California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago | Hacker News Reader

California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

motherjones.com

78 pointsmolecule72 comments

All of this reminds me of a trip I took about 10 years ago to Palm Desert. Even then I was stunned by opulence of their water use and the utter disregard for sustainability. It's a city built in the desert that regularly reaches 100+ degrees, and yet every house had a bright green grass with sprinklers running constantly. One of the main attractions was their huge amounts of golf courses, that were of course always kept green and watered. I guess it makes sense, a third of the population is 65+, they won't be around when the consequences of their unconscionable actions really hit.

Sounds like a lot of Phoenix.

you'd hope that the water they used was at least from waste water treatment plants.. however that water was fresh at one time, and used by a big city in the middle of the desert.

All water is fresh at one time...also, water tends to evaporate and come back as rain or snow, but it might go into the ocean where salinity is high and makes it uneconomical to extract back into something drinkable.

And that is the problem: with the glaciers melting off, more fresh water winds up in the ocean, and we have to run energy-intensive desalination processes to get it back.

That's infuriating. Agriculture is the main consumer of water in CA by a mile, but the sort of self-indulgence you describe sets a disproportionately bad example and avoidably confuses the issue.

It's easily resolved by properly pricing water. Tie the water price to rainfall and you've solved the entire problem. Let the market take care of it.

Unfortunately, not so easy. Then, here will come other unsustainable but cheaper markets (other states, Mexico, Asia etc).

Palm Desert and portions of Southern California get their water from a local aquifer and the Colorado River, unlike the Central Valley and most of the state, and therefore are not directly affected by the drought in the same way as the rest of the state.

Visible urban water usage like lawn watering is a small fraction of the water usage in California, and even if every lawn stopped getting watered it wouldn't come close to solving the issue.

But it would help the issue. The idea is to reduce non-essential water use, regardless of source.

> "regardless of source."

Why? Misery loves company?

No, because California already imports water from all over the place. Water shortage isn't a problem unique to California. It's only a matter of time before the rest of the country starts to feel the same pressure that Californians are feeling. Reducing water use now will give us time.

My water supply is provided seasonally from melting snow and rainfall. I highly doubt much of that water is trucked the thousand or so miles to California.

Using this seasonally supplied water today won't mean that we have less in the future. Not unless we are hoarding it all, but our reservoirs are only so big anyway, if they were filled to the brim, and that water weren't being used, it'd just be dumped down the overflow and would find its way to the ocean... which is coincidentally where it ends up anyway when I divert it for a nice long shower.

I'm not going to cut back on my excessively long showers just because Californians won't cut back on the damn tree nuts. I'll gladly do my part and cut down on Californian nuts though.

Water is a global resource. If your water isn't exported right now doesn't mean it won't be in the future. A huge amount of the US is dependent on groundwater reservoirs. When those reservoirs run out, they'll need to import water from places that don't depend on groundwater or (more likely) move. You may be able to take long showers now, but if we as a nation (or even species) are going to get through the long term consequences of global warming, we're going to need to learn to reduce our water intake. Why not start now?

I would claim water - groundwater - is a local resource, not global, as a certain part of a country is dependent on a particular reservoir.

Of course, water can be bottled or put into containers or tanks and this water can then be transported across the world. People are shipping branded water bottles back and forth, and it is often stupid (Can you spell "Evian" backwards?), but not entirely different from all the other material flows in our global economy.

Still, in any amounts relevant for agriculture, water is a local or a regional resource.

I remember hearing about Germany where they were so good at conserving water, that it became a bad thing:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-s-eco-tr...

The problem was: sewage systems need excess water to work, and since Germans were so diligent about saving water...well, that was a problem. Of course, the obvious solution is just to pump some of the saved water back into the sewage system, but that requires additional infrastructure.

That is no wonder, because the Germans seem to be extremist with this. We have had similar problems in Finland: my local water utility had to flush some clean water straight to the sewage system, because people started saving water and sewage lines started to clog up.

