An Australian startup is “growing” water for California
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
Doesn't look like enough water to be relevant. It takes ~100x as much water to grow a tomato as ends up in the final tomato. [1]
[1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7d92/40efa5321ba0e2a8596894...
Analysis depth level 1: Where are the prices coming from? What are the incentives for setting them the way they are currently set? What alteration of those incentives would politically-powerful capital holders accept?
Analysis depth level 2: Is market allocation moral for resources that are needed both for everyone to survive and for a small group of people to become wealthier? How does that analysis change as survival for the non-wealthy becomes more difficult?
You can go deeper, of course. Many have. But just thinking about a few of these questions leads to far more cogent commentary than "capitalism isn't the issue".
Ironically water prices are largely set by government bodies that created water projects (eg, Bureau of Reclamation which made most of the huge dams in the west, various California water boards). Much of it was knowingly, intentionally priced below the cost to deliver it for various political reasons. If you want to read an in-depth account of that, I suggest "Cadillac Desert".
>"capitalism isn't the issue"
In this case, it's _at most_ part of the problem. Government policies delivered artificially cheap water. Capitalism responded to that incentive. Of course people then fight to maintain those policies, so in that sense one could blame capitalism.
>This analysis is so shallow it's practically Libertarian.
Said the guy who has done no actual analysis, and instead just asked questions. I think we've reached a second peak of HN here.
> Said the guy who has done no actual analysis, and instead just asked questions. I think we've reached a second peak of HN here.
Ah, you've misunderstood the point of my post. It wasn't to argue against them. It was to point out that what they presented isn't an argument.
For what it's worth, I don't even disagree with "capitalism isn't the issue". I think a big issue is, as my questions would lead you find if you kept exploring, that people mistake economic and political systems for moral ones. Capitalism isn't moral. Or immoral. It's amoral. As such, it's not a valid answer when raising moral questions. Capitalism isn't the problem. The problem is that people accept "capitalism" as an excuse for immoral behavior.
My rhetorical goal is to get the person I replied to to expand their thinking. Spend less time quoting the Libertarian party and their conflation of profit and morality. Think about how systems interact with each other when applied broadly. Think about whether the systems in use are even appropriate for your goals. And above all, to remember that nothing ever has only one "the problem".
Almond exports (revenue <$11B) use as much water as the cities of LA and SF combined (GDP ~$1T). Has it occurred to you to wonder why the input costs of water to almond exporters doesn't capture the fact this dramatic difference in output? There's no "capitalist" setup in which growing almonds in CA would be feasible, because water prices and rights are heavily controlled.
Capitalism is far from a panacea, but the idea that it's causing CA's water woes is ludicrous. This is some real subreddit-full-of-college-freshmen energy
Either water is so abundant that it's not worth capturing the water released from tomato processing, or it's so rare that it's not worth growing tomatoes.
Is that a problem? If it takes 100 times as much water to grow as ends up in the final tomato, then that implies that the other 99 parts went back into the local environment, doesn't it? I would have naively assumed that the local ecology was really only upset when people export water containing products across the country
But ultimately no, the water doesn't just disappear forever. It just moves to a new location. That is, unless you are doing things that literally split the bonds of the molecules and revert it from being water at all. But that's a whole other level of discussion.
(And it's why I am against any form of energy that requires splitting water to create hydrogen. I would much rather we just put our efforts into going to space to collect the hydrogen there instead. Taking it from sea water is, in my honest opinion; extremely foolish.)
Yes, I understand that if you combust hydrogen in just a basic oxygen reaction you will get water; but not everything is as basic as that. Plus, the atmosphere itself is not "just oxygen". There is also nitrogen, methane, and more I am not sure of which to list here; but they are there.
In fact, I am so sure of my opinion on this, I just did a quick google search on the idea of "does combusting hydrogen always produce water" to be as fair as possible to all parties.
And the answer is no. At least according to these people, and other links can be found as well if you use the same search term. https://www.cleanegroup.org/hydrogen-hype-in-the-air/#:~:tex....
Sorry if I seem pedantic, but I am used to these sorts of things being the case, because society has a bad habit of misleading the public to get them on board with 'new' ideas.
Hence my commentary.
Here is an excerpt: "The bad news is that H2 combustion can produce dangerously high levels of nitrogen oxide (NOx). Two European studies have found that burning hydrogen-enriched natural gas in an industrial setting can lead to NOx emissions up to six times that of methane (the most common element in natural gas mixes).[17],[18] There are numerous other studies in the scientific literature about the difficulties of controlling NOx emissions from H2 combustion in various industrial applications."
I highly suggest every single person who supports Hydrogen as a fuel source to consider what they are claiming in the link provided. They provide many sources for their claims, and I might add... it makes sense. Unlike "All hydrogen combustion in atmosphere produces only water."
