Israel Proves the Desalination Era Is Here
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
I don't see it as anything rising close to a civilization-ending threat. Seawater is abundant. Freshwater can be made cheaply enough. We are extravagantly wasteful with water as it is, and that can be fixed easily enough as it becomes more expensive.
People in the West believe that it was about "freedom", but it was about food and life getting so expensive normal people needed to spend most of their salary just on it. Poor people not being able to eat well or not eat at all as there were no jobs.
People will revolt if they can't buy food because it is very expensive. That is the civilization ending treat: war.
War is really the worst experience you could experience. I will remember things I have seen in Congo all my life.
For example WWII was created because Germans lived a miserable life paying for WW1 and Great depression. Just interest in the WW1 debt grew faster than their productivity meaning they were slaves forever, just like Greece is today.
Americans were very careful not making the compensation for war for Germany excessive in order not to repeat History.
People will choose whoever person that promises an easy exit for their problems, and the easiest thing is to steal from others. You don't have water, you take the places that have water, like the Golan heights.
And that is war.
For market forces to work you need a long time. Inventors will only discover innovative methods after working for decades in a problem.
Letting your lawn die? This is a really stupid idea. I have worked in Sahara desert precisely helping people stop the desert just putting vegetation in place(that holds sand and makes soil so wind does not move it).
As for letting your lawn die, what I really meant but didn't say because it doesn't sound as pithy is to replace your lawn with landscaping or native flora that require much less water to maintain. There are many parts of California, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and other places that are all essentially desert, and rapidly tend back towards desert in the absence of voluminous irrigation. It makes no sense to waste thousands of liters of water per lawn per day keeping non-native grasses alive in the middle of a desert. For the cost of only several months' water you can replace your yard with something that doesn't need watering and won't blow away in a storm, the simplest and cheapest replacement being gravel.
But they were nonetheless capitalist. There were market forces at work to fix the problem, but it failed . Which still is a powerful argument against your thesis.
Sometimes the hand of the market isn't sufficiently incentivized by starving broke people. Sure they would pay, but can they?
Those countries though lack attributes of classical capitalistic societies like
- proper ownership titles and their protection from third parties, including the state
- low barriers for market entry
- free(r) flow of capital, including across their borders
All of these were practically absent in those countries. Good luck establishing your broadcasting service being a christian/jew/<minority> and without connections to the feudal rulers/police/military.
Which capitalist society does employ it's military to produce basic goods, like milk?
I feel like I'm being mistaken for a staunch libertarian here, so I want to point out that I'm not that at all. I do think there is a big role for government investment to play in society, including in providing drinkable freshwater. This was the Israeli solution, and it's increasingly going that way in California as well. I'm not advocating for strict market-force-only supply-and-demand, but rather just pointing out that wasteful uses of water will go down as the price of water goes up, which it should be allowed to do rather than being subsidized in order to control wasteful uses. The cost of having enough water to drink and to cook with is measured in the low cents per day per person in the US. A single penny gets you over two gallons from the faucet where I live. And I'm in favor of safety net programs to prevent people from dying from illness, hunger, or thirst.
"But when he put them on sale, three inspectors from the council asked him for bribes. Mohamed refused to pay."
When it comes to agriculture and industry (the largest consumers, by far) demand and supply isn't as elastic as you make it out to be. And that's exacerbated by volatility, both in demand but especially in supply--a drought isn't always a slow decline or even a simple precipitous drop in supply but often manifests in wild fluctuations.
That kind of environment makes capital investments, including investments in such things as desalination and power plants, risky and thus quite costly. So it's no surprise that most of these desalination plants are either government owned or otherwise heavily subsidized. That's not exactly the outcome one would expect of the free market if it were as simple as implementing a proper pricing scheme.
Rather, I think the takeaway is that water is one of those areas that proves that while the laws of supply & demand are utterly inviolable, price signaling can't always be readily accomplished through basic monetary schemes. Because of far reaching and pervasive externalities that make price signaling difficult. (Consumer pricing is obviously well suited but only the tip of the iceberg.) And because the capital investments required push the envelope of what the capital markets can efficiently handle. And yet because water is so fundamental its one of those areas where even governments (at least, well-functioning governments) can be relatively responsive. Those that don't handle it well tend to be winnowed out rather quickly--either by change of government or just societal collapse.
Also what do you mean by the term "monetary scheme"?
I was alluding to the fact that politics is also a kind of market for price signaling. Regulatory schemes are a signal to either reduce supply (literally, as in the Federal regulatory scheme for the wholesale electricity market) or to otherwise stop externalizing some cost. Economists quantify that in terms of the effect on market pricing because it's a much more useful and mature model for analytical purposes, but fundamentally that's just semantics. Political power is subject to the dynamic forces of economic laws like anything else, we just lack the ability to quantify it as well.
I like to think of government as just another large firm, and its product is legitimacy. Government does have the power of violence, but from a regulatory perspective (as opposed to criminal law perspective) that's often irrelevant in the aggregate. For example, in San Francisco there are many thousands of illegal in-law units. But never would the government go around house-to-house to enforce the law, and rarely do so even when given notice. The politicians would be voted out of office the moment anybody caught wind of such a thing.
The problem with water is the externalities, some of which are extremely difficult to price. So it's irrelevant that we can use e.g. futures markets to mitigate volatility.
Imagine that overnight somebody said that Silicon Valley is unsuitable for technology firms. Everybody needs to get up and go somewhere else. We could probably price the immediate effect fairly easily--cost of relocation, for example. But now consider that the economy of the entire Bay Area and indeed of all of California depends heavily on the technology economy. What's the cost of all the unemployed engineers who didn't get relocated? The cost to the companies and people serving the tech industry? The cost to the state of not only lost revenue, but of past and present budget allocations. Of unemployment? Of crime? Of the path-dependent evolution of economies, generally? Some of that is impossible to know given our current understanding.
And how do we internalize some of the benefit that will accrue to where ever those companies migrate to? Theoretically that should be possible, and ideally that would be done to minimize disruption.
Now imagine somebody told you that if the government intervened and did X, Y, and Z, then the tech industry was viable and could stay, at least for the time being. At best everything will continue as before, at worst there'll be a moderately slow wind down. But in any event things will be much more stable.
What do you think is going to happen? Are we (society) going to choose to develop a futures market for pricing the volatility, or are we going to turn to government?
Whatever we do, the environmental forces against the tech firms will remain, it's the mechanisms we employ to manage the direct and especially indirect costs that is different.
