Part 2 - Water Investment

Some may say that I am one of those who follow the herd mentality.

The Cleantech Group has just finished their investment forum on Cleantech, and there was a discussion on Water investment, so I can safely say that I am not alone in this thinking. In fact, this is a well known fact for the past 20 years or so.

A lot of pundits are saying that Water will be the next oil. UNlike oil where there can be substitute to energy, human rely on water to survive. Man (or woman) can survive with minimal use of energy such as coal and oil (just live like caveman of the past), but we cannot survive without water. You could say it is the elixir of life. THe lack of water will not only cause huma suffering but it will also cause social unrest, and thus potentially leading to antagonistic attacks on neighbouring countries in order to have that access to fresh water.

Singapore has accutely felt this fact since day 1 of independence, when Malaysia used water as a leverage in its dealings with Singapore during its short time as part of Malaysia.

So naturally, Singapore can be considered the Oasis in water technology, as the government has sought to be independent from Malaysia in terms of the citizen's water needs. It has desalination plants, as well as the Newater, which is essentially is recycled water.

So where would I look for in terms of water investment? I'd say 2 or 3 major themes.

1) Low energy desalination or filtration.

Technologies that will take salt water (in abundance) and convert them into fresh potable water. Based on the traditional way of desalinating salt water is to boil the water, extract the salts and then allow the water vapor to condense back into water, sans the salt and other minerals.

However, this is energy inefficient. THe latest technologies include reverse osmosis (RO) membrane technology. Hyflux, a Singapore based company is a prime example of a listed company taking advantage of the need for access to clean water to grow its business.

THe key would be to push these technologies into more energy efficient processes, or to take an out of the box approach in desalination.

2) Recycling water.

When Singapore started bottling Newater for the public to have their first taste of recycled water, much was made of it; and some in not so nice terms, ie jokes like drinking pee etc etc.

However, the asronauts have been doing that since the spacelabs days as it is important under those circumstances to be able to bring a bare minimum amount of fresh water from earth and then depend on what can be recycled to sustain the astronauts in space.

Again, recycling water uses a variety of membrane technology as well as charcoal scrubbers.

There are some innovative technologies like Katadyn and Hydration Technologies, that provide solutions that require no power (except human power) to provide the clean water for the users. These are mainly driven by the need for military personel to have access to clean water irrespective of their location as long as they have access to a river or pond for fresh water.

The opportunities here are then to look for key enablers that can lower the cost of adoption. Or to be able expand the volumetric flow of the membranes to something a village could use, but continue to be human operated. Or perhaps to expand the life of the membranes.

3) Irrigation and piping.

I believe this is one of the most wasteful loss, which can be controlled. 

A lot of pipes in Malaysia are old and the infrastructure is crumbling, thus leading to flow loss that could otherwise be recovered and used by the users.

Perhaps the next innovation could be how to monitor leaky pipes deep underground. The current use of ground microphones are limited to the area of coverage. What is needed is a grid monitoring system akin to the electrical grid system to detect unusual activities within the water grid, ie higher than usual flow of water etc. This is an interesting article about detction of water leakage.

No I believe the next innovation to come out would be in the area of leak detection as there are current major efforts to improve the membrane technology for the filtration of water.

Next, agrotechnology.