Dan Seed (00:00):
Hello and welcome to Big Ideas, a podcast from Texas State University. Happy New Year to everyone listening. We hope 2024 brings you nothing but the best. It was four years ago that we launched the show and we thank you for continuing to listen into the new year. We kick off the new year with Dr. Keisuke Ikehata, who is an assistant professor of civil engineering in the Ingram School of Engineering. Dr. Ikehata is one of the four founding members of the civil engineering program here at Texas State. And prior to coming here, he worked as a technical specialist in research and design manager at a water resources engineering firm in Orange County, California with another eight years in academia. Dr. Ikehata is an expert in advanced water and wastewater treatment and sustainable water resources management, including water reuse, desalinization and stormwater management. He has led or been involved in more than 130 engineering research and R&D projects in the United States to develop, design, and evaluate novel sustainable solutions for emerging water resource challenges. Dr. Ikehata is joining us to discuss the work. He and a team of researchers from Texas State Universities, Ingram School of Engineering, are doing to implement innovative wastewater treatment methods to improve the quality and aesthetics of reusable water. Dr. Ikehata, thank you so much for being here.
Keisuke Ikehata (01:20):
Well, thank you very much for having me. It�s great to be here and I'm excited.
Dan Seed (01:25):
We're excited to have you. And so what led to your interest in engineering and water resources engineering in particular?
Keisuke Ikehata (01:31):
A good question. I am a chemist by training. I did my undergraduate degree back in Japan. That's where I grew up and I left my country back in 1997. It's been 20 some years in North America. I did my grad school in Canada and moved to United States about 16, 15 years ago while I was doing a master's degrees. I studied environmental engineering and I did study and research water wastewater related work, but I never really thought about doing what I've been doing Recently when I was grad school, I think when I moved to California back in 2009, December, about this time of the year by the way, so 14 years ago I decided to leave Canada. It's where I used to live for 12 years. I almost called Canada home, but I decided to leave Canada and come to the US and that's kind of when I really decided to devote myself in water industry. The reason why I interested in water resources, water treatment, water reuse is that water is such a vital part of our life. Nobody can live without water for more than a few days. I was fascinated by this fact and I wanted to use my education and skills to make a positive impact on our society. And I think water seems to be a natural choice for me.
Dan Seed (03:10):
And it's certainly an area where at least here in this state, we need a positive impact. We've had many discussions on this podcast about water and environmental conservation. From your perspective, where do we stand here in Texas when it comes to the importance of water conservation and thinking about water in unique ways that we've never had to before?
Keisuke Ikehata (03:31):
That's a very good question. The reason why I moved to Texas and I decided to take this position at Texas State to start civil engineering program is that Texas has a very unique situation in terms of water resources from many perspectives. But from my perspective as well, Texas is growing so rapidly and we are projecting more than anticipated rate of growth economically and population wise. So the people are coming, but water resources are limited, although we have plenty of supply for now. There are some droughts here and there that would let us conserve more water, but we just don't have huge growth like this planned in Texas. So many people, including myself, five years ago we moved here from California, millions of people coming to Texas as a newcomers and we all need water every day to 150 gallons per person per day.
(04:42):
And if we are continue in welcoming people, we are running out of water resources within 10, 20 years. That is my main driver. I think that is the main drivers for us to really be more aggressive in terms of water supply, exploring new sources. Of course, conservation is a big deal, but we can reduce amount of water consumption by 10%, 20%, maybe 30%, but we just can't cut water uses to zero. 50% reduction is not really reasonable, which means we still need to have more new water resources. And where can we find that? That is a main question that we'd like to question ourselves and find an answers for that.
Dan Seed (05:37):
And therefore enters your research, the research effort that I was talking about where you're talking about purifying wastewater to where it's clean and aesthetically pleasing for everyday use. Walk us through the work your research team is doing in terms of the engineering it's happening here in San Marcos and describe for our audience in layman's terms how this purification system works.
Keisuke Ikehata (05:59):
Sure, I'd be happy to. So wastewater is generated from our households. Everybody has toilet and shower and sink and those places, wherever we use water, there is a plumbing system that connect our houses to the wastewater treatment plant. So that's where the wastewater flows starts. And all the water we use, not all but about 60 to 70% of our water we use at home in up going to a wastewater treatment plant. We used to call it a sewage treatment plant. These are the same thing, different from water treatment plant. By the way, water treatment plant produces drinking water. So going back to wastewater, so wastewater treatment plant over there, they have several very established conventional wastewater treatment starting from solid removal followed by biological treatment, which removes organic matter and some nutrients from the wastewater. Wastewaters contains a lot of organics, which coming from our food waste and us ourselves, and we also have a lot of nutrients in it.