Now to be fair to you all, I would have been better off to use the Nitrogen Oxide example, but to be quite honest, I kind of missed that part too. Hence my example using hydrogen peroxide instead, since technically a oxygen rich environment could theoretically produce it (i think).
And just in case that's not a good enough source for whoever: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2021/ea/d1ea00037....
So I did some digging, because my brain was still going "no this is wrong". And seems the Clean Energy Group has the details we all want to see on this. Assuming they are a legitimate source of information; the answer is no it doesn't.
And just in case that's not a good enough source, here: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2021/ea/d1ea00037....
growing tomatoes also splits water to create hydrocarbons, doesn't it? That's where the hydrogen in organic matter comes from, right?
That's why you have places with incredible evaporation and far less rainfall over water, if the water stayed local you'd expect that rainfall and evaporation to be roughly the same over large lakes and ocean, however that is not the case locally.
They're definitely not free. They need to be purchased and maintained. A bot would be a significant initial investment, compared to a human.
But after having worked in a automated environment where the work force was reduced to minimal required human staff; I can tell you that maintenance is (for some) a last resort. Also, a lot of these sorts of things can have stuff like subsidies for them, which means the tax payer is paying for it, not the company.
Finally, sometimes employers just don't want to have to deal with human workers. Sometimes, it's more worth it to just have to deal with machines that don't talk back, just do their work (usually) and don't require benefits, kickbacks, and other such things.
A human is an ongoing cost. A machine is as well, but not quite as much of one; depending on the situation.
Finally. You could always just have a bot that maintains the bots.
Edit: One other thing. Bots don't show up late for work, or require rest as much as humans. So their potential profit margin is higher.
Why not outdoor hydroponics? After all conventional soil based vegetables grow outdoors. You get free light too. Obviously it doesn't work in cold weather, but in temperate zones it should.
I suspect the hydroponic equipment and the skilled labor to build and maintain it is the biggest cost issue.
However, "real" hydroponic systems need to be protected from rain, I think, because rainwater would dilute the nutrient solution if it leaks into the system.
The question is: can we recapture some of the water that would have otherwise been wasted in the tomato processing/ketchup producing step?
If we can, and as long as doing so doesn't take undue resources (electricity, etc.), then it makes sense to capture the water, right?
Whether it's worth capturing depends on how much water is worth. At 100x it's very hard to have a water price low enough that growing tomatoes is cost effective but high enough that it's worth putting in this kind of effort to recapture 1% of the water from their production.
(Part of the problem here of course is that agricultural water is rarely traditionally "priced")
But to be fair the reporter is citing the company's CEO...
"We like to say that, in simple terms, we grow water," said Terry Paule, co-founder and CEO of Australia-based Botanical Water Technologies.
If California had a functional government, seasonal drought wouldn't be an issue. https://www.gov.il/en/departments/general/project-water-desa...
"In order to comply with the desalination plan set out by the cabinet, 5 desalination plants were constructed over the years, in Ashkelon (2005), Palmachim (2007), Hadera (2009), Sorek (2013) and Ashdod (2015), with total production capabilities of some 585 million m3."
The problem is price. From the wiki[1]:
> "The cost of water from the plant will be $100 to $200 more per acre-foot than recycled water (approximately 0.045 cents per gallon), $1,000 to $1,100 more than reservoir water (approx. 0.32 cents per gallon), but $100 to $200 less than importing water from outside the county. As of April 2015, San Diego County imported 90% of its water."
Considering SD imports so much water, this is a big win. But still, this one plant cost nearly $1b to complete, and only provides 7% of the potable water for San Diego County. It's a non-trivial cost to use Desal water vs recycling efforts and loss prevention from reservoirs.
Edit: 1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsba... 2- https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/29/us/san-diego-drinking-wat...
San Diego City budget is $5 billion: https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/fy23ab_v1execut...
San Diego County budget is $7 billion: https://www.sandiegocounty.gov/content/sdc/openbudget/en/hom...
This seems that if they needed to they could do it.
For inland california, this isn't the case since pumping costs don't make it so clear cut cost wise. Reclamation efforts like the OP company, are a really big deal because they are one of those rare "easy-wins".
If San Diego needed to then they probably could, but this is generally one of the most expensive options. It is politically impossible, but it would probably be cheaper to pump water from the Klamath to San Diego than to extract it via desalinization.
It cites a hit piece from Fox News Radio with equally confusing numbers.
Anyway, the Fox article says it will cost $1000-1400 (or maybe $1500 because they inflate the number as they go) per acre foot. At $1500, that's 0.46 cents per gallon, which is about 10-15x more than people currently pay to flood irrigate fields. Flood irrigation is notoriously wasteful.
Anyway, tap water costs about 1 cent per gallon in San Jose. These desalination plants could affordably provide water for residential use.
Parts of California produce more solar power than can be used at that time during parts of the day - could that extra electricity be used for desalination?