You can get around this problem partially by designing the sewage system to deal with this (handles better a larger portion of solid matter in the wastewater, includes pipelines for flushing fresh water through it).

Still, too much frugality is not a good thing. We nowadays use washing machines and dishwashers that are built to German specification.

The washing program is a compromise of water amount, temperature, duration, and mechanical wear during the wash. We now have machines where the water amount and temperature are prioritized. Thus the washing program takes a long time, and it puts a lot of mechanical wear to clothes.

This is OK for Germany, where water is somewhat scarce. You have one city pulling its water from the Rhine, purifying it, using it, and putting the managed wastewater back to the Rhine, then the next city a few kilometres downstream does the same, and then the next. The purification is an expensive process.

But we don't have that; we have a pipe from a lake that contains already-drinkable water in abundance, and it needs just a bit of cleansing of solid matters before delivering to consumer pipes, and it is better than in Germany. Then, after using this water, the wastewater needs to be managed, regardless of where the clean water came from

But now the bottom line is, we save water that we wouldn't need to save, then we flush sewage pipes with fresh water, and when I put my clothes to my Miele, I wait for two hours to wash the cotton program, and wear out the clothes too soon because the washing machine rubs and whirls them half-dry.

You should invest in some washing bags if you haven't already. We have the same problem with our chinese washing machine.

We have some, but they are an additional hassle and I'm not sure they help overall. Certainly good for bras and similar stuff.

You are not entitled to another region's water. If you want somebody elses water, you should be prepared to pay dearly for it.

If that other region happens to be running low on water as well then that water may not be for sale. If that is the case, you should prepare to pay very dearly for it. Countries have been broken up, and wars waged, over far less.

Alfalfa uses more California water than nuts. Maybe cut out the cheeseburgers first.

Residential use is a small enough part of the picture that it is not worth focusing on. Yes it would help to reduce residential use, but if we want to reduce water usage enough to make a difference we have to look at farming.

I guess it makes sense, a third of the population is 65+, they won't be around when the consequences of their unconscionable actions really hit. Oddly enough, I live in a university town in the Midwest, in a neighborhood with quite a few elderly residents. I've noticed quite a few elderly people driving hybrid cars.

There might be a little overlap there with elderly drivers looking for cars that have more assistive features. (In other words, newer and more computerized.)

This is probably due to that elderly people tend to be more wealthy, so they can afford a more expensive car. And hybrids are often nice.

One major problem that needs to be tackled is that much of California (and the world) is still using flood irrigation[1], which wastes massive amounts of water to runoff and evaporation. Fortunately this is starting to be tackled due to higher water costs and government subsidies. (But of course it's only part of the problem, and these subsidies carry some moral hazard[2]. Also, it's interesting to note that not all of the water "wasted" in less efficient methods of irrigation is actually wasted.[3])

[1] http://www.mullerranch.com/making_news/sacbee_drip_2_2014.ht...

[2] http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2014/world/conserve-wa...

[3] http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5942

I was in the Central Valley the other week and asked my dad about these little tanks that had popped up on farms in the area. He told me they were part of new drip irrigation systems. So things are changing slowly.

One solution to producing water is desalination. You can effectively get unlimited amount of water, but you pay for it in energy. A quick Google search finds that there's a desalination plant under construction in Carlsbad, California.

MIT Technology Review wrote a great article on this: http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/533446/desalin...

That is a good summary. A friend of mine is looking at putting a passive desalinator on the ocean floor off the coast of Monterey. Basically its a pipe with the permeable membrane surrounding the submerged collector. The pipe carries fresh water to the surface and as you pump out fresh water, the pressure of the ocean at depths of up to 1000 meters pushes in more water through the membranes, desalinating it in the process.

The challenge (other than just building the darn thing) is whether or not the current flow is sufficient to keep the brine levels down around the intake port.

I have no idea how practical that idea really is (he's pretty enthused of course) but I liked the notion of using the pressure difference between the ocean surface and at depths to do the reverse osmosis work for you.