That's water in a nutshell for many areas of the world. For example, the entire economy of the Central Valley of California is dependent on agriculture. In total dollars the immediate benefit of agriculture to the California economy is surprisingly small. But there's a reason California bends over backwards to sustain the industry. It's not just about corporate campaign money. Again, the industry is small by dollar amount. And if the costs of sustaining agriculture were so inefficient you can be sure other corporations would be using their political donations to fight such laws.
After all, it's _easy_ to import water. We don't need futures markets for water, or even to build desalination plants. Certainly not in California where there's more than enough water for residential use. The most efficient solution to drought is to import industrial and agricultural products which rely on water. But for various reasons there's a limit to how far countries wish to go down that track, or at least how quickly they want to.
This is usually dealt within the framework of commodity markets and the purchase of futures, but you won't be able to buy water there. We have abused water as a resource and created water rights for millenia.
At least we're moving in the right direction now:
- If you live on less than $1 a day, rising food/water costs is a big deal.
- If you are in a land-locked country, desalination isn't an option.
- Desalination plants aren't built over night. In the meantime droughts would have consequences.
- If water became a major percentage of the cost of food, it would shift what crops are grown. Towards monoculture and away from diversity. The poor would especially be constrained.
- If we let our lawns die, we'll see more property damage due to soil erosion.
Replace them with native plants.
Xeriscaping is a fine option and when done right, it looks gorgeous...but doing it right is beyond the means of the average homeowner.
Personally, I have never maintained a lawn. Unlike my neighbors, I didn't cut down almost all of the native trees, so I have native landscaping, and it looks 100X better than flat, mowed lawn. It has wildflowers, and 'weeds' that flower and add to the beauty. I simply rake leaves in the fall, and keep my walkway clear to the house with stone from my property.
The way manicured lawns and homogeneous homes depicted in Tim Burton's 'Edward Scissorhands' film was spot on to me except in real life most condo communities would not allow the differently colored houses, or at least limit the palette. I grew up in Brooklyn, but found this out when I tried to change my carburetor in my mother-in-laws driveway, and I was told you cannot work on your car in your own driveway. No thanks to that life!
I know if I were buying a new house today, one of which had several hundreds of dollars per month in required water costs to keep the lawn alive, and one of which did not, I'm going with the latter one every time. Especially because you know the lawn is going to die on the former anyway at some point in the future when more severe water restrictions come into play and watering your lawn is (rightfully) prohibited.
The project wasn't cheap, but it wasn't that outrageously expensive, either, especially not compared to the cost of housing. We have to irrigate some, but nothing like what a lawn would need. And we have a nice outdoor space to hang out and entertain in, way nicer than concrete.
I've heard this before, and I've tried to imagine how that would work. The lawns I see in just about every city, most of them are surrounded by streets and usually sidewalks and sometimes curbs, too.
I try imagine what'd happen if the grass all just died and soil erosion started to kick in. Where's the soil going that's now going to erode? Is it liquefying in heavy rains and flowing up and away over the roads?
I just can't picture how lawns are doing all that much to prevent soil erosion, but would love a more detailed explanation.
I'm not sure if your attitude, that supply and demand fixes everything, is the most probable outcome.
Capitalism usefully values human life at circa zero when resources are limited, or when there are lots of humans available to feed in to your luxury goods supply chain.
See, no problem.
In these situations rectification can mean one of several things: Decapitating all who are or seem to be in power or inflating currency until being rich loses its meaning.
Obviously those two solutions are not very attractive to the capitalist market players, so there is an incentive to form structure with the goal of sustaining society. Though history shows capitalist markets are not good (enough) at forming that structure (thus their heads roll).
The poor don't get priced out and die as you write. A potential market attracts problem solvers, yes, to make a profit (not a dirty word always), and new solutions are found to new problems - that is technology. Sometimes it creates new problems, hopefully less of a problem, and the cycle continues. Look at Cuba for what happens when you are cut off from trade, don't allow individuals to decide what they want to be when they grow up, and don't utilize technology and your natural resources efficiently.
I don't think any system, Capitalism, Socialism, what have you, allow you to meet and greet 7 billion people and get to know them to determine what is best for each individual, so yes, I'll go with market forces, supply and demand unless you have the ability to create something from nothing. These things emerge for the most part, and are not fully intentional constructs.
That depends on how it is done, Venezuela showed how not to do it. I think a good option is to also provide commodities by non-profit companies run by the state and then use their costs plus a profit margin as a cap for commercial competition. If water, electricity and basic foods become too expensive people suffer and one finally will face revolts - which pure commercial entities are not necessarily incentivized to prevent (just pulling out of a market when the suffering becomes too great might be more cost efficient for them).
>one finally will face revolts -
One should not be cowed into instituting authoritarian measures. If there is a law-and-order issue, that should be dealt with directly by punishing violent protest.
I would have thought the most dangerous interventions were ones that tanked the economy and caused widespread poverty and desperation. But yeah, slightly reduced economic output sounds worse.
I do love the untestable nature of this assertion, too. The underlying claim here is that all interventions cause economic damage, even if we can't detect it. This is analogous to claiming that microwave ovens increase the risk of cancer, even though we can't detect it.
>I would have thought the most dangerous interventions were ones that tanked the economy and caused widespread poverty and desperation. But yeah, slightly reduced economic output sounds worse.
The compounding effect of slightly reduced economic growth adds up to a lot over the long term. Much more than a big one or two year drop in GDP. You can do the math and see what I mean.
>The underlying claim here is that all interventions cause economic damage, even if we can't detect it.
To clarify, you probably can detect it but like all economic phenomena, we don't have absolute proof that so-and-so economic policy was the cause of the damage. We only have a reasonable cause to believe it is the cause.
The problem is that the majority of the electorate are not well-versed in economics so unless the damage is extremely obvious they're not going to react properly and correct the harmful policy..
Source?
Is it possible the unfathomably complex economic machine will simply adapt to the subsidy? If the subsidy was limited to a couple liters per person per day (e.g., sufficient to ensure survival), could this be less reckless than letting people die of dehydration?
This is logical extrapolation, and it's more or less validated by empirical evidence. It's not scientifically proven because we're dealing with incredibly complex phenomena where there are always potential confounding factors, but a reasonable case can still be made based on real world events.
See Venezuela for an extreme example of the consequences of interventionism.
