“One of the biggest questions in the climate change debate: Are humans any smarter than frogs in a pot? If you put a frog in a pot and slowly turn up the heat, it won’t jump out. Instead, it will enjoy the nice warm bath until it is cooked to death. We humans seem to be doing pretty much the same thing.”….Jeff Goodell
“Saving our planet, lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth, these are one in the same fight. We must connect the dots between climate change, water scarcity, energy shortages, global health, food security and women’s empowerment. Solutions to one problem must be solutions for all.“…Ban Ki-moon
Finding an active way to save our planet from climate change, a means to vanquish emissions and deal with water scarcity and energy shortages have long been an on-going planetary dilemma in our fractured world. Especially so in places like California where every inch of the Heavens are constantly engulfed in flames. As the world shifts and the climate changes we have no holy passport to protect us.
The innovative City of Tracy, California, has taken a giant step in saving our planet from destruction via “Tracy Renewable Energy LLC” with CEO, former NASA employee and engineer Frank Schubert at the helm of his wastewater desalination facility. In addition to his water resolution, Schubert is then using a company called “Reactive Surfaces” to capture the carbon dioxide created thereby eliminating deadly emissions. “Tracy’s emergence as a leader in clean tech innovation is subtle yet undeniable.“
A long-time resident of Tracy, Frank Schubert via Tracy Renewable Energy LLC began 10 years ago with an innovation of a desal prototype which can continuously clean up salty and polluted water. Currently the company is pioneering one of the most aspiring Clean-tech projects on the planet designated around it’s proprietary desalination technology and other global warming combatting considerations. The projects will also supply many more employment opportunities for the residence of Tracy.
The former NASA employee who was responsible for building Mars simulation modules was happy to further explain his innovations….Frank knows that without risk there are no possibilities and in a world where people are crying for the moon and penicillin can no longer save us, if he doesn’t do too much…nothing gets done.
Exactly what does Tracy Renewable do?
There are actually two of our companies involved. “Combined Solar Technology” and “Tracy Renewable Energy LLC.” It started because I created this process to create clean water from dissolved solids. That’s not like something floating in the water, it’s the stuff that dissolves into the water like salt. When you go to the ocean, iy’s salty but you don’t see the salt. There is something called reverse osmosis which is the number one water cleaning technology when you have an ocean next to you. This is because with reverse osmosis what happens is when you put 100 gallons into the machine you get 50 gallons out that is clean, and 50 gallons of water that’s twice as salty. It filters half of the water in the soil, and that which was in that water is now in the reject tank. So the problem with cleaning water is if you’re in a place that is not next to an ocean you end up with a worse problem, you have half your water that isn’t clean and nowhere to put it other than truck it to a disposal sight.
So then are you getting your water from the ocean?
No. We are getting our water from Tracy’s wastewater plant. We’re not taking water that comes from the toilet although we could. There are two major streams coming out of the Tracy’s wastewater plant that goes into the river. One is the household sewer water. By the time it comes out it’s almost drinking water, it’s not bad. But what they can’t do is get salts out of the water. They get everything else out, all the biological stuff, all the biological oxygen demand, which is a term they use for living things in water, anything that would get you sick like bugs. There are two types of bugs, biological oxygen demand and chemical oxygen demand. They can eventually get that out, but they cannot get out salt because it’s dissolved. That’s what my machine was designed for. What we do is we is we pull it out of the water and then we hydrate it down to the point where it’s just salt. We end up with a big chunk of salt. Then we can sell the salt to American Chlorine and they will make chlorine out of it. Right now we clean a little over half a million gallons a day. Once we get rolling, we will clean over a million gallons a day.
Does anyone drink this water yet?
Our water is actually too clean to drink. It’s cleaner than bottled water. The reason you can’t drink it is because water is the universal solvent. It wants to pick up stuff. So if you drink this water that has no minerals in it, it needs minerals, it wants minerals so it would suck the minerals out of your body. So you need what’s called TDS, total dissolved salts.
So what you’re saying in essence is you take dirty water, clean it up and then make it dirty again so you can drink it?
Yeah. We are taking the wastewater plant’s most saltiest stream and turning it into the best clean stream and then they use our water to dilute all the rest of their water which brings the total dissolved solids down to compliance with the state. When the city first hired me to start this they had been fined $35,000 a day for a while. They were paying lawyers millions of dollars a year litigate around that. So they got a reprieve a few years ago and the state gave them X amount of time to come up with a solution. Our system is the solution. It will be the biggest inlet water reformation in California, and we are just barely getting started. We are at a half a million gallons a day now and will be at 50 million in five years.
Do you see this as a future solution for our drinking water?
One of them. Right now we’re making a serious amount of money by doing this because there was no competition. We evaporate water kind of like how to boil water. With normal boilers you can put bad water into it. The boilers that I invented they don’t rust out, the steam goes out of the top and the solids that were in the water goes out of the bottom. When people ask what my technology is, I tell them “I boil water.” I built the first boiler in my garage. It’s lucky I didn’t blow the house up. I opened the garage doors up because there was a whole bunch of steam and the neighbors called the police. They thought it was either a meth lab or a high-tech barbecue. We built the first commercial one about 10 years ago and have been running them ever since. Our two services are creating water for the city and the other is trucked water. We intercept the trucks that deliver water to the Bay Area. We save these truckers a lot of money. We save them 140 miles of trucking. The city loves us because we reduce the truck trafficking and the truckers love us because they don’t have to spend four hours taking water to Oakland. We reduce all of that pollution caused by the trucks driving back and forth. We can take in 30 trucks a day now and 30×140 miles a day starts to add up.
What even made you think of inventing something like this?
When I worked for NASA the biggest issue with going to Mars was the water. You have to be able to clean the water. If you had to take enough water for a six-man crew that’s approximately 28 tons of water. So you have to be able to take a small amount of water and be able to clean it. They can just recycle it like they do on the space station.
You’re working with a company called Reactive Surfaces, how do they fit in?
Well because we burn walnut shells, we have a compensated stack of CO2 going up into the air. The burned walnut shells are made out of CO2. They originally wanted to infuse paint with bacteria that was designed to eat anthrax. The idea was that we would paint the walls of the post office and then if there was an anthrax attack instead of taking three months to clean it, it would only take a week. They sold a couple of gallons of the stuff and then nobody cared about anthrax anymore. They sort of morphed into other things. Then about 3 years ago they went to the climate talks, they freaked out and decided that they better do something about the CO2. So they invented a CO2 capture system that captures the CO2 that the walnut shells cause.
Aside from the business end of all of this you also have a personal and social sense about this?
I’ve been worried about global warming since 1970. My roommate in school was a climatologist and he would tell me what was going to happen. For the last 20 years since I went to Devon Island, I spoke to all the Eskimos and in 1990 they were telling me that the world is coming to an end. They have had radical shifts in weather patterns every year since 1990. The snowstorm in Texas which was their worst ever probably is an example of what’s been happening in the Arctic every year. The Arctic feels effects of climate change about 20 times more than we do. The reason Texas had that snowstorm was because it was so warm in the Arctic last month that it expanded the air and the jet stream which carries cold air and carried it that far south. The jet stream usually goes to the boarder of Canada but this year it went as south as Texas.