How does the membrane stay clean of marine growth?

hiring a diver or two to do that is probably cheaper than the alternative ways to desalinate.

there is very little marine growth at 1000 meters depth. A bigger concern would be marine snow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_snow

You can do it, but it turns out the work to pump water up to 1400 psi in a pressure vessel before it goes through a reverse osmosis membrane is about the same as the work to pump desalinated water up from the bottom of the ocean at 1000 meters. There are different inefficiencies in each situation, but I'd assume maintaining equipment 1km below the sea would trump them all.

I think he really means you bail the water from the top rather then pump it, leaving an airgap at the top that the pressure from below gradually fills with more water through the membrane. But then again unless you bail all the water, that leaves only a small pressure differential, and if you bail it all, it gets less efficient as it fills back up and the pressure differential gradually reduces and lifting it from the bottom takes a lot of energy :P. Yeah, I don't understand what he's getting at with the design.

As described in the paper the top 20 meters of the pipe to the surface are emptied (the paper refers to a 30 meter 'pump head' which I believe is the distance below the surface that the water has been pumped out of the pipe). The part on the surface of the ocean is what looks like a giant bucket of sand on the outside (it is supposed to be below the level at which coral grows). The pipe fills with fresh water at some rate (unspecified by the paper) and you can pump it out at the top when you need it. The part on the bottom of the ocean requires no maintenance.

Sounds like the MaHaLo Hawaii Deep Sea Water project[1]. They use that water in Ocean Vodka interestingly enough[2], which is where I found out about it. On the tour they indicated this project seems to be working out quite well.

[1] http://hawaiideepseawater.com/source [2] http://oceanvodka.com/our-vodka/ingredients/

Interesting that their "3000 feet" corresponds to the 1000 meters I read in the paper. I could not find anything on their site though that actually talked about the extraction process.

What does all that extra salt do to the chemistry of the water in that area?

Well depending on rate it can be a pollutant or not. Most desalinating plants have a mixing pond where the mix fresh seawater with partially desalinated water (which has a higher salt content) to produce an effluent that is saltier than the unprocessed water but not so salty that it causes issues. That same mixing could, in theory, be done by ocean currents if the water motion was enough.

There's also the problem of what to do with the high salinity waste water that is generated from the process. Simply dumping it back into the ocean can cause environmental problems.

What about putting the waste water in a salt pan?

What problems would it cause? As long as you had decent mixing, you'd barely change the local salinity.

I have a hard time understanding this would be a problem, considering the scale, i.e. how much water there is in an ocean.

Let's say we take the amount of water mentioned in a link in another comment, and desalinate 54 million cubic feet of clean water per day in a single plant. That is 204 400 cubic meters per day. It is a huge amount, but we're talking about operating this plant at depth of 1 km. 204 400 cubic meters is 0.0002 cubic kilometers. The California Current flows at around 0.25 m/s which means that the cubic kilometer of water around the desalination plant will be completely exchanged almost once per hour, 21.6 times in a day.

I would say that the salt that you take from desalinated water is an entirely insignificant problem when just left in the ocean, even locally. It's a drop in the ocean. Most likely the saltiness of water will vary a lot more due to other reasons (e.g. how much water evaporates locally).

Other aspects of access to more water in places like California are probably a much more relevant environmental problem. That water is mostly going to be used as irrigation water in agriculture. This will flush a huge amount of earth particles to the ocean. Literally, it will eventually wash away the agricultural land, unless it is used sparingly. When doing that, it puts additional earth material in streams and rivers.

And then there are the issues of fertilizers, pesticides etc for the ever increased volume of agricultural production.

Given that by far most of the water in California is used for growing food, an interesting question would be: at what point is it cheaper to grow the food somewhere else where water is more abundant? Of course the amount of sunlight, temperature etc. would factor in too. But with enough energy, you can simulate the conditions of California anywhere.

A recent econtalk podcast (http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/03/david_zetland_o.htm...) discusses the feasibility of using desalination to cover California's water usage. Basically, one desal plant is a drop in the ocean compared with demand.

The relevant metric is price of desalinated water, not the number of plants.