(07:18):
And those things are removed pretty well. 99% of those materials are removed by conventional wastewater treatment plants. Seed of some markets has one just downstream of the sun, Marcus River, and they have a 8 million gallon per day capacity and they treat the wastewater there and treat the wastewater is finally disinfected. Sorry, let me back up a little bit. Solid removal, organics removal, nutrient removal and disinfection. So all these processes are currently done, 8 million gallon per day capacity and the treated water majority of the treated water is discharged to the Sun Marcus River and become part of the natural water systems. Portion of this treated water is actually coordinated and sent back to our community certain places like golf courses and industrial reuses so that we are actually reusing fraction of the water at this moment. So that's a current status quo. I hope that is reasonable.
(08:28):
And our research group is actually taking this treated wastewater, solids removed, organics removed, nutrient removed and disinfected water, and then taking that water and using something called advanced treatment. We have a series of advanced water treatment processes like microfiltration outer filtration. This is a very fine membrane filtration and followed by reversal osmosis. It's another membrane process that actually takes out everything but water in a very simple term and a little bit of things. But most majority, 99.9% of impurity could be removed by the system reverse osmosis, followed by something called ultraviolet disinfection and advanced oxidation. So a lot of advanced processes that basically removes all the impurities from already treated wastewater and making a crystal clear water like this. This is actually real water that I collected from our pilot advanced water purification system that currently running at the wastewater treatment plant in some markets. So this water is actually almost as clean as a distilled water or maybe better. And you can buy distilled water from Walgreens and CVS and HEB. So it's really clean water.
Dan Seed (10:05):
It's pretty fascinating. Those of you with audio here, he, he's holding up a bottle of water that looks crystal clear, looks normal, looks clean, not exactly what you would think of when you think of wastewater. And I think that's probably a big part of this, right, is the public education of it to inform the public because when we hear wastewater we automatically go, Ugh. But how important is that aspect to your research to inform the public that yes, this is okay, this is drinkable and this could be a solution down the road for our water woes.
Keisuke Ikehata (10:38):
Public perceptions be one of the biggest hurdles. Another problem is the cost. Of course, advanced treatment is pretty expensive. We can afford it. It's cheaper than drinking seawater by the way. Trying to making seawater drinkable is more expensive than making wastewater drinkable. And that's why I am so fascinated by the idea, this idea, but how perception is tough because everybody, again, as you said, associate wastewater and smell in order and it stinks and that's what we think. And no way we can drink that water. Again, this is where our research is trying to address. A lot of researchers are currently focusing on the safety of the wastewater, which is already pretty much so, but there are all kinds of additional water quality challenges or some emerging contaminants. And everybody talks about if the water doesn't seem to be pleasing to drink, how can we convince people to drink it?
(11:47):
Because if you think about the regular tap water, sometimes you feel, oh, this water smells like early musty or is it the colors doesn't seem to be right and it's summertime, you smell like algae. These things are still happening in the tap water. And if we start sending out water from the wastewater, purified water and if you smelled any of those and that would instantly shut down people's perception. And I'm not going to drink this water again, it's bad water. My research group is actually trying to study. Our advanced purification system can produce crystal clear, first of all, and very safe to drink, no toxic contaminants or pathogenic organisms like viruses and crypto spr, gia, all these bad stuff are not in the water, but also it looks so nice and clear and smells nothing bad and nobody has done this before, surprisingly. And this is where we started this project to really prove that scientifically and one of my graduate students is working actually at the wastewater treatment plant now.
(13:09):
He's surrounding our advanced water purification system that produces about one and a half gallons per minute of purified water. He is collecting water samples. He's coming back to this lab tomorrow and we are going to sniff the water and make sure that our treatment process removes all these OD compounds from the reclaimed water, which istre wastewater and after the order treatment, we smells nothing. And we've been confirming that there's no offensive odors detected by our sensory analysis as well as instrumental analysis. We have collaborators in Wichita Falls, Texas, and they're running some sophisticated GCMS analysis and we are confirming our system is removing those orders compounds. So if you have no odor to smell, and actually we can prove that our purified water is maybe sometimes better than the tap water, that's what our conclusion may be.
