We need more water than rain can provide: refilling rivers with desalination
caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
Why are we not planting more forests? Amazon was planted by natives several thousand years ago. "Primitives" with hand tools, and we, with all the technology and fossil fuels, cannot/will not?
Forget technology. Find place [4][5][6], plant seeds.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biotic_pump
[1] https://www.calacademy.org/explore-science/rainforest-makes-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene#Biodiversity
[3] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-permaculture-f...
[4] hhttps://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
[5] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
[6] https://climatehealers.org/the-science/animal-agriculture-po...
Replanting native forests in deforested environments also requires desalination.
Probably not everywhere. If biotic pump theory is correct, you could (for example) reforest at the coast, with the forest there established then progress inland, without expensive desalination / water distribution technologies.
Also, desalination is largely a function of energy, as solar falls in price, so does the cost of desalination.
https://terraformation.com/blog/solar-powered-desalination-r...
Really? What was there when the natives first arrived? Is there somewhere I can read more about this stupendous continental scale triumph of pre-modern environmental engineering?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_America#Ama...
> Terra preta soils are found mainly in the Brazilian Amazon, where Sombroek et al.[21] estimate that they cover at least 0.1 to 0.3%, or 6,300 to 18,900 square kilometres (2,400 to 7,300 sq mi) of low forested Amazonia;[1] but others estimate this surface at 10.0% or more (twice the area of Great Britain).[
they don't transmute nitrogen and silicon into hydrogen
Is a well known fact that forests build rivers
Even better, they turn CO2 into water. Many of our problems would be solved having much more plants and algae around, but strictly protecting more lands as forests is the simple solution that nobody wants to try (and making the laws much harder against arsonists that are releasing CO2 in massive amounts just for fun and profit would be a big step in the right direction).
> Not. Water is a chemical byproduct of the Photosynthesis. Each time a plant cell uses the sun is making 3 molecules of water by cycle. ...
> Even better, they turn CO2 into water.
this is backwards
photosynthesis destroys a molecule of water per ch₂o unit produced, as well as a molecule of co₂
it doesn't create water, from co₂ or from anything else
this should be obvious because there is no 'h' in 'co₂' but there is in, for example, glucose, c₆h₁₆o₆
you can't produce hydrogen from carbon and oxygen without nuclear reactions, which are not involved in photosynthesis
plants don't have significant sources of hydrogen for photosynthesis other than water
of course it's circular; when the carbohydrates are metabolized, the water is produced again, so it's not as if the water is destroyed permanently, but it's not created either
this is why there are no rain forests in the middle of the sahara, because plants depend on rainfall for their water (or occasionally fog)
indeed, in semiarid deserts one of the biggest drains on subterranean aquifers is often trees such as salt cedars, because like most plants, they lose much more water through transpiration than they consume in photosynthesis
people like you that want to 'make laws much harder' while getting the basic causality backwards scare me
you are calling for violent enforcement of your ignorant errors, the kind of institutionalized violence that produced the greatest atrocities of the 20th century, such as the four pests campaign in the great leap forward
i hope you are trolling
Well, I could be wrong or mixing things. I studied extensively the entire plant metabolism many years ago and I don't remember by heart all the hairy details but I remember that plants released water in the Calvin cycle and also in the respiration, If I'm not wrong. So some water is consumed by day, then this water is recycled by night and some water is released also 24 hours a day in a different cycle.
This is probably not the place to show the full chemical horror, but feel free to copy it here and do the math for me if you want.
> you are calling for violent enforcement of your ignorant errors
I want arsonists in jail. Punching them in the face for boycotting our survival as species is optional but very tempting. You can call me Mao or ignorant for this. I don't care.
you appear to be blaming climate change on swidden agriculturalists doing what they've been doing for millennia
Apparently it's more cost effective to destroy everything to plant palm for oil to manufacture our unhealthy processed "food"
Yeah. This blog post spends a lot of words on the idea of large-scale desalination, but it's closer to a child's blueprint of a spaceship than even a rough proposal for a viable engineering project.
The Carlsbad Desalination Plant near San Diego was completed a few years ago and is now operational. It is the largest, most technologically-advanced and energy-efficient desalination plant in the United States. It is approximately the best we can do right now for large-scale desalination.
It cost about $1 billion to construct, about $50 million per year to operate, and produces about 150 acre-feet of fresh water per day.
"Stage 1" from this blog post proposes to produce multiple millions of acre-feet of freshwater.
