It's easy to take water for granted. Turn on the tap, and you'll receive clean, life-giving water (with some very notable exceptions). But for a myriad of reasons, ranging from our changing climate to aging infrastructure to growing demands for water, all aspects of the water cycle -- how it is collected, cleaned, distributed (and repeat) -- are overdue for a technological makeover. For one thing, the workforce behind our waterworks is aging, at least within the public water utility sector, which is composed of an astounding 50,000 individual systems. "Lots of senior engineers are 30 years into their job and are reaching retirement," says Will Maize, a water industry analyst with market research firm Bluefield Research.

Since joining UCLA's faculty in 1988, urology researcher Arie Belldegrun has developed a specialty: starting companies with the university's help. Belldegrun's track record includes selling his first company, the Santa Monica cancer therapy biotech Agensys Inc., for more than $500 million. In 2009, Belldegrun's Cougar Biotechnology was sold to Johnson & Johnson, for $1 billion. He's still running the cancer cell therapy firm, Kite Pharma, which recently ranked seventh in the MIT Technology Review's 2017 list of the 50 smartest companies. Belldegrun, 67, thinks most universities would have forced him to choose between being a full-time professor or an entrepreneur.

The project, which is being done with Sweetwater Tech Resources, utilizes Water Planet's IMS-5000 Integrated Produced Water Treatment Solution powered by IntelliFlux. The IMS-5000 technology used in the pilot is an integrated mechanical and membrane filtration system that incorporates ceramic membranes to filter the water. It was developed to perform in oil & gas produced water treatment, one of the most challenging water treatment applications on the planet. As part of the project, Water Planet is also running a standard reverse osmosis unit to desalt the brackish water that is left after treatment by the ceramic ultrafiltration membranes. "We are currently running a series of demonstrations using a range of waters provided by a consortium of California oil producers to evaluate treating produced water for potential use in agricultural irrigation.