In the desert southwest, millions of gallons of brackish, unusable water lies
deep down under the parched earth. The by-product of decades of oil and natural
gas extraction in the area. The water is loaded with high chlorides and sodium, it’s
extremely dirty and volatile. On average, oil wells will produce nine times as much
dirty water as the oil they extract and in the U.S. alone there is over 18 billion
barrels of this polluted water. Too costly to treat the water, it was just pumped
back underground.
But, in this arrid land of the Navajo, times are changing. A company called Altela,
devised a innovative system to purify industrial polluted water utilizing a natural
process of desalination that’s been around for thousands of years, dating back to the
Egyptians. The process is called thermal distillation. By evaporating the water and
then recondensing it. (more…)