New water purification technology helps turn seawater into drinking water without tons of chemicals

Cutting acid and base treatments from conventional desalination plants could save billions of dollars globally, making seawater a more affordable option for drinking water.

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Michigan Chemical Engineering

Water desalination plants could replace expensive chemicals with new carbon cloth electrodes that remove boron from seawater, an important step of turning seawater into safe drinking water. 

A study describing the new technology has been published in Nature Water by engineers at the University of Michigan and Rice University.

Boron is a natural component of seawater that becomes a toxic contaminant in drinking water when it sneaks through conventional filters for removing salts. Seawater’s boron levels are around twice as high as the World Health Organization’s most lenient limits for safe drinking water, and five to 12 times higher than the tolerance of many agricultural plants.

“Most reverse osmosis membranes don’t remove very much boron, so desalination plants typically have to do some post treatment to get rid of the boron, which can be expensive,” said Jovan Kamcev, U-M assistant professor of chemical engineering and macromolecular science and engineering and a co-corresponding author of the study. “We developed a new technology that’s fairly scalable and can remove boron in an energy-efficient way compared to some of the conventional technologies.”

A man wearing a blue lab coat and safety goggles places a piece of black material onto a square, metal plate. Two steel rods protrude from each corner of the square.
Jovan Kamcev, an assistant professor of chemical engineering and macromolecular science and engineering at U-M, inserts a carbon cloth electrode into a flow cell for water desalination. Photo credit: Marcin Szczepanski, Michigan Engineering.

In seawater, boron exists as electrically neutral boric acid, so it passes through reverse osmosis membranes that typically remove salt by repelling electrically charged atoms and molecules called ions. To get around this problem, desalination plants normally add a base to their treated water, which causes boric acid to become negatively charged. Another stage of reverse osmosis removes the newly charged boron, and the base is neutralized afterward by adding acid. Those extra treatment steps can be costly.

“Our device reduces the chemical and energy demands of seawater desalination, significantly enhancing environmental sustainability and cutting costs by up to 15 percent, or around 20 cents per cubic meter of treated water,” said Weiyi Pan, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice University and a study co-first author.

Given that global desalination capacity totaled 95 million cubic meters per day in 2019, the new membranes could save around $6.9 billion annually. Large desalination plants—such as San Diego’s Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant—could save millions of dollars in a year. 

Those kinds of savings could help make seawater a more accessible source of drinking water and alleviate the growing water crisis. Freshwater supplies are expected to meet 40% of demand by 2030, according to a 2023 report from the Global Commission on the Economics of Water. 

The new electrodes remove boron by trapping it inside pores studded with oxygen-containing structures. These structures specifically bind with boron while letting other ions in seawater pass through, maximizing the amount of boron they can capture.

A pair of grayscale microscope images show carbon cloth fibers in the electrodes. Pristine fibers on the left appear smooth, while acid-treated fibers on the right have a rough texture. The fibers are approximately ten micrometers in diameter.
When treated with acid, the carbon cloth fibers in the researchers’ electrodes gain oxygen-containing features that can trap boron. Photo credit: Jovan Kamcev, Kamcev Research Lab, University of Michigan.

But the boron-catching structures still need the boron to have a negative charge. Instead of adding a base, the charge is created by splitting water between two electrodes, creating positive hydrogen ions and negative hydroxide ions. The hydroxide attaches to boron, giving it a negative charge that makes it stick to the capture sites inside the pores in the positive electrode. Capturing boron with the electrodes also enables treatment plants to avoid spending more energy on another stage of reverse osmosis. Afterward, the hydrogen and hydroxide ions recombine to yield neutral, boron-free water.

The diagram outlines the water treatment process, starting with a box representing a first stage of reverse osmosis. Dark blue sea water enters one half of a box that is split diagonally, becoming light blue before moving into another cell with gray electrodes at each end. The pink and orange rectangles (membranes) divide the cell into two compartments. A water molecule made of one large red ball (oxygen) and two smaller white balls (hydrogen) sits at the interface of the pink and orange rectangles. On the right-hand side of the cell, there is a white ball (hydrogen ion). On the left-hand side, a red ball and a white ball are stuck together (hydroxide). Also on the left, a green chloride ion bounces off the electrode and an orange boron ion moves toward the electrode.
This diagram shows how boron is removed by the researchers’ electrodes. First a majority of the salt ions are removed with reverse osmosis. Then the water flows into a cell containing a membrane with positive (pink) and negative (orange) layers. Similarly charged electrodes face the membrane layers, and when a current is applied, water molecules at the interface of the membranes split into hydrogen and hydroxide ions. The hydroxide ions stick to boron, causing it to stick to the positive electrode. Illustration credit: Jovan Kamcev, Kamcev Research Lab, University of Michigan, and Weiyi Pan, Elimelech Research Lab, Rice University.

“Our study presents a versatile platform that leverages pH changes that could transform other contaminants, such as arsenic, into easily removable forms, “said Menachem Elimelech, the Nancy and Clint Carlson Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Rice University, and a co-corresponding author of the study.

“Additionally, the functional groups on the electrode can be adjusted to specifically bind with different contaminants, facilitating energy-efficient water treatment,” Elimelech said.

The research is funded by the National Alliance for Water Innovation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation.

The electrodes were studied at the Michigan Center for Materials Characterization.

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