The theory that intervention does harm is based on the fact that this complex system we know as an economy exists the way it does because of carefully weighted decisions of millions of people, each trying to meet their own needs in the most efficient manner available to them that does not cause harm to others (since harmful action is generally illegal in a market economy [there are edge cases of courses, like misleading advertising]). That carefully wrought symphony of welfare-maximizing human interaction is crudely disrupted by authoritarianism any time a legislature signs a law in effect that forces millions to act a certain way, that they otherwise would not have, or refrain from engaging in some voluntary interaction that they otherwise would have engaged in.
An authoritarian intervention to force several million to do some action to benefit several other million is going to have innumerable unintended consequences, that could not possibly be a net positive for the world.
Not only possible: it happens all the time. There are very few industries in the US that aren't subsidized by the govt one way or another. Agriculture and oil being one of the best examples.
Any recent news from Venezuela.
Alternatively you could just subsidize water use up to some threshold and then charge more for every additional gallon.
Edit: initially, I didn't think your first plan works, but then I realized people need water to survive. You can charge anyone an arbitrary amount if the alternative is death by dehydration.
Your second doesn't appear to account for any cost increases except for directly used water.
This approach seems rather over-simplistic.
Unless you mean everyone will get only one cup of water. But then, the farmer will be fucked, because one cup of water is not enough to farm. And if the farmers can't farm, then you'll have another set of problems on your hand: NOT ENOUGH FOOD.
Saying that eventually we'll realize what the correct price for an asset should be is incredibly unhelpful if we've already done permanent damage to ourselves or our environment.
Anyway, wikipedia gives a bit more background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_pond
They mentioned so many silly subsidies and flat out craziness going on in the water markets that it made templated C++ code seem sane in comparison :/
It has heavily under utilized land, abundance of insolation and plenty of water that could be desalinated
If we grew crops in these areas, then both food and water would be a function of energy.
Sure you can dump additives in the ground and boost this years crop but that isn't going to create long term healthy soil which can support farming. Fertilizers are just another dependency on fossil fuels.
Water is certainly a part of terraforming a desert, but only a part of it.
Southern California is one such place where the desert meets the sea. It is not underutilized, but it is undergoing a massive drought.
While not every drought is going to lead to a civil war its a dramatic example of how the type of market adjustment you are talking about is not a smooth, painless experience.
It actually was civilization ending in affected areas of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas. And the massive migration that ensued had negative impacts around the country too.
We are now looking at a figure of over a pound per day for waste removal. The figure feels steep to me. If I could separate liquids and solids easily, then actually I could dump both in the garden. If you have the space then composting seems like a great solution. And would save flushing all that clean water down the toilet.
So in that context, it's absurd to think that £1 per day is steep to get all of those benefits. Back when I had a house our water bill was way more than you're paying, and I would've been willing to pay way more still. Having fresh safe water available at the flick of a tap whenever you need it, and all waste products disposed of without spreading contagion, is a modern day miracle.
Or perhaps the sewerage network should be replaced with a multi-purpose, transport network, or some other innovation.
You can process your own waste by pumping air basically through black water, all very good. But at the same time you can just throw a turd on the compost heap if you have the room, and nature will do its thing, and you'll build up your soil.
Education of good habits and some simple practice goes a long way.
Do you really need to live in a desert? Why would a human civilisation choose to live in a place that lacks an essential ingredient for life? It seems we choose to do this in deserts all over the world so there must be a reason.
And there is plenty of reason:
* historic: a lot of trade routes for sought-after goods went through deserts
* economic: rich fishing grounds just off the coast - see Western Sahara for an example (Boujdour and Dakhla being the main cities)
* economic: a lot of nomadic farmers live in deserts because they provide just enough food for the livestock
* politics: keep disputed areas occupied (Israel and Western Sahara as examples)
* politics: borders - these things tend keep people from freely moving to more hospitable areas
* nature: some think deserts are beautiful (count me in)
* spiritual: very low population density and a very tight connection to the forces of nature appeal to some people
So we can also try to adapt to salt water
There Dutch have practiced salt water farming and management for a long time. That said you can't drink salt water ;)
If there were a free market for water I would agree with you, nothing in the world will end a shortage of anything faster than a free market.
my RO has kinda low efficiency. 4 units of water in, i get 1 unit of clean drinkable water. 3 units are 'waste' (don't believe what socmed says, it's not dirty). the waste water is used for laundry, aquarium and gardening. my fishes and vegs are thriving.
to test purity, just plunge the ohm meter probes into a cup of ro water. if the resistence is in 1MOhm, it's pretty pure. mountain/mineral water bought from store is about 150kOhm. after drinking ro water for a while, store-bought water tastes slightly salty.
my house pumps water from ground (well-pump). for a family of 6, i need 1m3 of water. that's about half hour of 500W pump. an ro unit (40W) runs about 3 hours for 5gal bottle. so give or take, 1/2kWH or about 15KW per month. that's about $1 or $2 for my water need per month.
if i must buy raw water (such as living in an apartment), it's about $1 per m3, so about $30 per month; however, i get drinkable water too. ro units are portable. i saved $28/mo in water expense after moving from apartment.
flashing back from memory, i used to lug around 3 5gal water-cooler bottle from stores to my apartment every 3 days (i had 3 bottles). it was not pleasant and wasted time (go to store, queue, lug heavy bottles back)
ro unit has relay so you don't have to sit and wait for it to fill. it automatically cuts power to the pump when its internal clean-water-tank is full.
I'm also surprised that you use the waste water on your aquarium. In my experience, fish are MUCH more sensitive to water quality than humans are. This is particularly true for corals in saltwater tanks. In fact, many aquarium stores sell RO-purified water for fish tanks!
http://www.survivopedia.com/how-to-re-mineralize-water/
http://www.waterbenefitshealth.com/reverse-osmosis-water.htm...
What is true is that you should not drink hot water from pipes because hot water does leach metals, tapwater or otherwise.
I built a CVD lab that had aluminum deposition chambers plumbed into a DI water cooling system. The water was fed from a purifier that provided 18MΩ-cm water.
The water corroded the aluminum chamber cooling passages, leaving aluminum hydroxide behind. This conversion of metallic aluminum to a gelatinous, clogging hydroxide was what alerted us to the problem. Feed pressure (regulated) was fine, but flow rates fell and chambers heated up.
We had to wire brush all cooling channels, a total pain. We ran on tap water for a couple of weeks while we researched the issue, and had very little corrosion but had other issues (mineral deposits).
Finally, we reverted to 18MΩ water and added ~10% volume of ethylene glycol (antifreeze, basically). Once we "degraded" the water purity with glycol, our corrosion problems stopped. It was very counterintuitive.
