From Fast Company, July 21:
Eden Tech’s centrifuge-based system aims to cut energy use, recover more water, and create value from leftover brine.
Growing up in Las Vegas, Hunter Manz took annual trips to nearby Lake Mead with his father. Each year, he watched the reservoir, Southern Nevada’s primary water source, recede further, sparking an early interest in water conservation.
As a teenager, Manz began experimenting in his garage with potential solutions to water scarcity. He later enrolled at Utah Tech University, studying mechanical engineering and finance, and learned about desalination, which removes salt and other contaminants from water so it can be used for drinking or industrial purposes.
While in school, Manz began building desalination prototypes. There, he developed what he calls a reverse osmosis centrifuge, or ROC, a first-of-its-kind system that he says is two to three times more energy efficient than conventional desalination technology.
In 2020, Manz dropped out of college to found Eden Tech, a startup seeking to make desalination cheaper and less environmentally damaging. The company has since raised $3.3 million from Utah Tech, community investors, and venture capital firms. Now based in Lockhart, Texas, Eden has just unveiled Genesis, its first full-scale reverse osmosis centrifuge. Over the next year, the company plans to refine its model, scale to consumers, and begin commercial use. Once up and running, each Genesis machine is expected to process approximately 144,000 gallons of water per day.
Desalination has long drawn criticism for its high energy use and the concentrated brine it leaves behind. Eden is betting that a more efficient system, combined with new uses for that waste, can address both problems.
“It’s a technology that is not only producing the water that people want,” says Manz. “It’s helping the environment as well. So it’s kind of a two-for-one benefit.”
Old technology, new approach
Early desalination systems relied largely on heat to evaporate water and leave salt behind. Beginning in the 1950s, researchers increasingly turned to reverse osmosis, which uses pressure to force saltwater or wastewater through a semipermeable membrane. The process produces two streams: clean water and a concentrated brine.Reverse osmosis has helped drive a desalination boom in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In Israel, desalination now supplies much of the country’s drinking water.
The technology remains energy intensive, however. Conventional systems use roughly 15,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity for every million gallons of freshwater produced, according to Bloomberg, and typically recover only 30% to 40% of the water they process....
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