A brave new world of water

Most people in the water industry will probably not recognise the name Craig Venter, but I am very excited that we have been able to secure him to speak at the Global Water Summit in Rome on 30th April. He is not a retired statesman or a water industry leader. He is a geneticist. And then some. He is the man who cracked the human genome sequence, and more recently he was responsible for Mycoplasma laboratorium – the first synthetic new life form since the Garden of Eden.

I think that what he is doing today will profoundly change the nature of the global economy in general, and the water industry in particular. I look at it this way: biotechnology will be to the 21st century what information technology was to the 20th. It will be the central driver of productivity.

One could say that one of the reasons why the global economy has struggled to grow since 2000 is because the productivity gains from investing in IT have started to level out. Another reason is that the cost of natural resources has risen as we start to run up against the ecological limits of growth (see last month’s GWI). The biotechnology revolution addresses both of these issues.

It offers productivity gains because nature has far more efficient ways of processing energy and materials than man. For example, the human kidney is more effective at salt removal than a desalination plant. It challenges the “limits of growth” because biotechnology enables materials to be endlessly recycled and repurposed. An example of how biotechnology could achieve these aims is the project that Venter’s company Synthetic Genomics is working on with ExxonMobil. This involves developing algae which photosynthesise to excrete a bio-oil which can be turned into a biodiesel-like fuel. The process reduces our reliance on finite natural resources, and does so far more efficiently than the equivalent “man-made” system (the photo-voltaic cell).

Large-scale biology is already harnessed in wastewater treatment plants to kill pathogens and to generate biogas. The scope for using large-scale biology to create biorefineries is far greater than that. Why shouldn’t there be micro-organisms which desalinate seawater or address the problem of nitrates in surface water or sort and recover the elements from toxic waste effluent? Some of these things already exist in nature, and don’t need Venter’s involvement, but once one can start adapting the genetics, it may be possible to overcome some of the barriers (such as energy requirements) which currently restrict what biotechnology can do for us.

The theme of our Rome summit (see www.watermeetsmoney.com) is “Brave New World”, but it is not just futuristic technology we will be talking about. We are bringing together all the themes that are shaping the future in 2012. We have John Lipsky, who used to run the International Monetary Fund, to talk about the new financial environment; Ali Ibrahim, Libya’s deputy minister of Housing and Infrastructure, to talk about the Arab Spring; Frank Rijsberman, who heads the Gates Foundation’s activities in water and sanitation, to explain how it is addressing the world’s water problems. There is a long list of others on the website, which is growing every day as we get confirmations in.

By popular demand, we have scheduled two sessions of round-table discussions, which will involve booking 80 leaders, executives and experts to play the role of host.

As Miranda remarks in Shakespeare’s Tempest: “O brave new world! That has such people in it!”

Come and be one of them.