Here's an industry source that has a little bit to say about the corrosive properties of pure water:
http://www.lytron.com/Tools-and-Technical-Reference/Applicat....
Given the industrial importance of the problem, I'm sure there are in-depth chemistry explanations. Haven't pursued them.
The collected water is basically similar to distilled water since it's formed directly from cloud/fog condensate. Consequently the default pH is ~6.8-7.0, which leaches lead from old plumbing. The federal government forced the city to add sodium hydroxide to increase the pH to ~8.0 and reduce corrosion.
Obviously city water has very little dissolved solids which in principle could have health implications re: Ca, Mg intake. Diet is normally the main source of these minerals, not clear how much additional risk is attributable to low mineral content of household water.
Most people here consider our water to be very palatable as is and are reluctant to have further modifiers applied to it. If any new federal requirements are attempted it's likely to elicit a lot of controversy and pushback.
I do see a possibility for it to be slightly more corrosive in pipes under specific circumstances, due to the lack of anything forming a passivating layer on the long run. But for teeth I have a hard time believing this.
i still have other teeth intact, no holes, despite using ro water for 8 years or so.
i think there's the cause of my holes. i had wisdom teeth very late in age. my brushing pattern wasn't sufficient. moreover, i was addicted to oatmeal power drink and didn't brush after. those sugary flakes seem to linger on my back jaws.
yudkin book, "pure, white and deadly" discusses this. children who drink sugary vs eating candies. same sugar; however, those eating candies get more cavities simply because candies stick between teeth ... think twinkies
on interesting part of the book is about the slave in sugar plantations. they did eat raw sugar; however, the slaves didn't get the same disastrous level of disease as the masters, who eat refined sugar.
after i got a son, we replaced hard water with ro water, including the thermos. well, baby is important, right?
over time (months), the stains are gone, the glass inside the thermos got cleaner.
so yeah, ro water being soft water probably cancels out the stains from hard water previously used.
on waste water for aquarium: it's because you misrepresent 'waste water'. water in an ro unit gets filtered four times (must go thru 4 different filters). the first is sediment, and the last is the ro membrane. can't remember the middles.
the sediment filter gets brown over time and need to be replaced (cheap, ~$1 per cylinder). so there's some impurities captured.
after last filter, the membrane, the water that fails to pass becomes 'waste water'. it's actually clear, tasteless, just didn't pass the ro membrane.
so ro waste water is actually cleaner than the input water. my fishes are okay with water from well. naturally, they should be okay too with water that's cleaner than well water.
on heavy metal, fishes are very sensitive to cu, not so much for pb. so if fishes are healthy and not jittery or die after a day, the water should be okay.
i also bought ro unit for my soft-water fishes: neon tetra. accidently, i found that human can drink ro water too ;)
I think hypothetically when the system is first installed it's supposed to be tested, but I don't put a lot of faith in that. Interestingly, in contrast to parent, it's pretty standard for the water to be totally unfiltered. Generally, you have an electric pump that cuts on any time the water pressure drops below a certain level to maintain it. Honestly I've no idea how much it costs me a month, but it's pretty nominal. My electric bill runs about $125/mo and most of that is the AC.
(In case you were wondering, sewer is dealt with via a septic system, which still amazes me. All your wastewater drains into a ~1000 gallon tank buried in the ground. At the top of the tank are field lines, which distribute water and drain it over a wide area. Solids are rapidly broken down by bacteria in the tank and quickly dissolve. These systems can be maintenance-free for 25 years, though the septic industry recommends you pump them every several years to remove "sludge" that slowly accumulates at the bottom.)
if you can get good water within 9 meters, that's great because standard pump can suck up to 9 meter down.
if you get salty, rusty, smelly colored water, drill deeper. 30m is pretty much max depth for home-use jet pump and normally you get clean water.
you can get deeper too and use bigger hole too; however, that's when you need permit. industry and hotel often do because they need a lot of water very fast.
water collected from pump can be stored in large tank above roof. then gravity plays it part delivering tank-water.
there's a switch on the tank that cuts electricity to the pump when a buoy inside the tank float up to a certain level. so, my switch is simpler water-level-based, not pressure-based.
from empty to full, my pump runs about 30 min. my pump is 1 horse power or about 750w. so for a month that would be 30 * 30/60 * 750w = 11.25 kwh.
for disposals, my house get two lines. one for washing, bathing, etc and that goes to city sewer. another is for human waste that goes to house ground sewage tank.
sewage tank is basically an unsealed empty space inside ground. bacteria decompose human waste and the water just get filtered by ground beneath. the tank gets full over time and sewer tank service can come and suck the sewage tank.
i'm not overly concerned about contaminants because my water source is at the back of my house which has big trees, not some deserted mines.
likewise, i never really question the safety of spring water bought from store. my crude experiment say that it's purer than spring water. that's should be sufficient.
as far as i know, spring water is just that, water from spring, untreated.
Why did you buy water at a store when you lived in an apt instead of using city water?
well water are already filtered by nature. the deeper the well, the cleaner the water is. think spring water, which is rain water filtered by hundred-meter rock hill.
water in apartment often smell funky and can't be trusted (management mix water from its own water-treatment with government water).
i know for sure how nasty the apartment water because i often pour pure-strength (not grocery-bought) HCl or NaOH (wait for a day so they don't cancel out) down the drain when it's clogged in hope they dissolve matters.
the pipe still sometimes gets clogged after harsh chemical treatments so lately i just use thick-liquid SLS (or use downy super in the USA, or any concentrated detergent) and pour hot water. it moves clog point down further the apartment pipe. slippery it is!
i used to have my sink flooded within 10 seconds. now it's after 60 seconds, leaving plenty of time to do quick washings.
that's history because now i live in a house.
it's not scientific, no replication, i did not even double blind myself and randomize. it's lazy, just for fun.
[1] http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2013/12/09/se...
It's cheaper to screw your neighbor than to build infrastructure.
Israel blames Palestinians for West Bank water shortage http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Israel-blames-Pal...
The story said that the pipes Israel is complaining about had been recently installed by the Americans and worked fine. The real issue is that Israel wants quid pro quo construction of water resources for unlawful settlements.
So, Israel is holding back water because Palestinians refuse to give up any more of their land to "settlers". Who said politics had triumphed?