All of the costs in the blog post are off by a couple orders of magnitude.
That’s an incredibly strange unit.
I think it comes from reservoirs, since the area is measured in acres and the depth in feet.
maybe a rice crop requires three feet of water from planting to harvest, and you normally only get three inches of rain during that time, so you need 2.75 acre-feet of irrigation water per acre of rice
Israel built a 624000 m^3/day desalination plant for about $400M in 2013. It costs about $150M to operate per year, most of it probably from electricity consumption
So you already have an order of magnitude reduction in cost
Build 10 of them should reduce building cost even more per plant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination_by_country#Israel
185,022 m^3/day (150 acre-feet) for $50 million/year is about $0.74/cubic meter.
624,000 m^3/day for $150 million/year is about $0.65/cubic meter.
Even if they weren’t way off, the proposed capital costs to replace Arizona’s extraction with from the Colorado river with SWRO is $24bn, which seems like a lot ? (~$3200 per capita).
Would like to see sources for his capital cost estimates and the detailed calculations around operational costs, system lifespan and input energy (battery lifespan ? what capacity factor on the solar ? 6 hours in 24 is given in the article, which seems high).
That said, I love this kind of big thinking. I’m completely sold on Casey’s solar-derived synfuels idea.
To more directly address the OP's point - dumping water into existing resevoirs and rivers allow us to reuse existing infrastructure getting water from source to consumer (at the cost of other inefficiencies).
I'm certain the real answer is case by case and if such a system were to be implemented, we would see the whole spectrum of implementation deployed.
What needs to be done instead is to stop interfering with the water cycle [0], let rain water infiltrate the ground, recharge aquifers and restore soil moisture. In order to do that we need to stop the habit of making the ground impermeable (with cement and tar), and stop sending rain water to the sewers to be thrown back to the ocean, and then plant trees. Lots and lots of trees.
Yes, energy is going to be cheap, and yes we can do this, and in some cases we may have to. But there's so many simpler ways to just stop wasting the water we do have, this should be a last resort.
I'd think you're way better off just solving the problem. Someone else called this "solutionism." Well, this article makes an exceptionally good case that the amount of input cost justifies the output economic activity by more than order of magnitude... so with this in hand, what would the justification be for forcing unnecessary changes in human behavior?
Tech allowed us to live in ways that are 10-100x time to wasteful to be sustainable, we should learn to be frugal again
Our frugality was not a learned trait that we've simply discarded.. it was purely a consequence of our lack of technological progress and the austerity it forced on us.
It's the oddest thing to me to live in this world of amazing technological progress, while openly suggesting that throwing this technology away and returning to austerity is the only viable "solution."
But just as people won't buy EVs if they're allowed to pollute for free, as it'll make the EV seem expensive, it doesn't make business sense to install modern irrigation systems if you're paying close to zero for your water. This is where it becomes political and about legal claims to water rather than tech though.
You need to define that carefully. If I use water in a city, and dump it down the drain, that water is not wasted - it's cleaned, and then returned to the watershed for the next city downstream.
On the other hand, water used in an arid area to irrigate (especially flood irrigation) could be wasted - but it depends on where it ultimately rains. some places that extra water causes rain in places that need it, other places it rains in places that have plenty of rain.
Are you on septic? That seems like the water is wasted - it goes underground. But if it refills underground storage reservoirs, it's not actually wasted.
So defining "water waste" is much more complicated than it may appear.
Make sure that whatever water rains down in a place stays long enough to nudge the micro-climate in the right direction - by digging some water barriers in the right places.
While it cannot possibly(?) solve water shortages everywhere it can turn some deserts green:
It sounds a bit like medicine before medical science. A bit of woo is then to be expected?
The eco-system seems fragile - easily destroyed by over grazing, or even simply from tourists or visitors
Also labour intensive - he mentions 100 labourers x multiple years.
So these projects would need government regulation and protection.
https://www.ewu.edu/cstem/stories/the-ecological-benefits-of...
If we take that 876 million cubic metres of water from his example and pump it to, say, lake mead (also in his example), the total change in gravtiatonal energy is
m = 876 10^6 m3 water = 876 10^9 kg
g = 9.81
h = 375m lake mead
mgh = 3.22 10^ 15 J = 895 GWh
If my calculations are correct, the energy cost of pumping the water exceeds the cost of desalination by far. Now obviously IRL all that water wouldn't go to lake mead but a back of the envelope calculation shows that the water pumping costs shouldn’t be ignored.
