Fun fact: there will be no tomorrow when the water runs dry
You have thousands of kilometres of coast; if you don’t dessalinate it’s because you don’t want to.
So far, desalination has not been a useful solution to the problem. Companies have been trying to create useful desalination plants for decades. The current process is expensive, inefficient, slow and creates toxic residuals. For these reasons, the current technology does not scale up very well at all.
This a really bad take. Seawater deal with RO is a marvel of efficiency, only 2-3 times above the thermodynamic limit of demixing water from salt. It does not really generate toxic waste like coal fired power plants, but does produce lots of brine with various organics (antiscalants, surfactants etc.) that are not that great. The key issue is water is very cheap from traditional sources (surface water and groundwater) and requires rather crude treatment to be usable, resulting in very low cost. Hence why desal is used in areas where they have no choice. If you don’t have surface/ground water source or brackish water source you are doing seawater deal or leave the area…not many choices. At least RO is electrified so it can use renewables but that does not really solve the much higher cost…or issue of brine generation, with zld have a set of it’s own issues costs…
With enough demand, enough money for R&D will show up to improve the technology.
But regardless the current costs, that did not stop Israel to source all their water from the sea from very early, as well as other countries have for regions where there isn’t enough drinking water available.
In my country, it’s used to supply our islands territories and even by some hotels for pool water.
And the problem with the brine has me scratching my head, as I’ve read sources where the process required chemical treatment of the water and others where it’s stated the process is entirely physical.
America does desalinate in it’s coastal regions. Increasing desalination is prohibitively expensive. Shipping water inland is preposterously expensive. Even if you spend the money, scaling up takes years or even decades.
There are reasons America, like nearly all other nations, gets a relatively small amount of it’s fresh water from desalination.
[…] Increasing desalination is prohibitively expensive. Shipping water inland is preposterously expensive. Even if you spend the money, scaling up takes years or even decades.
Just like oil and natural gas?
There are reasons America, like nearly all other nations, gets a relatively small amount of it’s fresh water from desalination.
The way desertification is advancing in California (there must be other places facing the same problem) there will be a tipping point where mass scale desalination will be implemented.
Desal itself isnt really that hard, its very similar tech to regular wastewater treatment. What it is though is energy intensive, because the desalinated water starts its life at the lowest altitude and must be pumped up network to be gravity fed like regular water sources. very energy intensive
Here is the rationale:
a) factories create wealth
b) [in order to create wealth] factories create jobs
c) jobs return taxes
d) taxes return money
e) money can be returned to factories to hold it in place
For water extraction, we only need to add a line where we state water is replenishable, another stating that is easy and cheap to extract and a third where we expand on how water is a good in constant demand, thus, easily marketable.
Desalination is not a question of “if” it should be established but a “when” one.
https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/10/desalination-plants-california/
They are building them.
America actually does do desalination in several locations along the California coast and is expanding.
Like everything in life, it’s not that simple.
One thing that is simple, however, is googling the answer to this question before making an uninformed response.
There is a limit for how much water consumption can be reduced, how much water can be reused and how much preserved untouched.
It is actually a subject I actually find interesting. All the criticism put towards the technology could be as easily applied to the internal combustion engine: its inefficient, produces larges amounts of residues and is expensive to run.
There are several large scale operations already in place (Israel sources its water from the sea, as well as several other nations where drinking water is scarce) and even hotels use it to source water for swimming pools.
There is, of course, the problem of distribution but we’ve already invented pipelines, haven’t we? And a water pipeline bursting could cause floods but no great concern lasting environmental damage, unlike oil or liquified natural gas.
I’m going to be dense as I have no knowledge in this area, but can you just put it back in the ocean? I assume with sea levels rising the ocean is getting less salty so it wouldn’t be harmful as long as we spread it out/did it slowly?
Desalination produces a massive pull on using more fossil fuels. It’s an emergency procedure. Not an end goal. Read a book.
Well, put me in a red dress and pony tails and call me Shirley…
Haven’t we discovered other ways to harvest energy besides fossil fuels? Perhaps wind a solar might be an answer to that problem?
My own country is in the process of converting a former refinery into a green hydrogen plant and part of the conversion goes into installing a few gigawatts of power in solar and wind.
Couldn’t this same solution be used for desalination?
It takes hundreds of years for groundwater to replenish. We are experiencing problems right now.
Sure, I never said anything about that, only commenting against the hyperbole that there will be “no tomorrow” when places run out.
There will still be tomorrows, people will just move elsewhere like they’ve done for thousands of years.
Sir?
I see you posting and I’m still waiting for your proof or reasoning behind thinking there will be no tomorrow when some places lose ground water.
You guys are all smug af with your downvotes, but got absolutely nothing for facts beyond your provocative hyperbole.
Keep in mind I never said losing ground water wouldn’t suck and/or be catastrophic, only looking for some proof it will be “the end of tomorrow” as the upvoted dude with his provocative words stated so definitively.
I keep getting told to read a book or that I know nothing of history or geology, yet all of human history proves me fucking right so far, so I’ma need literally any scrap of evidence from fucking anyone who has something better than a shitty opinion alongside some clicks of a down arrow.
Tbf there very well could be no tomorrow
With climate change and large corporations like Nestlé sucking up all the water it can this will only get worse.
By the way large corporations and large agriculture farms are to blame for the most waste of water.
Also the amount of money spent on watering lawns and golf fucking courses are huge factors in this.
We need to put end to Nestlé and fuck lawns.
In general: bad.
But the lion’s share of that groundwater is going to agriculture, and much of it specifically to animal feed, so unlike with carbon emissions, this feels like the sort of environmental disaster that market forces are at least going to be somewhat responsive to; less groundwater -> spike in alfalfa prices -> spike in beef prices -> people eat less beef -> people use less groundwater.
Yeah but how long does that take, compared to how long the environmental destruction takes?
It sounds from the article like the environmental destruction has been going on for decades and that it’s already affecting crop output in some places.
I thought that groundwater used in beef production exists in the water cycle and actuslly replenishes. Did I fall for a talking point?
That water would logically enter the typical water cycle, but ground water itself can take a long time to replenish. It seems to depend on the particular source, but in many cases it is functionally non renewable.
Once pumped out, it will evaporate, rain down, and eventually make its way in to the oceans, I assume. Desalination seems like it will eventually be the solution, but it’s a long way off.
Paywall.
https://archive.is/VjQuZ has the text. Even better, the beginning, which I presume to be one of these terrible scroll-to-advance animated presentations, has the animation removed.
I mean, data visualizations are important and personally I think they contribute to the article by showing aquifer depletion over time, but do you.
Also, I’ve never really appreciated the incessant need to whine about paywalls [edit: sorry, not directly addressed to you, I know you just provided a link]. Journalists and editors shouldn’t have to work for free or depend solely on ad revenue. I understand if you can’t afford it, but journalism is a job that already doesn’t pay very well. I assume you’d also like to get paid for your work.
If you insist on keeping the paywall then posting news and inviting other peoples’ opinions without allowing them access to the link is bad form, no?
the west coast is especially fucked.
there was never enough ground water and there never will be.
Central planes as well, there is an enormous amount of crop land that will no longer support farming.
It’s not like it’s getting zero rainfall, it’s just not getting enough to support its current levels of crop output; they were growing cereal crops in the Great Plains long before we figured out industrial-scale groundwater irrigation.
No, the western plains requires irrigation. Plains as a biome exist because rainfall is marginal.
Idk fam there were some huge rivers in California not that long ago. Arizona and Nevada are much more iffy.
