Water

BP suffered a setback on Saturday in an attempt to contain oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico with a metal box when crystallized gas filled the structure, a blow to hopes of a quick, temporary solution to a growing disaster.

BP engineers have moved the four-story containment dome, which was seen as the best short-term way to stem the flow from a ruptured oil well, off to the side on the sea floor. They plan to come up with a solution in the next two days, Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, told reporters.

The problem is with … Read more

NanoH2O on Thursday said it will supply components to the Navy for an on-ship desalination test that promises to be significantly more efficient with energy and space.

The El Segundo, Calif.-based company has developed a membrane that can improve the energy efficiency of reverse osmosis seawater desalination machines by 50 percent to 100 percent, according to NanoH2O CEO Jeff Green. It plans to start production of modules that use the membrane for testing with customers in the second half of this year, he said.

The Office of Naval Research awarded NanoH2O $400,000 to test the system on ships … Read more

If irrigation systems were half as smart as scientific calculators, they could cut water usage by 20 percent to 50 percent, says ET Water Systems.

The company earlier this year introduced its SmartBox, a replacement for commercial-scale irrigation controllers that determines the watering needs for landscaping based on a mash-up of site-specific data and local weather. A new version of the device, set for release this summer, will be able to get firmware upgrades over the cell network it uses.

Water conservation is an area that's often considered overlooked by investors and technology entrepreneurs. That's largely because there … Read more

Moments before heading out for dinner this past Saturday night, I learned I was living in what you could call a dry town. Along with 2 million other people in the Boston area, water service to my town was disrupted because of a "catastrophic" break in the distribution system.

Early Saturday morning, a collar attached to a giant water pipe in Weston, Mass., broke off, which cut off the source of clean water to 30 cities and towns. Two days into the crisis, people in the area are now being supplied by a backup reservoir system that requires … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Dean Kamen, who best known as the inventor of the Segway scooter, has come to realize that people pose much tougher challenges than machines.

Kamen, who heads design and engineering company Deka Research and Development, said that in his many years of working in technologies, he has found that the time it takes to develop new products is often eclipsed by the time it takes to bring something to market. Among his many credits, Kamen lists many medical devices, including machines for home dialysis, Pap tests, stents, the iBot wheelchair, and its offshoot, the Segway.

But even though … Read more

LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif.--The U.S. auto industry needs to "go green" in more than one way, says Bill Ford.

Ford is committed to making its vehicles more fuel efficient by investing in a number of technologies, including electrification, biofuels, fuel cells, and more efficient gas engines.

But auto manufacturing itself needs to be "reconsidered" so that it's not all about smokestacks and environmental hazards, Ford said Wednesday during a talk at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference here. Ford, the great-grandson of Henry Ford, is the executive chairman of the company's board of directors. … Read more

What happens when robots go green? Mexican artist Gilberto Esparza has created a provocative "Planta Nomada, or Nomadic Plant"--a machine-plant hybrid that carries plants and microorganisms from the famously polluted Lerma Santiago River in Mexico that convert waterborne elements into electrical energy.

The creation is designed to be a multi-legged, autonomous robot powered by a microbial fuel cell. When the microorganisms it's carrying need nourishment, the robot is supposedly able to move toward water, suck it through a tube, and convert it to electricity, with part of the water feeding the onboard plants. But looking at … Read more

IBM and Saudi Arabia's national research group are opening a solar-powered desalination plant in the city of Al-Khafji.

The pilot plant will supply water to about 100,000 people and pump out about 30,000 cubic meters of potable drinking water per day. It will run exclusively on solar-powered electricity, and showcase two technology breakthroughs that were the result of a multi-year collaborative research agreement signed in 2008 by IBM and the Saudi research group known as the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST).

On the solar end, the plant will use ultra-high concentrator photovoltaic (UHCPV) cells … Read more

The U.S. Department of Energy has given two grants totaling $1 million to Lockheed Martin to determine the feasibility of tapping into the ocean's hot and cold spots to save energy.

Instead of looking at how to harness wave and tidal power, as the Seadog and Oyster projects have been doing, the grants require Lockheed Martin's scientists and engineers to determine if they could take advantage of the ocean's varying temperatures.

The first part of the grant is to develop software and tools for determining which thermal areas of the ocean have the greatest potential for … Read more