Bob Kennedy, CTO of New Terra, explains when decentralizing water treatment makes sense: remote villages, mines, ecologically sensitive areas, and regions without infrastructure. Modern decentralization treats water near where it's used and returns it locally. The main barriers aren't technology but cost, capital, and political will.
Hi, I'm Angela Godwin with Waterworld magazine, coming to you from the BlueTech forum here in Vancouver, Canada. Joining me today is my guest, Bob Kennedy. He is CTO for New Terra. Bob, thank you very much for joining us today. I appreciate it. You were leading a roundtable at the event this year, and one of the topics you were discussing is the notion of decentralization. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what some of the key challenges are there?
Sure. It's interesting. So I'm going to turn that question around a little bit, and rather than talk about why we would go decentralized, to talk about why people would actually go centralized, and maybe we'll maybe approach it like that. Historically, if you look back, everything was decentralized, right? So people had. Their. People had drilled wells, had waste going into the hole in the ground, basically. Right. And that lasted for a couple of million years, maybe, I don't know, long, long time. And it really wasn't until. Till people started to settle in cities that the problem of sewage became very apparent because of disease and whatever. So people built aqueducts or they built pipelines to get rid of that sewage out of cities, and typically they dumped it into a river or a lake or whatever was nearby. Okay, so that was the start of why you ended up with pipelines. So as soon as the river, whatever, started to get overloaded, people started to invent, and people invented the ways to deal with that waste near the source of the outfall. And so we started to get big plants in cities, typically outside the city, and those became centralized facilities. And that whole concept is probably less than 300 years old. So before that, everything was decentralized. So really what we're talking about now is does that really make sense to take that water from over here, use it and dump it and dump it over here, never to be returned to its local kind of area. So when we talk about decentralized systems, we're really talking about treating that water where it's being used and returning it as a benefit potentially to the area where it came from. Okay, so we're really going back to a concept that's actually thousands of years old rather than brand new.
So when does it make sense to sort of go off grid and what kinds of technologies are going to support that?
Yeah, so going off grid could be a matter of absolute necessity. So you've got a remote, a remote village, or you got a remote city, or you've got a remote industry or a mine. There is no infrastructure. Right. But typically they tend to be in areas that are sensitive ecologically. So you want to be able to treat that water to a pretty high degree before you discharge it. So you need relatively advanced technology that's easy to use, doesn't take up a lot of space for those typ. So that tends to be a little bit more advanced. But there are other areas where you don't really need advanced technology to do decentralized treatment of waste. So if you look at places like Africa or India, or even a lot of towns that are in the United States and in North America, simple technology like lagoons can actually treat a fair amount of water for quite a large number of people. And there are technologies that can advance that. And we do supply some equipment that advances the lagoon technology as well as far more advanced treatments like mbrs. So you can run the gamut depending on the situation and what that water quality needs to be and how many people that needs to service. But typically water reuse is actually technology agnostic. And just about any technology that cleans water can be used right now. Some of it requires depending on what the final use for the reuse is going to be, whether it's recharging an aquifer or whether it's direct toilet to tap irrigation, that type of thing that will dictate the technology that's going to be required for that particular case. So you know, there's lots of room out in this world for 7 billion people to or approaching 7 billion people to have all different kinds of technologies to provide that. I think that the issue is that is capital constraint and willingness to actually or ability to be able to do it based on localized infrastructure and problems. Because some places in the world, I mean you look at a place like Delhi, you look at a place like Karachi or whatever, where there's millions and millions of people who do not have access to sewage treatment and it's so difficult to put the infrastructure in there. Decentralized actually makes a lot of sense for places like that if there's the political will.
Right, Right. So before I let you go, you mentioned some of the technologies that Nutera has. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you do and how you address your clients challenges?
Sure. We do a lot of work in remote areas and we do some work with industries that want to be able to reuse their water. And specifically we go in and we look at case by case basis, so we look at the customer's need and typically we'll design a customized, completely modular plant for that particular application. And then kind of drop that on the site. Whether that's in Africa or whether that's in the Arctic or whether it's down south or in Chile, you know, it just really depends. But we try to work with the customer so that we don't give the customer more than he needs. Right. Because at the end of the day, it's all about cost, how much it's going to cost to put the system there, how much it's going to cost to run the system and what benefit the customer can get out of it.
That makes sense.
All right, Bob.
Well, I really appreciate your time today, and thank you very much for your insights. We appreciate it. Wish you all the best of luck. For Waterworld magazine, I'm Angela Godwin.
