NATIONAL ENERGY WATER TREATMENT & SPECIATION (NEWTS): A WATER & CRITICAL MINERALS DATABASE AND DASHBOARD

The scarcity of water resources, the need for beneficial water reuse, and the challenges of wastewater treatment are becoming increasingly pressing in economic, social, and environmental domains. Addressing these concerns requires effective treatment strategies to manage wastewater streams and tackle environmental and economic issues. Furthermore, the recovery of critical minerals from the waste streams associated with energy production holds the promise in offsetting treatment costs and securing local sources of valuable minerals. However, relevant data on these waste streams are dispersed and challenging to locate. The process of ingesting such data into modeling software often involves multiple steps, requiring data restructuring to meet software-input requirements. The nonstandardized reporting of water data makes data handling a time-consuming process. Additionally, essential attributes necessary for modeling water treatment and mineral scale formation are frequently missing. Moreover, data gaps vary depending on the region of interest. Consequently, there is a pressing need for high-quality energy-water composition data that can be easily imported into water treatment software.

To address this need, the National Energy Technology Laboratory has recently launched the National Energy Water Treatment and Speciation (NEWTS) Database and Dashboard—a free online tool catering to community leaders and water researchers. NEWTS facilitates a comprehensive understanding of the composition of energy-related wastewater streams in the United States. The datasets provide detailed concentrations and speciation of major and minor aqueous compounds in energy-related wastewater streams, including power plant leachate, acid mine drainage, brackish water, and oil and gas produced water. Many of the aqueous species are critical minerals in high demand to build the world’s GHG-free energy infrastructure. This database and dashboard offer public access to hitherto challenging-to-access data sources, presenting processed data tailored for easy input into aqueous chemistry modeling software. By bridging the gap between dispersed data sources and modeling software, NEWTS serves as an essential resource in advancing water treatment research and sustainable water resource management.