The RFP divides projects across two opportunity areas. TO1 (Devices) covers pilots of novel unit processes within a treatment train. TO2 (Treatment Trains) prioritizes pilot studies that optimize the design and operation of complete pilot treatment trains. To be considered for an award, projects must exhibit the following traits:
- Piloting of innovative unit process design and operation, potentially including the use of advanced automation, in complete treatment trains treating wastewater from an industrial facility.
- The value of the innovation is benchmarked to the industrial facility’s baseline treatment train and quantified using NAWI’s Pipe Parity Metrics, including superior operational reliability and/or lower levelized operating cost as compared to the base case.
- Innovation is appropriate to the scale and constraints of the selected industry or industries. The research team includes an industrial host site where the pilot will be operated.
- Likelihood for further deployments upon successful operational demonstration.
The RFI does not have an attached grant amount, opting instead to compile information from industry experts to inform NAWI’s understanding of regional water system operations and decision-making. The alliance will pull from the combined cross-sector experience of teams within and between industry, academia, national laboratories, non-profits, trade associations, public sector and other stakeholders.
NAWI is prioritizing information needed to better understand the state of regional water infrastructure and operations. This includes:
- Planning and decision-making processes used by water planners and utilities to ensure that projects are focused on real regional water needs.
- Potential regional water system studies that can assess the role of non-traditional and decentralized water sources in affordable, energy-efficient and reliable water systems.
- Modeling and analytic tools or methods that might be required to effectively conduct such studies.
- Types of support NAWI can provide to maximize the impact of these studies.
Core topic areas that responses should cover include water and energy challenges, technological opportunities, information gaps, existing and opportunities for planning tools and methods and conditions and metrics for success. State and local governments, industrial water users, consulting engineers, researchers and other stakeholders are encouraged to respond.
Photo by Luis Quintero from Pexels
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