EDIT: And from your linked article, the real issue gets a single mention "The Palestinian refusal to sit down with Israelis, means that the committee has not met for over five years." The article implies a broken pipe keeps everyone from getting water, when it's really a refusal to give any more land to illegal settlements.
http://www.btselem.org/water/discrimination_in_water_supply
And from the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-11101797
> Palestinians say they are prevented from using their own water resources by a belligerent military power, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to buy water from their occupiers at inflated prices.
> Israel allocates to its citizens, including those living in settlements in the West Bank deemed illegal under international law, between three and five times more water than the Palestinians.
But it would get bombed if it was built after not too long, like all good things. And that's assuming Israel let the Palestinians build one in the first place.
In fact Israel ships tons of goods every day.
Furthermore:
* a lot the land that is Israel today is bought.
* Jews that left neighbouring countries for Israel lost their property there vut this is never mentioned
* Plenty of people - say, American Japanese had their land, money, and property seized during the second world war - and they haven't received a dollar in compensation for it. That doesn't give them the right to do the same to other people.
How much of that price drop is due to lower energy prices? How sustainable is the power source?
Even with significant efficiency improvements (3X), shifting from local freshwater sources to desalination would have a massive energy requirements.[1] For such a bold claim ("the Desalination Era is Here"), this article has a rather lightweight examination of the environmental impacts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Energy_consumptio...
Sure. Just about all high-energy industries that don't use up limited resources are sustainable.
The desalination itself is sustainable. That's a different question from where the plant buys power, or where it buys parts, or whether the employees use gasoline to get to work and back. There's nothing tying it to buying sustainable power or unsustainable power; that's a significantly different question and while it could fit in the article, it's by no means necessary for the article.
Every multi-factor process has some limiting factor. Your overall capability is defined by that limiting factor (constraint). Ecology knows this as Leibig's Law of the Minimum.
There's a finite energy flux available on Earth. Excluding nuclear, there are solar, geothermal, and tidal fluxes. Nuclear introduces fission (uranium, plutonium, breeder), or fusion (yet unproven: hydrogen). The only reasonably unconstrained energy sources might be breeder or fusion, and I'm not sure either is long-term viable for other reasons (too long to go into now, though waste / "hygiene factors" play large).
Otherwise, solar is what we've got. 1 kW/m^2 surface flux, modulo capacity factor (0.3), spacing factor (~0.5), conversion efficiency (presently <0.2, single-layer max 0.47, infinite layer max, ~0.85).
The present roughly 17 TW of power consumed by humans would requite a nothin-but-solar region 800 km on a side.
Factor in increased energy for the 6 billion people not living in the US or EU, and increased energy demands of the 8 bilion people (7 presently, plus one more) who'd like to live at US-standard-of-living levels, and you're increasing demand significantly. 85 TW just for population and standard of living would require 3.1 million km^2 -- about a third of the land area of the United States, Australia, or the Sahara Desert. With nothing in it but solar plant. Wall to wall.
Oh, and 1/5 of that needs replacing. Every. Single. Year.
Solar panels, for numerous systemic reasons, degrade with time, and have about a 20 year effective life.
(Research on extending panel life strikes me as more useful than increasing efficiency or massive cost reductions.)
Keep in mind that there are other creatures on this planet and they've got their own demands for land use. We may rely on them in complex ways.
If you're building more power plant capacity than you can sustain, any industry relying on that power won't be sustainable.
2. "and 1/5 of [solar cells?] needs replacing. Every. Single. Year." Huh? The technical life length of solar cells are much higher, as you note yourself.
And certainly, solar cells are not that useful in a Scandinavian winter, because there is just not enough sun. But as it seems now, unless General Fusion or a similar fusion project works out, solar will in twenty++ years supply electricity to most people's normal energy use on the planet. (Few live up in the north.)
This is an odd statement. Don't most high energy industries use fossile fuels? Such fuels are non sustainable.
We are not yet at the point of such plentiful sustainable energy deployments that we can separate the notion of power utilization from source. High levels of utilization, in absence of specific plans to create sustainable energy supply, must be assumed to exploit non sustainable sources.
Sure we are, if we exclude processes that are only barely profitable and also locked in price. Anything else can pay the small premium to get non-fossil power. For a technology to be sustainable doesn't require that specific implementations buy green energy. If it's viable to do so, that's good enough.
(However, in practice the capital costs of a plant are such that it usually makes sense to use non-renewable power to let them run 24/7 instead of having them idle when there is no renewable power)
And I would imagine that desalination plants don't have to work around the clock. If they can be wound down and restarted relatively fast, they can track the sun, and only produce (and store) freshwater while that solar power is flowing in.
So, which part here is a "big if"?
If you're placing solar panels in a sand desert, you have to deal with sandstorms and shifting dunes.
The more land you use for solar panels or heliostats, the more difficult it becomes to find additional usable land.
> "Concerns about the impacts of the Ivanpah Solar thermal project led the developers to hire some 100 biologists and spend US$22 million caring for the tortoises on or near the site during construction."
Of course, because Fate is an arsehole, they got the construction underway, and the next year the drought broke. If the drought hadn't broken, people wouldn't be so quick to condemn the desal plant...
Oil (and such and such) will last a 100+ years and obviously won't destroy the planet in that time.
I'd call that sustainable.
And given it's just a "power source", at any time we could swap it out for X, Y, Z.
Plus they specifically talk about efficiencies in the article?
Not sure your point at all?
I haven't seen huge drops in energy cost across the world? Electricity seems the same or more than the 1990s?
It is not at all obvious that it won't.
Black flag weather
This is just trading water now for more CO2 added to the atmosphere, worsening the underlying problem.
http://www.delek-group.com/Holdings/EnergyInfrastructure/Del...
Average rainfall in Tel Aviv - 528mm/year, that's about 50mm less than Jerusalem - and London. Now, a lot of the country is a desert, but even Beersheba gets an average of 400mm. Only the far south is really dry.
Not that Israel didn't need its desalination system, it might be the only good and/or competent thing our government has done in recent years, but it's not a very dry country in its inhabited areas.
This article mentions the brine "is just pumped back into the Mediterranean", but don't they need to be concerned about killing fisheries?
Documents are in PDF form
Key Issues in Seawater Desalination in California: Marine Impacts http://pacinst.org/app/uploads/2013/12/desal-marine-imapcts-...
Desalination Plants: Potential impacts of brine discharge on marine life ftp://ftp.pcouncil.org/pub/Salmon%20EFH/338-Danoun_2007.pdf
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-dying-of-th...
Nobody wants to do that, and there are all sorts of complex legal issues around water rights. But push come to shove, California could survive just fine without its agricultural sector.