Dan Seed (14:13):
How long do you think this will be until a system like this gets online for public consumption? Are we months, years away from this? Where do we stand with it? Because it seems like you're making more and more progress each time you go
Keisuke Ikehata (14:29):
Depending on where you are. They are actually one such a plan in the state of Texas in Big Spring they are running about 1 million gallon, one and a half million gallon per day direct portable reuse facility, very similar to what I just described. And El Paso is also building their treatment plant as well. In California. The background is Orange County. They currently have 130 million gallon per day production of purified water. This is reality. But in our area, central Texas doesn't have one quite yet. And there's no true direct portable reuse facility from the wastewater plant to your house. This has not been done quite yet. El Paso is working on it. So this is what I like to see in central Texas. Within 10 years, five to 10 years, I like to see a more aggressive direct portable reuse plan. And I don't want to name the cities, but hopefully one of our cities around here will build advanced water purification system that would allow us to basically bringing the water back to our society so that we can create close the loop. This is circularity and circular economy and if we can do other materials with this and we can do it water and it's very much technically feasible,
Dan Seed (16:06):
What would be the impact on our current water situation looking down the road, if this becomes more widely adopted, how would it affect or impact the water situation that we face here in Texas? Do you think?
Keisuke Ikehata (16:22):
This closed loop system that I just tried to introduce will actually create a very positive impact on water supply as well as aquatic environment. So water supply, this is a very drought resistant water supply. Because we have our water within the system, we will be losing some water as we use it. Of course, if you irrigate the backyards and front yard with your water, that water won't come back to us. It's not going to be collected and sent to the wastewater treatment plant. But all the water we use and send to the wastewater plant can be reused pretty much. So this means we have secured supply as long as we keep reusing and treating it correctly. Does it make sense?
Dan Seed (17:15):
Yeah, of course. So my question to that is, is that an expensive process to do? I mean all these things that you're talking about, is it more expensive than what we would have now or is it something that would be cost feasible
Keisuke Ikehata (17:28):
Depending on how you look at it, this type of process or system or scheme is a little bit less expensive currently than the seawater desalination, which is taking the seawater like Gulf of Mexico, which is a big water. Some may think, oh, we have a lot of water there, and why don't we desalinate it and drink it? That is another possibility. Certain municipalities close to the Gulf of Mexico are considering it, but taking out salts from seawater costs a lot of money, which is almost more than more money than taking impurities from wastewater. Think about bringing the water from the Gulf of Mexico, building two, three feet diameter, maybe five feet diameter water main and sending all the seawater up to the central Texas. That's cost a lot of money to, first of all, build and pump. Actually, it's way more expensive for us in central Texas to drink desalinated seawater. So it's way cheaper than that. If we are ready to do that type of thing, it's way easier and cheaper than cheaper to do wastewater reuse. But when we compare the price of water right now, it is certainly more expensive. So it's about two to $3 per 1000 gallons, which is actually, when you think about buying water from Costco and Walmart, it's way cheaper.
Dan Seed (19:08):
I was going to say that is way cheaper. And this is all very interesting stuff. We're up against the time here, so I want to leave you with one more question. In what ways is Texas State and your group and the Ingram School uniquely positioned to be a leader in this kind of work going forward? Not only for the state of Texas, but across the southwest, the country as a whole?
Keisuke Ikehata (19:30):
Well, it's probably safe to say our project at the city of San Marco Wastewater treatment plan, which is funded partially by the Bureau Reclamation Department of Interior. It's probably the first university or student driven, advanced water purification, direct portable reuse research project, pilot studies in the state of Texas. And as far as I know, we are the one first one food drunk, the purified wastewater from pilot scale, continuous flow system. And this is our, I mean, that's how convinced we are and how ready we are. So we are trying to partner with, work with the utilities and cities in central Texas and beyond, hopefully. And whenever they would like to implement the portable water reuse, direct or indirect, we would like to partner with them and help them tackle some technical challenges or some public relations perception work. We like to work with them and I think we have a competitive advantage. We are already here. We know how to make our wastewater clean and drinkable, and we are comfortable doing so. But me personally, I want to be a cheerleader in academia to help utilities to promote this idea. And not only a cheerleader, but with the science behind hope. That kind of answer your question.
Dan Seed (21:09):
It very much does and very important work that you're doing. And again, I'm always amazed by the minds of the people that we have at Texas State that come up with these things and think this way. Cause it's really fascinating stuff. Dr. Ikehata, thank you so much for being with us.
Keisuke Ikehata (21:26):
Thank you very much for having me. And if you have any questions, lemme know.
Dan Seed (21:30):
Sure will. And thank you all for the privilege of your time for listening to and downloading another episode of Big Ideas. We'll be back next month with a new episode. Until then, stay well and stay informed.