Prince Sultan Water prizes announced

The SR 1 million first award of the Prince Sultan International Prize for Water (PSIPW) has gone to a research team led by Ashok Gadgil of the California University.
Gadgil is director of the Energy and Environmental Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
The award was announced at a meeting of the Council of the PSIPW to decide the winners of various prizes for the year 2011-2012. The meeting was chaired by Deputy Minister of Defense Prince Khaled bin Sultan at the Al-Aziziah Palace in Riyadh on Thursday.
The Kingdom is striving to ensure sufficient water supply for future generations, Prince Khaled said in a press statement after the meeting.
The prince also commended the late Prince Sultan’s efforts to set up an international prize for water studies with the aim of promoting studies on issues related to water. The prize, which is an offshoot of the Prince Sultan Charitable Foundation, aims to promote research studies in the field of water under the supervision of the King Saud University.
“The electro-coagulation method invented by Gadgil and his team is the cheapest and the most user friendly system available currently in the world for treatment of arsenic-contaminated ground water,” said secretary-general of the prize Abdul Malik Al-Asheikh. This new method has the potential to save millions of people from various health complications caused by arsenic poisoning, Al-Asheikh said.
“For instance one in five deaths occurring currently in Bangladesh is caused by arsenic contamination in water,” he said.
Prizes worth SR 500,000 each were awarded to four specialized research works. Kevin Treberth of National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA, won a prize for his research findings on the impact of the environment change on the universal hydrological cycle and balancing of the surface water.
A team led by Charles Franklin Harvey of the MIT, USA won the prize for special ground water studies. The prize for alternate water sources went to Muhammad Khayat Souhaimi of the University of Complutense in Madrid, Spain, for his new technique of membrane distillation, while the fourth prize for water resources management went to Damia Barcelo of the Catalan Institute for Water Research in Spain.