US Bureau of Reclamation announces $1.4m for nine water purification projects

Nine desalination and water purification projects, including pilot studies, will receive $1.4m from the US Bureau of Reclamation, as announced by its acting commissioner Lowell Pimley.

The Bureau’s Desalination and Water Purification Research Program will finance the nine research projects, four of which are laboratory-scale projects, three are pilot testing projects and the remaining two are also pilot-scale but will be put on hold until the second year.

Acting commissioner Pimley said: "New desalination and water purification technologies have the potential to assist Reclamation and its partners to confront the widening imbalances between supply and demand in river basins throughout the West.

"Fostering development of new technologies will help improve the options communities have to be resilient to climate change and meet future water demands."

Research laboratory projects, funded for one year, are small-scale projects with a funding limit of $150,000 per project. These projects decide whether a process is feasible or not and precede pilot-scale projects.

Pilot-scale projects demonstrate the working of a technology. Their aim is to decide whether a process is physically viable and suitable on a larger scale.

In case a pilot project is able to show sufficient amount of work in the first year, it may be funded the following year.