Removing oil left behind in 2.5B gallons of produced water every day in U.S.
purdue.edu
purdue.edu
From the article -- Researchers are working with the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization to patent the innovation, and they are looking for partners to continue developing it.
What is the public good of patenting a process that would make usable water more available? Doesn't this graduate student get what they paid for? An advanced degree in chemical engineering from a prestigious school? Doesn't the school get what it wants from this, a reputation for doing solid research into big problems and coming up with good answers?
And then they want to take the idea out of considering by applying a 'tax' to it so that the university can extract some rent on work they have already been paid for. I find that so unpalatable.
Why don't we force mining and oil companies to pay for the externalities of their profit and pollution-generating enterprise, and let that money flow to institutions that do the research to clean it up?
I would be totally cool if the EPA said, "This works great, all extractive industries creating 'produced water' must use this process to clean up that water to safe water standards."
But what Purdue wants is to have these companies to both have to do this, and have to pay Purdue a 'tax' on the process just because one of their graduate students and a professor there thought it up. That 'rent seeking' model takes good ideas an kills them. Digital cash which could have taken off in the 90s was completely killed by patent holders unwilling to license patents for less than extortionate rates. The RSA algorithm, similarly held hostage.
Purdue would get much more goodwill if they did not patent the process, and it would be easier for the EPA to mandate it because doing so would not disproportionately benefit a third party economically.
The government can, if necessary, use that revenue for incentives to encourage deployment; for example to drop the upfront cost in the short-term to incentivize adoption. Use market-based solutions with aligned incentives instead of trying to pretend there is no market or that incentives aren't misaligned.
This isn't as a bad a comparison as you might imagine. There are "rewards" and there are "rewards." It is in the governments interest to spend tax dollars to make the country better for everyone. If they give Purdue grant money to do the research and this process results, then they make it both free to implement and required, then the result is a "reward" where there is less polluted water out there, everywhere.
Similarly when someone spends their time making gcc better and giving way that investment, everyone gets a better compiler. So they have invested a bit of their time and the community as a whole has benefited.
Because they are pursuing a patent on this process, I predict it will never be used for the next 20 years because it doesn't add any "value" for the people who should use it.
This is pure fantasy. Grant money is scarce and drying up everywhere. Not two weeks ago, this administration put a $1 billion dollar cut to the National Science Foundation[1] on the table.
Because they are pursuing a patent on this process, revenue generated by the licensure of this product will flow to the institutions supporting that research. Companies can then be incentivized to pursue licensure.
The scientist that discovered insulin, Sir Frederick Banting, forfeited his right to profit from the patenting of his discovery[2], and yet we have companies to this day restricting supply to wring hundreds of dollars per dose out of patients that depend on the drug. The patent isn't the problem.
> As a thought exercise, compare how much you have benefited from the gcc tools suite being "free and unpatented" versus having it cost you every time you used it.
You present a false dichotomy: that GCC tools be free/unpatented vs having them cost every person on every usage. Just yesterday we saw posts on HN describing the struggle of open source community sustainability and undue burdens on maintainers of free software.
When multi-billion dollar corporations depend on free and open source software, they should be made to contribute in some way.
1. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/433507-trump-pro...
2. http://www.cdnmedhall.org/inductees/sir-frederick-banting
what in your opinion is the root problem?
[edit] formatting
You could likely fund openSSL properly if people had to pay some minimal tax on it, that could be offset by contributing
Reminder that Universities like Purdue are non-profits. While this doesn't mean they spend all their money wisely, it isn't just going to some billionaire CEO, and a very large portion is funding additional research.
I still believe in some of the benefits of patents too though. What I'd like to see are compulsory licensing rules w/ ceilings imposed on the fees. And some sort of "public good" exemption for things like this that limit patent length even further.
All wells produce water along with the oil. Great background from the old theoildrum blog: http://theoildrum.com/node/6052 and http://theoildrum.com/node/9045
The "water cut" is the percentage of water in the fluid coming out of the drill hole. Normally this is a disposal problem. If it's drinkable (and not saline!), Saudi no longer need to desalinate quite so much water, they can just use the water from the oil wells.
There are cases of shallower reservoirs where the petroleum is mixed with otherwise potable water. If it is within an agricultural area, like Bakersfield, it may be treated and used for irrigation. The treatment is mostly just multiple steps of skimming off petroleum.
> It can be more than just saline polluted. Pretty much anything that can be in the earth and can mix with water.
Most water we drink is rain filtered through many different layers of earth. It's the cleanest source of freshwater we have. Minerals only mix to a very small percentage with the water during this process and this "pollution" is actually wanted to a certain degree, i.e. mineral water.
The poster you are disagreeing with is correct. The deep earth is full of really toxic stuff. Arsenic, lead, sulfur, radon, etc. Then there is the deep oil and gas, salt domes, asbestos. Huge volcanic eruptions called flood basalts are likely the cause of many mass extinctions due to the chemistry of the eruptions, not the ash. The mother Earth we all love is just the little skin on top of a cauldron of death.
Luckily for the environment, it is one of those cases where "more oil emitted into waterways = less money earned", through less amount of product, or less valuable product - cleaning up the oil and cleaning up the water often go hand in hand.
As to your second argument, the EPA's literal purpose is to force citizens to operate their life/business responsibly; if you think their standards are too lenient than take it up with your elected representative. One of my biggest frustrations I see here are people pushing to overthrowing everything for grand new systems, completely ignore the implementation details for such a system, and then get frustrated when the system fails because of the details. The system to accomplish your goals is already fucking there, use it.
One of my biggest frustrations I see here are people suggesting that you take things up with your representatives as if big corporations don't control the government.
I think you are referring to the statement
> The Purdue researchers were able to recover up to 95 percent of the oil that was absorbed.
This is not referring to the amount of contaminants removed from the water. Its referring to recovering the oil from the activated carbon filter.
Edit: my bad, this article is about using nanoparticles to increase solar distillation efficiency.
> Handling that water is a major challenge in the oil refinery industry, particularly because it is deemed unusable for household and commercial use by the Environmental Protection Agency because of remaining contaminants. Several commercial treatments are available, but they are expensive, do not remove all traces of contaminants from water and can be energy-intensive.
EDIT: the first paragraph in the linked article was very insightful
Purdue University researchers have developed a process to remove nearly all traces of oil in produced water.