Lynne Kiesling at Knowledge Problem has an interesting post that might be of interest to enviropreneurs. She picks up on a recent article that suggests clean water for fracking is the next hot cleantech sector:
“In an interview this week with VantagePoint Capital Partner and Founder Alan Salzman, he told me that he sees technology that can help solve the clean water issue for fracking as an upcoming hot area for investment. “We think the limiting factor for gas fracking is water. We’re not gas people, and we’re not oil people. But we are water people,” said Salzman…
A company called ABSMaterials has been working on the problem of cleaning liquids involved with fracking. The company uses sand-like particles to absorb chemicals, and the company says it can remove 99 percent of oil and grease from water in fracking fluid, and another 90 percent of the toxic chemicals like benzene and xylenes.”
This video shows one of their products in action. As Lynne notes, this project and others are being funded in part by the Department of Energy. Her concluding discussion asks good questions:
“If fracking really is here to stay and growing, as Mike has discussed extensively, are these research subsidies necessary to induce innovation in water cleaning technologies? If so, on what basis? Is there a Coase problem here — does legal precedent fail to define legal liability sufficiently to clarify the profits attached to the water cleaning? Or, if that’s not the case, is the water cleaning insufficiently valuable to be worth doing? That hypothesis is consistent with the argument that fracking does not actually create a lot of water supply damage. But if that’s the case, then why subsidize the research — isn’t that a waste of taxpayer funding on research that isn’t likely to be valuable enough to be worth pursuing?”
Mike Giberson, also at Knowledge Problem, has been providing diligent and extensive analysis of fracking and energy markets more broadly from a market perspective, much of which can be found here.