As the population rapidly grows in places like the American Southwest and the Middle East, the demand for clean water is spurring additional investments in water technologies. Earlier this year Orange County brought online a reverse osmosis water reclamation plant to clean sewage water, and the United Arab Emirates recently signed a contract with Veolia Water for a reverse osmosis desalination plant in Qidfa, Fujairah.

The $115 million contract with Veolia Water, a subsidiary of French Veolia Environnement (VE), is part of the F2 Independent Water and Power Project. The plant, scheduled to be completed by 2010, will desalinate 136,500 cubic meters per day. Additionally, the project will include a 2,000 megawatt power plant to power the energy intensive process of reverse osmosis, whereby salt water is forced through a membrane against the osmotic gradient, separating the water and the salts.

In the U.S., a large barrier to water technologies is an aging and insufficient infrastructure. Water transport is far more expensive than that of electricity: the EPA estimates the country will have to spend up to a trillion dollars to upgrade its water infrastructure over the next 20 years. Meanwhile, developing countries will have to start installing public water works. That is a huge opportunity for new water technologies to provide new, cheap sources of clean water.

Starting today, the Orange County Water District will put into operation the world’s largest sewer water treatment plant for reclaiming drinking water. The $481 million groundwater replenishment system will supplement the Southern California county’s potable water by processing some 70 million gallons of municipal sewage each day through the use of reverse osmosis, which involves forcing water through a semipermeable membrane to remove solutes.

This is the first potable water reuse program of its type in the U.S., according to the New York Times, but many other water-constrained cities have been considering such a technology for over a decade. The NYT reports that the Orange County plant has already had visitors from all over the world. While certainly not the sexiest of cleantech ventures, sewage water reclamation might prove necessary to save our valuable water resources.

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Today’s Wall Street Journal devotes a good part of its front page to the growing problem of air pollution produced by cargo ships, which are used to transport 90 percent of the world’s goods. The tonnage of goods sent by cargo ships has tripled since 1970, according to the Journal, and in 2005, pollution from shipping produced an estimated 27 percent of the world’s smog-causing emissions. Not only are the numbers staggering, but the solution is going to be very complicated.

We wrote about the opportunities for eco-shipping containers a few months ago. The source of most cargo ships’ pollution is their source of power — residual fuel oil, a.k.a. bunker fuel, which is about as dirty as they come. Bunker fuel is the “tar-like sludge” that remains after petroleum is refined. The heavy metal-laden goo is collected from the bottom of distillation towers that process crude, making it cheap for shippers — less than two-thirds the rate of marine-gas oil, according to the WSJ — and a boon for refiners, who can sell of their excess waste.

While this exchange works out nicely for those two parties, the losers in the deal are the rest of us. Environmental Science & Technology (the journal of the American Chemical Society), published a study this month that estimated air pollution from ships is causing 60,000 cardiopulmonary and lung-cancer-related deaths a year, chiefly along trade routes.

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As bright red Coast Guard helos sliced through the sky and depressingly photogenic water fowl were plucked out of the water, a dented Cosco Busan container ship sat in anchorage in the greater San Francisco Bay, where federal investigators have begun a criminal investigation. More than 60 ships, nearly 1,500 workers, and over 35,000 feet of boom have so far recovered 12,270 gallons of oil after the container ship struck a tower of the Bay Bridge last week. It’s a massive logistical effort led by various contractors using an array of cleanup technology.

At a press conference held by the Cosco Busan Unified Command at their Incident Command Center on Treasure Island on Monday, Earth2Tech had the chance to speak with Barry McFarland, incident commander for The O’Brien’s Group, the contractor coordinating the response and recovery effort. McFarland explained that all ships in U.S. waters are required to have a response and recovery system in place, a service which the O’Brien’s Group provides. In the event of a spill, the vessel owner calls the company, which then calls dedicated response corporations that can deploy response vessels “within minutes.” (They don’t own or operate fleets, equipment or personnel themselves.)

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Following an article from last week’s Jerusalem Post regarding Israel’s “much-hyped” venture capital market, which noted the favored status of the growing cleantech sector, Globes has reported two cleantech venture fund announcements out of Israel. Terra Venture Partners LP has raised its first $15 million, which it plans to invest in 10 startups, including IQWind, makers of a high-efficiency wind turbine gearbox, and Phoebus, a water heating company. Also, Greylock Partners and Israel Cleantech Ventures said they are forming a joint platform for investment in early-stage cleantech startups.

“The hype surrounding cleantech in Israel continues to increase. And yet one thing is missing — deals,” Asher Mechlovich, partner and head of the division focused on technology media & telecommunications industry at Deloitte Brightman Almagor, told the Jerusalem Post. Terra and the Greylock-Israel Cleantech partnership are both just starting to make deals and Terra plans to raise between $40 million and $50 million by the end of the year.

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The flood gates are opening up for water technology investments, the Wall Street Journal says this morning. Calling the water industry “one of the hottest areas for investors,” the article says that while investors struggled to fund water technology in the past, concerns over water supplies, contamination and aging infrastructure are now driving a funding boost. Missing from the article is a good look at how investors still seem to be struggling to figure out how to invest in complex technologies and develop business models.

The WSJ’s bullish water story sent us back to a report issued by the Cleantech Network, where a round table of investors discussed some of the problems they’ve faced when determining where to place a water bet. Stephan Dolezalek, managing director of VantagePoint Venture Partners, says in that report:

“We certainly have come to a perspective which I’ve heard echoed time and time again that says ‘We keep looking at water deals, we keep getting closer to pulling the trigger, but we haven’t yet made that first water investment.’…There hasn’t been a particularly elegant solution to some of these very tricky problems.”

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That deafening roar you hear is the collective masses railing against the evils of bottled water. Unless you’ve been on a media fast over the past few months, you’ve probably read stats similar to those that have come from the Earth Policy Institute showing that the amount of crude oil used to make the plastic for water bottles in the U.S. alone has risen to 10 million barrels per year.

OK, we get it, it’s bad, but even though the bottled water market is projected to reach $75 billion by 2010, there’s also the gentle hum of water technology progress beneath all that uproar.

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Written by Georgia Biondo Flight

Hybrids and biofuels may be hot topics on eco-watchers’ lips these days, but with two-thirds of the world’s goods still being transported by sea, forward-thinking companies will be focused less on the highway and more on the horizon. Enter UK-based Blue Sky Intermodal, which has developed shipping containers lined with sustainable bamboo instead of the typical tropical wood (aside from growing again once it’s cut, bamboo takes just four or five year to mature — the current industry standard, Apitong wood, takes 60).

Who’s buying green in the more than half a trillion worldwide container ship market? French shipping giant CMA CGM was first on board. After giving the new containers a test run, the company discovered that bamboo is as durable, waterproof and pest-resistant as the non-renewable wood. CMA CGM has announced a roll-out of 37,000 TEUs (that’s shipping talk for huge heavy containers). According to the company’s senior vp of container logistics, Alexis Michel, the use of eco-containers “has a dual objective” in the form of modern eco-design and improved technical performance. Hmm, good for the planet and the bottom line? Sounds like smooth sailing.