'This will really speed that up': Great Lakes researchers awarded $15 million to improve water treatment

 

MILWAUKEE (CBS 58) -- On the fourth floor of the engineering building at Marquette University, students tackle a wide variety of complex formulas in the water research lab. Now, there's now a new challenge: turning $15 million into $160 million.

Marquette is among more than 50 companies, universities and utilities that compose 'Great Lakes ReNEW,' a joint effort to improve water quality. The collaboration was announced as one of 10 "regional innovations engines" Monday by the National Science Foundation (NSF.)

Each of the 10 awardees will receive $15 million over the next two years. If researchers can demonstrate they're making real progress toward a breakthrough, the NSF will increase its support to as much as $160 million over the next ten years.

The program was authorized as part of the federal CHIPS and Science Act, which passed in 2022. 

Great Lakes ReNEW members will be tasked with finding ways to improve the process extracting minerals and energy from wastewater. 

Daniel Zitomer chairs the civil construction and environmental engineering department at Marquette. Some of the measurements and experiments happening in this water lab revolve around extracting certain chemical compounds. One of the most important, Zitomer said, is phosphorus.

"Because phosphorus is a limited resource," he said. "And we're projected to run out of phosphorus for agriculture, that we get from mining, from anywhere from 200 to 500 years from now."

"If we run out of phosphorus, we can't grow food as productively, and it's gonna be a big problem."

Within the Great Lakes region, ReNEW singles out Wisconsin, Illinois and Ohio as a "region of service," citing the states' universities, "engaged industry and utilities" and "emerging market clusters for water tech."

Zitomer said making new tech breakthroughs could create a legion of new jobs in the Great Lakes states because they'd be doing the work of building, installing and operating improved water treatment and extraction systems.

While the technology to extract phosphorus from water already exists, Zitomer said it's still relatively new, so there's lots of room for improvement.

"We're looking at developing new, more sustainable, even better methods to extract nitrogen, phosphorus and metals and other things," he said.

Zitomer said the difference between $15 million and $160 million could allow researchers to do more than simply find better ways of separating individual elements; it could lead to breakthroughs in taking what works in a petri dish and applying it at a scale companies and utilities are able to actually use.

"To get from bench scale to being a usable technology is called the 'valley of death' in technology development," Zitomer explained. 

Beyond deriving energy and nutrients from water, ReNEW's research also explores ways to isolate and either remove or destroy PFAS/PFOS, which are referred to as "forever chemicals" because they don't degrade naturally. 

The full list of NSF awardees, as part of an interactive map, is available here.