It would probably be better to use desal for providing coastal cities with 100% of their water and simply reducing the amount that we pull out of the rivers in the first place
In the 5th paragraph of the section titled "what?" He says that "even including pumping and 25% solar utilization, just 20,000 acres of solar panels ... would be adequate to power 100% of arizonas imported water", but he doesn't actually derive that figure. He doesnt calculate the pumping costs.
So yes, I think its fair to say that he neglected pumping costs
Must we?
It's a valid thing to question that premise.
Anyway, you could mass produce these and float them in the ocean. The idea is that they would add moisture to the atmosphere which then carries it inland, rains, etc...
I have no idea if it would work.
Its too late for warning about carbon emissions. Sure, we need to address it to not worsen future issues, but it's not going to solve our current and impending problems. Am i mistaken?
Or even better edible. Is called a garden.
Not that it makes much sense anyway to pump water uphill because people want to farm in places that can’t support it.
Source: Zero Energy Cost Fresh Water: https://youtu.be/M5RG13AG4Bo?t=46
Desalination takes a lot of energy.
> requires 5.6 GW of solar energy. For context, this is roughly 10 days of solar panel production in 2021, though the industry continues to grow explosively. 5.6 GW consumes roughly 112 square km of land
No maintenance and they also sequester carbon.
All this seems to me like replacing trees with silicon and maybe that doesn't make sense.
the most popular solar panels are about 21% efficient
solar panels don't require maintenance, though efficiency drops if they get dusty
trees commonly require a lot of maintenance, i guess you don't know any gardeners; most afforestation and reforestation projects totally fail because they neglect this
but the biggest issue is that trees generally don't desalinate seawater
mangroves sort of do, but their output is water vapor, and generally growing mangroves in ocean water decreases evaporation from that ocean water rather than increasing it
in summary, how pv-powered desalination compares to just planting trees is that pv-powered desalination produces fresh water and planting trees doesn't
Brine may be returned to the sea via a long leaky hose, eliminating effects of excess salt concentration on wildlife by distribution along its length. There is no need to produce extremely concentrated brine, anyway: there is plenty of seawater, and it takes less energy to extract fresh water from less-concentrated brine.
You don’t need expensive PV and reverse osmosis to separate fresh water from brine: greenhouses can do the job at much less capital cost, with incoming water used to cool the glass that fresh water will condense onto the bottom of, and heat exchanged from outgoing brine to incoming brine after it drains off the condenser and spreads out over black evaporation pans.
In some places, condensing the fresh water is unnecessary; the water vapor may be released for the wind to carry off, to rain out into mountain streams collected behind alpine dams. North/central California is ideally situated for this mode, with myriad dams in long use in the Sierra Nevada range.
Hawaii successfully demonstrated using deep sea water solely as a coolant to condense fresh water directly from ambient humidity.
What do we do with this brine? Certainly not dumping it in the sea?
"Wastewater brine can pose a significant environmental hazard, both due to corrosive and sediment-forming effects of salts and toxicity of other chemicals diluted in it."
Seems like a well known problem with some solutions already in place
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2190929-growth-of-desal...
But I'm not sure the brine levels would actually be ever increasing.
Consider the water that we take out. Short term it goes somewhere on land to be used for some purpose humans deem useful to have land water for, but after that I'd guess that much of it eventually returns to the sea.
At some point wouldn't we reach a steady state where the rate we are taking water out to desalinate equals the rate that water from past desalination is returning?
At that point brine levels would be higher than before we started widespread desalination, but they would not longer be rising. As long as that new steady state higher brine level is not too high it might be OK.
But none of them look even close to cost competitive.
We will probably get there with carbon capture too.
Though I do agree, we should focus more heavily on nuclear power now, because it is much closer to ready-for-prime-time than carbon capture.
Still, I think that carbon capture is an excellent future technology for the production of carbon-neutral liquid fuels. Liquid fuels are super great, and they can be made into a very clean portable power source through the use of nuclear power and carbon capture tech.
The money spent on coal alone while waiting for a nuke to come online would suffice to build out enough solar and wind to match the nuke's output. The money spent on the nuke itself would pay for many times that much solar and wind. The solar and wind would start displacing carbon emissions almost immediately, not many years later. Displacement would increase throughout construction, and power generated early would help fund subsequent construction.
However, after carbon emissions has been substantially curtailed, we will need to capture the carbon already exhausted, because otherwise it hangs about for many decades, doing harm the entire time.