These posts will appear on the News page.
August 7, 2020
Herein, we present a scalable approach for the synthesis of a hydrogen-bonded organic–inorganic framework via coordination-driven supramolecular chemistry, for efficient remediation of trace heavy metal ions from water. <read more>
January 6, 2020
Berkeley Lab scientists demonstrate a “photo-thermal” umbrella that can double evaporation rates, thus reducing environmental impact of settling ponds. <read more>
October 10, 2019
A research consortium led by Berkeley Lab, along with three other national labs, will head a DOE desalination hub to provide secure and affordable water. <read more>
August 26, 2019
Scientists use a powerful microbial detection device to show that suggestions of sewage in Kauai’s watershed were mostly false positives. <read more>
August 26, 2019
As populations boom and chronic droughts persist, coastal cities like Carlsbad in Southern California have increasingly turned to ocean desalination to supplement a dwindling fresh water supply.
Now scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) investigating how to make desalination less expensive have hit on promising design rules for making so-called “thermally responsive” ionic liquids to separate water from salt. <read more>
August 26, 2019
Scientists at Berkeley Lab have been exploring different approaches for efficiently separating out salt and other contaminants to generate water that’s fit for drinking or other uses, such as agricultural irrigation. For example, they’re looking at charge-based brackish water desalination, nanoconfinement of water, better membranes, and other advanced water treatment techniques. <read more>
August 26, 2019
Drilling a single oil or natural gas well with hydraulic fracturing requires between 1.5 to 16 million gallons of water. When the well starts flowing, the fluid that is brought back to the surface alongside the oil and gas is a combination of the injection fluid and brine from aquifers – a difficult-to-treat mixture known as produced water. Brimming with hydrocarbons, harsh salts, and industrial chemicals, the vast majority of produced water is injected into disposal wells after it is collected. Currently, less than 1% of the billions of gallons generated each year is reused.
How can this “wastewater” be turned into usable water? One answer: Let microbes do the work. <read more>
August 26, 2019
The overpumping of groundwater in California has led to near environmental catastrophe in some areas – land is sinking, seawater is intruding, and groundwater storage capacity has shrunk. But researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) believe machine learning could be part of the solution to restoring groundwater to sustainable levels and quality. <Read more>
April 22, 2019
Water-purifying technology developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) was named among only five in the world that meet current international standards in a recent study from United Nations University examining systems for small communities.