If food were grown by magic, without employing any people, and it could all be sold at cost, it would contribute 0% to the state's economy. Does that mean that it would make economic sense to immediately stop growing all that food? Of course not! The fact that growing food is so cheap is a good thing!
My quick calculation is the biggest of these desal plants would only feed 25,000 acres of almonds. There are 1M acres +/- of almonds in California, if we wanted to double nut protein production in California (the leading global exporter of almonds) you would need about 50 of the plants described not just three.
Who wants to build the giga-desal plant to feed the Clifton Court Forebay?
Pinch off ag in enough places, and you'll find it's got some underappreciated benefits.
The alternatives to crops being raised in Calfornia aren't limited just to the lost ag revenue, but to the expense of transporting in food, the loss of fresh fruits and vegetables (California specialises in "table" crops (vegetables), fruit, and grapes especially, knock-on effects of worsened nutrition and reduced food quality, price increases resulting from withdrawal of California ag land, etc.
Simply figuring out where you'd source that food from becomes problematic. Seattle is the only West Coast port with significant capacity and growing regions near it (Portland might do in a squeeze), plus growing area. There's no assurance that California crops, particularly greens and vegetables, would be suited to more northern climates and growing conditions, though adaptations might be made.
And there's considerable room for adjustment in California's crop mix. No need to grow alfalfa in the desert, as a perennial crop, that's easy to fallow in dry years. Tree crops are multi-decadal investments, and will not simply fail to bear fruit without water, but will die -- one of the real crimes of the almond-planting spree around the state. You lose cropping flexibility.
(There's a study I turned up some months back, either IRS or Federal Reserve, on tree crop asset lifetimes -- some bearing orange trees in Southern California are approaching or over 300 years old.)
A straight market-based analysis does poorly.
Instead these will need to be shipped from overseas by marine transport which is an intense source of pollution.
You can grow carrots and strawberries almost anywhere in the US. Peaches need things a bit warmer, but again most of the US is fine.
It makes sense to shift water intensive crop production to states with water.
This is a superficial analysis. It assumes that California's agriculture could be easily replaced. Not to mention that whatever replaces it may face the same issue with desalination. In actuality the entire country is dependent on California agriculture to a large extent and "The loss of California’s output would create a dire situation for at least a decade."[1]
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2...
What if your current comparative advantage gets lost due to development elsewhere? Your exports will no longer earn you the foreign currency you require to import food (look at Venuzvela for a recent example or the disaster of Haiti where IMF prescribed food imports or India's famines of the 1960s)
This is the reason nations heavily subsidize agriculture even when they can rely purely on imports.
According to one source 1 ton of wheat is 216,000 gallons of water.
Beef requires considerably more water per pound, at least 10 times as much and the documented source says much more.
Beef and other red meats are also imported as a rule. Turkey and chicken, which require less water, are grown domestically.
http://www.vegsource.com/articles/pimentel_water.htm
For many of the Middle Eastern countries with water shortages, importing grains and red meats to conserve on water seems like a good strategy.
Also, technology from carbon nano-tubules may make the desalination if much cheaper.
Couple this technology with ever-improving solar technology which is likely to be efficient in Israel's Negev Desert and this promises to be a water technology with no consumables.
Thus, wheat imports water at $0.15 cents per cubic meter.
Also, never saw many cattle grazing in Jordan or Israel. But there is a fair amount of grains grown in Eshcalon and by Lake of Galilee.
http://www.smartpeoplepodcast.com/2015/10/26/episode-214-set...
tldr; water was used as an excuse by the British to limit immigration to Israel, so from the earliest onset of the formation of Israel, Israel has been trying to tackle the problem of water use inefficiency.
http://www.lacsd.org/waterreuse/
I guess in many areas it is less urgent so it doesn't get done.
The Groundwater Replenishment System (GWRS) is the world's largest system for indirect potable reuse. The system takes highly treated wastewater that would have previously been discharged into the Pacific Ocean and purifies it using a three-step advanced treatment process.
Our current desalination capacity, with 2 plants, amount to only 100 million gallons per day which currently meets 25% of our needs [1].
[1] https://www.pub.gov.sg/watersupply/fournationaltaps/desalina...
"Desalination used to be an expensive energy hog, but the kind of advanced technologies being employed at Sorek have been a game changer. Water produced by desalination costs just a third of what it did in the 1990s. Sorek can produce a thousand liters of drinking water for 58 cents. Israeli households pay about US$30 a month for their water — similar to households in most U.S. cities, and far less than Las Vegas (US$47) or Los Angeles (US$58)."
But I saw nothing about where the energy comes from, the type of source, the scale. I'd like to compare this with local proposals, etc.
One of the biggest DeSal issues is cost of conversion and source, proximity of source, etc. play a huge factor.
But if we must, I suspect the supply side (of electricity) I suspect most new supplies in Israel are solar PV located in the Negev, since peak demand there correlates with sun.
And what sort of local proposals are you imagining as alternatives to desalination?
In the Monterey Bay Area, one proposal by a local oceanographer/hydro geologist was at Moss Landing where there is a power plant and could provide (with pumping/piping, etc) for both Monterey and Santa Cruz county.
Santa Cruz, being ... polite ... unable to play well with others, was pushing their own thing which would disrupt a good part of the town, had no local power generation, and would require extra pumps, storage, and what not all over town. Something in the $100s of millions for a county of < 250k. The regional approach makes way more sense, but local politics and all.
That and various energy efficiency improvements.
Much of this comes down to questions of "what are the energy costs" and "how much energy can we supply".
I'm not a huge fan of desal generally, especially where it's reliant on fossil-fuel energy. On the other hand, it actually plays into another area I've had some interest in -- seawater-based Fischer-Tropsh fuel synthesis (SFTFS). That's the task of taking seawater, separating carbon from it (mostly in the form of dissolved carbonate and bicarbonate -- the dissolved CO2 fraction is small), and electrolysis to split out hydrogen.
That problem divides into a few parts:
1. Electrolysis of hydrogen. Essentially a solved problem at large scales. Example: nuclear powered submarines replenish their oxygen supply through electrolysis (I'm not sure what they do with the hydrogen resulting). Since water is 89% oxygen by weight, the amount of water you need to process here is small. There's an energy cost (more below).
2. Removing carbonate & bicarbonate from seawater. Here the fraction is far smaller -- a few fractions of a percent by weight. The reason you're looking at seawater is because energetically it's far easier than getting CO2 from air. And yes, seawater is also necessary. The probme here is getting enough water -- you've got to process tremendous volumes.
