A story I wrote last week for MIT Technology Review takes a look at a new energy-efficient approach to desalination developed by a Vancouver-based startup called Saltworks Technologies. Conventional desalination relies on reverse-osmosis and costly membrane technologies. Pumping the water at high pressure through these desalting membranes takes a lot of energy, which drives up the cost of this form of desalination. Another approach is to evaporate and then condense the water, another energy-intensive approach.

Saltworks has a completely different, and quite novel approach. It starts by using the sun or industrial waste heat to evaporate one pool of seawater until it becomes concentrated with 18 per cent salt (compared to 3.5 per cent for regular seawater). This concentrated stream is pumped into a desalting unit along with three other regular seawater streams. The concentrated stream is connected by specially designed “bridges” to two regular streams, and because it has a higher concentration it is compelled to diffuse its salt content — sodium and chloride — into the weaker streams. But the bridge connecting to the one weaker stream only allows sodium ions, which are positive, to flow through; the bridge connected to the second weaker stream only allows chloride ions, which are negative, to flow through. The end result at this stage is that one of the two weaker streams now has surplus positive ions, mostly sodium, and the other has surplus negative ions, mostly chloride. The two streams, now out of balance and eager to pick up ions of opposite charge, are separately “bridged” to the third regular seawater stream. The one stream with surplus positive ions strips the third stream of all its negative ions, and the second stream with surplus negative ions strips the third stream of all its positive ions. This leaves the third stream completely stripped of all ions — i.e. it’s de-ionized, or pure drinking water.

It’s a brilliant process because most of the energy that’s required comes at the front end through evaporation, which is accomplished in a low-tech way with abundant solar energy, or waste heat from a neighbouring industrial facility. The rest is accomplished through electrochemical reactions requiring no outside energy source. If Saltworks can scale this approach up, it could bring cheap desalination to the many parts of the world that need it.

My friend Tom Rand has a short but no less interesting video filmed during a presentation he gave recently in Toronto. Rand helped build a “green hotel” that emits a quarter of the emissions of a comparable hotel. The workhouse behind this approach is geothermal, and Rand said it can be done in a way where energy savings exceed the monthly payments on a long-term low-interest loan. Now, the key is to get that cheap loan. Rand said it’s up to the federal and provincial governments to backstop such loans and mandate the banks to lend the money. It would help, he added, if use of this technology was mandated where it was appropriate. This, as Rand says, is low-hanging fruit that we’re simply not picking. Instead, with each new building or home we build we’re letting this ripe-for-picking fruit fall on the ground. Rand, it should be pointed out, is behind another move to have the government sell green bonds that would help fund these kinds of projects, or backstop the low-interest loans required to do them. It’s all perfectly logical, but I guess politics is never as logical as it could be.

Click here to watch the short video.

Cremation is popular these days for those who have kicked the bucket. In Canada, only 3 per cent of the population got cremated 50 years ago, while today that number has ballooned to more than 55 per cent. But here’s a shocker for the conservation-minded: The amount of natural gas and electricity used to cremate one body is the equivalent of driving a car from coast to coast. When your body goes up in flames, it also emits a lot of nasty stuff: greenhouse gases, smog-causing gases, particulates, and mercury vapour if you’ve got a few of those old tooth fillings.

Given this post-humus environmental footprint — and given our concern about climate change — innovation in this area is on the rise. In Denmark and Sweden, some municipalities are taking the waste heat from their local crematoriums and using it as part of their district heating systems. In North America, there’s a new technology called Resomation — generically, biocremation — that avoids incineration by chemically breaking down the body. A Toronto-based company called Transition Science Inc. has licensed the technology and recently signed up its first customer, cemetery and crematorium operator Park Lawn Trust, which plans to have its first Resomation system up and running in Toronto next spring. I’ve got an article on this company and the technology in today’s Toronto Star. You can read the article for a detailed description of how it works. It’s kind of yucky — basically the body is loaded into a metal chamber that’s filled with an alkali-based solution that, under heat and pressure, turns the non-skeleton portion of the body into a soapy soup that’s simply flushed down the drain (apparently it’s benign and gets treated in our wastewater treatment system just like what we flush down the toilet). The process uses a fraction of the energy required for cremation.

Sure, sounds gross, but since we’re always talking about the need for cradle-to-grave energy analyses, it makes sense that we leave the world in the most energy-efficient way possible. The interesting thing about biocremation is that plastic and metal devices left in the body — knee and hip replacements, pacemakers, stents, etc. — are retrieved in perfect condition and can be recycled. Alternatively, if you’ve got land to spare, you could always have a good old-fashioned burial.

The Real Property Association of Canada, whose members are property investors representing more than $150 billion in real-estate assets, has formally adopted an energy-consumption target for office buildings equal to 20 kilowatt-hours of energy use per square foot of rentable area per year, and they’ve pledged to reach that target by 2015. “The target represents a reduction of up to one half of today’s energy use in Canadian office buildings,” according to a just-released report. “Achieving the target will lead to an estimated energy cost savings in the order of $18.5 billion a year, and greenhouse gas emissions savings of 7.5 megatonnes per year contributing to 5 per cent of Canada’s national 2020 goal.”

The target was derived from large pilot projects conducted last year by the Canada Green Building Council, which created a large, detailed database of office building energy use performance. ” Audits were conducted of top-performing buildings to document their building system characteristics, leading to identification of best practice design standards,” according to the report. The audits found that there was a large range of energy use per square foot, with some buildings using more than twice as much energy. Surprisingly, results showed no co-relation to building age. In fact, some of the oldest buildings — as much as 40 years old — were among the most energy efficient. Getting to the efficiency target by 2015 will be a challenge, the association concedes. “The good news is that operating cost savings should generally be greater and Capex less than had previously been expected, with higher rates of return on investments,” it states. “The more challenging conclusion is that high levels of performance cannot be achieved and sustained without significant organizational change to align policy, management, leasing, procurement, and HR programs with the demands of consistent energy efficient practice.”

Kudos to RealPAC for doing more than our government is prepared to do by tightening building-code rules.

Not that I find it at all that surprising, but the International Energy Agency has pinpointed Canada as a laggard on energy efficiency in a report released a few days ago. The report targets Canada’s pulp and paper, iron and steel and cement industries, specifically. IEA analyst Ceclilia Tam told Canwest News that Canada’s performance isn’t just poor in comparison to the 29 other members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, but it ranks low on a worldwide basis. “The reason for this is that in many cases Canada is using older, less efficient technology, and significant improvement can be achieved by switching to current, best-available technology,” said Tam.

Compared to building new power plants the investment in industrial efficiency should be seen as low-hanging fruit to Canadian politicians, but sadly it’s not. This study gives us yet another reason to more aggressively embrace approaches such as co-generation as a way to lower Canada’s industrial emissions and become more globally competitive at the same time.

Is anybody listening? Sadly, when multinational industrial giants look to cut costs by shutting down facilities, where do they go first? They zero in on those facilities that are least competitive, and that means least efficient.