Sustainability From Sea To Sky: Unexpected Inventions That Can Save The Planet
This story is part of a series from GE that explores Unexpected Inventions and the subtle geniuses who discover something new by seeing the world differently.
We need water for drinking and growing, power for industry and places to put our trash. But everywhere we’re challenged to meet those basic needs. Drought and intensive use of water are leading to chronic water scarcity from India to the American West. Energy demand continues to surge as a swelling global middle class plugs in and our waste is, at times, overwhelming.
While the challenges are many, the flourishing of technologies in a wide range of fields means that humanity has never been in a better position to invent creative, sometimes unexpected ways to answer them.
Squeezing water from the sun
Take the challenge of water. Globally, more than 783 million people lack access to clean and safe drinking water. “Water, water every where/Nor any drop to drink.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of the Ancient Mariner’s predicament but it holds true for many in the world today.
Yet while half the world’s population lives within 40 miles of a coastline, the salty oceans provide no hydration for people, livestock or crops. Only with energy intensive and costly desalination can seawater be made fit for human use.
A team lead by Italian researcher Antonio Naviglio may have an answer — using the sun itself in the most sun-parched places to convert saltwater into fresh. They recently won a contest sponsored by Aramco Entrepreneurship and GE with a new energy-efficient desalination design that uses sunlight and high-tech distilling. They believe they can drive the cost of desalting ocean water to 50 cents per 264 gallons, a price reduction that would make the process feasible for many more people.
“Because we have introduced so many factors in the project that may contribute to a wider availability of good quality, low cost, no pollution fresh water to the global population, there is a real possibility of winning a difficult challenge for mankind,” said Naviglio.
Transforming trash into clean energy
What if you could clean your clothes with rotting garbage? That seeming contradiction is becoming a reality. Projects around the world are starting to collect the flammable gas that naturally comes from decomposing garbage to produce electricity.
In the Philippines, landfill gas is firing power-generating turbines that can operate on biogas, like the GE Jenbacher. These energy-efficient engines are churning out megawatts of clean, free electricity for residents living nearby. The project, which now includes 6 methane-burning plants around the country, isn’t just about taking advantage of a free, if smelly, resource.
Biogas generators are now capturing and burning up to 70 percent of the methane emanating from the landfills they operate on. It’s a significant greenhouse gas reduction for a nation of islands that is highly susceptible to climate change’s rising sea levels.
A doctor’s tool becomes a pipeline savior
When a person takes a nasty fall, doctors turn to X-rays to take a look below the skin and muscle and see if any bones are broken. Now, engineers are starting to turn to the same technology to see if anything is broken in another area hidden from the naked eye.
Subsea oil and gas pipelines operate in crushing pressure, frigid temperatures and pitch-blackness miles below the ocean’s surface. In these conditions, invisible pipe weakness or areas of corrosion can quickly turn into catastrophic failures. But, because of the fragility of imaging equipment, there wasn’t a good way of diagnosing early symptoms before they turned serious. “People didn’t really think that radiography would work subsea,” says Dan Scoville of Oceaneering International, an oilfield services firm. “Anything with air in it would be squished.”
But GE engineers proved otherwise. They reverse-engineered a medical X-ray machine built by the company’s healthcare division to harden and waterproof it, and designed a submersible remotely operated vehicle around it. The idea is for the machine to latch onto a pipeline and crawl its length, taking X-rays of the walls as it goes. Though the machine has only been tested in a lab so far, the researchers working on it hope the unusual collision of healthcare technology and resource extraction will make more efficient, safer oil and gas operations.
“This is not what we normally do; this is not what anyone does at all,” said GE Healthcare mechanical engineer Karen Southwick. “X-rays are giving us an insight. You don’t know something’s wrong and then you see it. Whether it’s a small spill or a catastrophic one, this is hopefully preventing that.”
Feeling Inspired? Check out the GE Store, a marketplace of imagination that is reinventing industry by mixing and matching GE technology in unexpected ways.