3. Synthesising hydrocarbons from this (that's the Fischer-Tropsh bit). Fairly well established, and exothermic to boot, so it doesn't cost energy.
4. Energy input. You only get out about 60% of what you put in to split out hydrogen. That normally isn't a very good bargain except for a few useful things about hydrocarbons, below.
The upshot is that desal and SFTFS have a few things in common: taking in gobs of water, purifying that so you don't gum up the works, and applying fairly hefty amounts of energy to it.
What desal offers is a proving ground for developing that seawater handling capability, at scale, and in particular the filtration parts. It would also be possible to combine the processing (though there might be other reasons for not doing so). In theory, you'd ingest seawater, electrolise some of it for hydrogen, capture the carbonate/bicarbonate (which aren't of interest for tapwater), feed your C & H to the FT synthesis process, and continue with the remainder of the water to your desal system.
Why bother making hydrocarbons? Because they're damned useful. Renewable energy has advantages, but it doesn't store or transport well. Synthesized hydrocarbons would be precise (and in fact, more precise) analogs of methane, petrol, kerosene (a/k/a jet fuel), and deisel. For some applications, including standby generation, gas heat, some industrial processes, and powered air and marine transport, they're about the only real viable option. I suspect they may continue to see use in private / passenger transport as well, and possibly rail (electrification is an option, but has challenges). There are industrial processes which also utilise gas and oil feedstocks, notably Haber-Bosh nitrogen fixation (though alternate processes might emerge).
Even if we end up with a small fraction of total energy coming from hydrocarbons (marine and air would be ~12% of the present total), the process could prove quite useful.
Large-scale desal could be a proving ground for related technologies.
> Sorek can produce a thousand liters of drinking water for 58 cents.
For comparison, the lowest marginal rate for water in a single-family residential unit in San Francisco costs $4.86/ccf or ~$1.72 per thousand liters. San Francisco has an excellent water supply, and they nonetheless charge about three times the cost of desalinated water in Israel.
This obviously glosses over a bunch of things (cost of maintenance of the SF water system, the fact that SF charges quite a lot of money for the privilege of having a water meter, the capital cost of the desalination plant (I don't know whether that's amortized in the 58 cent figure)), but still, desalination isn't terribly expensive.
I suspect the main issues blocking large-scale desalination in the US are:
- Lead time. Desalination looks great during a drought, but it looks useless in wet years, and it takes longer than a typical drought to get it up and running.
- Environmental impacts. You have to build the intake and brine discharge systems, and getting that through environmental review might be complicated.
The first point could be addressed to some extent by running the plant even in surplus years and using it for groundwater recharge.
I've heard this brine can have a pretty negative ecological impact, I wonder how that could be mitigated.
"The brine discharge from the plant will be piped 100 miles north through Jordan to replenish the Dead Sea"
The ocean is say 99 parts water and 1 part stuff. We take out 1 part water and .01 parts stuff, keep the water, then put the .01 parts stuff back. Doesn't seem to really change the ocean concentration? I guess maybe if dumped too close to shore it could make a brine slick?
> Desalination processes produce large quantities of brine, possibly at above ambient temperature, and contain residues of pretreatment and cleaning chemicals, their reaction byproducts and heavy metals due to corrosion.[45] Chemical pretreatment and cleaning are a necessity in most desalination plants, which typically includes prevention of biofouling, scaling, foaming and corrosion in thermal plants, and of biofouling, suspended solids and scale deposits in membrane plants.[46]
> To limit the environmental impact of returning the brine to the ocean, ...
> Brine is denser than seawater and therefore sinks to the ocean bottom and can damage the ecosystem. Careful reintroduction can minimize this problem. Typical ocean conditions allow for rapid dilution, thereby minimizing harm.
What's an example of not typical?
Here's an article which points out that the Arabian Gulf is shallow, with low circulation rates and high evaporation rates which make it naturally saltier. That, combined with the damming of freshwater and increasing number of desal plants places a limit on to how much it can be use as a water source: http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/environment/desalina...
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ilana_Berman-Frank/publ...
> Minimizing the plant's environmental impact: Pipe jacking .... Other measures: the potential impacts of the Sorek Plant's operation on the environment were thoroughly assessed, and appropriate measures were taken to prevent, minimize and mitigate these. The following are some highlights of these measures:
> – The feed water pumping station is located far (2,400 meters) from the coastline, and feed water flows by gravity to the on-site pumping station.
> – Entrainment and impingement effects at the intake system are minimized, thus minimizing the consumption of electricity and chemicals (especially CO2) and reducing the emission of related greenhouse gases, air pollutants and noise.
> – Environmentally-friendly antiscalants, and inorganic and treatable cleaning solutions, are used.
> – Brine is discharged back to the sea approximately 2 kilometers offshore, and at a depth of 20 meters through a specially designed outfall system (diffusers) that enhances quick brine dilution to the seawater body. The critical parameters of the brine disposal are monitored online, 24/7.
> – The plant is equipped with a special sludge treatment system to treat any effluents generated in the process. This system removes all suspended matter and only clear water is discharged to the sea.
From http://www.ide-tech.com/blog/b_case_study/sorek-project/ assume 26,000 m³/hour of brine outflow.
According to http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/evaporation-water-surface-... , 1000 sq. meters of water surface evaporates under 500 kg/hour.
26,000 m³ = 26,000,000 kg => 52,000,000 sq. meters are needed or 52 sq. km.
However, as the salinity increases, the evaporation rate decreases. If I read http://www.actis.com.au/evaporation_rate_of_brines.pdf correctly, a saturated saline needs almost 50% more area for the same evaporation rate.
So, call it 75 sq. km. for your evaporation pan/sea.
Oh, and double it because night-time. And add more safety factor because of rain. Perhaps 200 sq. km will do?
That's a huge area.
As a quick check, some of the storm waves in the eastern Med. can be 5 meters high - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/03783839859... . So you're talking about some massive walls. To say nothing of redundancy, since you don't want the sea to breach a nearly full basin of salt.
Note that the salt in seawater is actually about 3.5%. So what happens is you suck up a bunch of seawater, which is pretty easy to mitigate negative effects from, and then you have an outflow of 7% salinity seawater, which you have to be somewhat careful with. Ignoring power usage, the US draws something like ten thousand cubic meters per second of water for its use. So a single plant that is supplying water for, say, only a million people might be expected to discharge a volume of water brine that was on the order of 1 million cubic meters a day. The ocean is big, but it would be extremely costly to discharge that amount of brine into the ocean in a way that wouldn't create a very large persistently briny volume near the discharge point. Also, that discharge point is almost certainly going to be near to the shore, which means that it will impact ocean life.