> You can effectively get unlimited amount of water

For an effectively unlimited amount of energy. We do not yet live in a post-scarcity era when it comes to energy so that "unlimited" is quite hypothetical. In the same sense that there is unlimited amounts of space available for humans, <please insert spaceship here>.

Water waste is everywhere. In deserts we water golf courses. In cities we hose down sidewalks to reduce dust and dirt. A huge percentage of the food we produce that uses water to generate gets disposed of. Then there's this:

"Initial estimates are that when fully operational, the Utah NSA Data Center will use as much as 1.7 million gallons of water per day."

where does that water go? evaporated?

Yes

And South Dakota is injecting toxic chemicals into theirs because "we won't ever need that water anyways".

All these companies are buying up rights to fresh water sources - it's like the next oil crisis.

Maybe instead of the US invading other countries for oil we will have people coming to us for water.

Wonder what it would be like 30 years from now with all the water problems.

Julian Simon: Bumping against any limit will increase the price of any resource in short supply, leading ingenious humans to find new supply sources or substitutes.

Nothing like paying $4/gallon for water.

Probably as bad the population problems we have now that were hypothesized in the 1970s?

Interestingly, in Asimov's Caves of Steel, the Earth was hopelessly overpopulated, with eight billion people! That book was published in 1954, and set in to future three thousand years ahead.

Today, 61 years later, the population of Earth is 7.3 billion people, and there is little doubt that life with 8 billion people, in a decade from now, will not be dramatically different from what we live at the moment.

There's some work to do in order to make it sustainable, but it's not such a disaster.

Reminds me of the film "Interstellar" with dust storm. And this is already happening every year in Beijing and its neighboring towns. Does this "bad" human cultural behavior push our scientific researcher further? It certainly does for the 200 yrs of technological advances.

Well desertification is a very interesting problem. But basically there is natural desertification and there is accelerated desertification caused by the growth of population (misuse of lands, overuse of farm lands, deforestation, rapid growth of population, etc). In northern part of China, the government and locals plant trees to slow down and even able to recover lands from desertification. But the progress is slow...

although South America is still full of trees, scientists are already seeing rapid desertification because we are destroying the nature.

Our appetite for beef is causing the destruction of forests. If we could tone down our meat consumption, we stand a chance to save tue environment.

The dust storms are not just in Beijing and neighbouring towns; it is a geological phenomenon which has been happening on a geological time-scale, over millions of years. All of the North China Plain, home to many many millions of people, is a result of silt land blowing from the dry Asian inland - Gobi Desert - and then being washed down by the Yellow River, forming an alluvial plain.

The dust storms are not nice, but they are not really man-made, although man's actions may have worsened them a little (and now man is trying to help out a little bit, although once again, what you can do about is quite small in scale).

Not a secret. Scientists have already found that there are more water underneath the deep earth of Earth if you just search "water under earth". However, digging is very hard. But essentially deep in the Earth there are copious amount of water.

Strangely I am concerned about the dryness will more likely trigger an earthquake there.

Can they somehow transport sea water to inland? if there is a need for that I'm sure CA will have some startup working on that.

Only if there's a social angle.

And this means that soon, many of us will be eating food grown with 20,000 year old water.

if water in bottles expires in a few years i can't even imagine how bad this unpackaged water will have turned. this is totaly outragous

pretty sure water in water bottles only 'expire' because of the plastic leaching into the water over time. "Unpackaged" water has been sitting in the earth for thousands of years, as evidenced by this article, and is perfectly safe to drink.

I think your humor detector needs tuning.

Oh, yeah, you're probably right. I just thought they were bad at English.

In fairness, I think it's not so much the water as the bottles that go bad. That type of plastic is not easily biodegradable, but it is photosensitive, and it weakens over long-term exposure to light. As the bottles break down, they leach toxic chemicals into the water and also lose structural integrity.

That all started due to NJ state law requiring everything to have an expiry date.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/water-never-goes-ba...

Yeah, they should really be using new water to water that new food.

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