Just setup a pump to pull a ton of sea water into the plant and deposit back out off shore. Slowly inject the brine into the stream and it would be instantly diluted.
My understanding is that the brine you get from desalination is only slightly more salty than sea water. It might take 20 gals of sea water to prosuce one gallon of desalinated water.
This article was a hard read due to lack of editing. I hope they update it with fewer typos and cut and paste errors. Peer review people, at least.
The Tampa Bay Desalination Plant produces 25 million gallons per day of drinking water to provide 10% of the region's needs. [1]
Americas’ largest seawater desalination plant provides 50 million gallons (189 million liters) of drinking water for the San Diego area each day - 8% of needs
[1] http://www.tampabaywater.org/tampa-bay-seawater-desalination...
[2] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/11/02/world/florida-fl...
In Los Angeles, the DWP tier 1 retail price for a cubic foot is very, very roughly 5 cents or roughly $1.75 for 1000 liters. And DWP's prices are going up (for a host of reasons).
To compare them, it would have to be the price someone pays to obtain a kilolitre of untreated water at source.
California seems to have some water transfers, and I found a report listing prices from $50-$550/acre-foot, or ~1.25 million L (2012 [1])
That would give an upper bound of (550/1250) $0.44/kilolitre at source.
From the DWP FAQ:
"The Sewer Service Charge (SSC) is based on metered water use"
https://www.ladwp.com/ladwp/faces/wcnav_externalId/c-cs-sewe...
Bottled water is so incredibly expensive that it really doesn't matter where the water in it comes from -- the production cost of the water in the bottle itself is insignificant compared to the retail price of that bottle.
Besides, it's not like you can water lawns with seawater. When you're at the point where you're having to rely on desalinated water to drink, you're going to need to use it on your lawn as well (if you want to have a lawn).
Most countries have leaky water around pipes. UK lose around 20%, US is a little above 10%. Are the any innovation that we can shrink this number? I dont see why this cant be within 98%+ region. What is stopping it?
I do know of one case (not in London) where complaints about the quality of a house's water led to the discovery that it was, via a somewhat convoluted plumbing route, still drawing water from the nearby river via Roman pipework.
If you can find a leak, stopping it is usually straightforward, but on a colossal, heterogeneous and patchily documented pipe network like the UK's, the best you can do is patch it up as you go along.
To what extent the current situation in Syria influenced by environmental changes, I wonder?
Unemployed farmers -> Social instability -> Civil Unrest -> War?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-has...
When you can reclaim most of you water and ensure quality control throughout the system you simplify it, have one water feed for residential use, and usually another for agriculture and industry. Reclaimed water even drinking quality is usually not put back into the tap because the cost of ensuring water quality make it unfavourable, it's used for agriculture and industrial uses, when it ends up again as drinking water it's often as filtered bottle water simply because you can then transfer the cost of the additional water quality control to the industrial users.
Shouldn't this be considered having in mind that we're bringing water to.. where it's not supposed to exist, hence influencing a micro climate and making climate changes?
The article says Israel needs (or needed?) 1.9Gm³/year (60 kiloliters per second, 60kℓ/s) of water, of which it got 1.5Gm³/year (48kℓ/s) from natural sources; but now (or when the plants opened?) it gets 127Mm³/year from the 2005 Ashkelon desal plant, 140Mm³/year from the 2009 Hadera desal plant, and 150Mm³/year from the new Sorek plant. These total 417Mm³/year (13kℓ/s), but the article says Israel's current total is 600Mm³/year (19kℓ/s) from desalination plants, which is more than 417. Also, it says, Israel now gets 55% of its domestic water from desalination. But 55% of 60kℓ/s is 33kℓ/s, which is 14kℓ/s more than the 19kℓ/s it says Israel gets from desalination. I suspect there's some confusing mixing of categories here leading to these numbers not adding up properly.
The other really crucial questions are about capex and opex. How much do these plants cost to build, and how much do they cost to run? How much of that is the energy cost?
They give the figure that the Sorek plant's reverse osmosis runs at 70 atmospheres (7.1 MPa; fucking Christ on a stick, why do people keep inventing new non-SI units?) which means that each liter of output water requires 7.1kJ of mechanical energy to force it through the membrane. There are presumably some other energy costs, but that may be the bulk of it. At US$100/MWh (US$28/GJ; fucking non-SI units again), which is a reasonable ballpark for the levelized cost of electrical energy, that's about 200 μUS$/ℓ or 200 US$/Mℓ. Irrigation water is commonly quoted in US$ per acre foot in the US; this is US$240 per acre foot, which would be a very competitive cost.
But it says the cost is US$0.58/kℓ, which is 580 US$/Mℓ or US$715/acre foot, about three times the cost of the mechanical energy and high enough that many crops are uneconomical. It is crucial to understand where that extra cost is coming from.
One of the comments on the Ensia version of the story claims that the new Carlsbad desal plant is selling its water for US$2000/acre foot. I don't know if that's true, but it's about 150% higher than the projected costs.
Links, in case the Scientific American web site is lost:
Original article: http://ensia.com/features/how-a-new-source-of-water-is-helpi...
Bar-Zeev et al.'s article about their bioflocculation anti-biofouling prefiltering apparatus: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236137883_Biofloccu... DOI: 10.1016/j.watres.2013.03.013
"Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought": http://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3241.abstract doi: 10.1073/pnas.1421533112
California uses 1/26 millionth's of the ocean's volume per year (50bn m^3 out of 1.3 bn km^3). So a drop is quite right! According to [1], it takes 87 mi^3 (~320km^3) to raise the ocean level by 1mm. You'd need several Cali's worth of water use just to negate to that 1mm rise. And that's assuming you destroy the water after use, which basically does not happen.
If you _could_ destroy the water (freeze it all or fuse it all or something) it'd still take a million years to use it up.
But I'd take a wild guess that by the time we get to that level of terraforming, we can build solar reflectors and just prevent the warming in the first place. Desal'ing all that water is going to require massive amounts of power (big fusion plants) plus all sorts of machinery. Tossing a bunch of mirrors into space seems easier to my engineering-ignorant mind.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Watercyc...
Couldn't solar or nuclear power allow for desalination pretty easily in countries like these?
Is this a serious question?