As I've been saying and writing for many years, we solve today's problems with tomorrow's technology. 'Twas ever thus. We've always been finding new solutions to old problems, developing new technologies to improve our lives, from fire to the wheel to metallurgy to the automobile, airplanes, and the internet. Sometimes people develop new technology we didn't even know we needed until we needed it, such as iPods and smartphones.
One problem facing a lot of folks who live in dry areas is water. As in, they don't have enough of it. Large portions of the American West have this problem. Up in Wyoming, not far from where we lived for many years, there was an old saying, "Whisky is for drinking, water is for fighting over." Some places in the world deal with the problem to some extent by desalination of ocean water, but that brings problems of its own.
Now, though, a new technology may make desalination more practical and cheaper, and could bring other benefits besides clean, potable water.
Traditional desalination has involved reverse osmosis, in which salty water is pressed against a membrane hard enough that freshwater squeezes through and the salt stays behind. On land, this requires a bank of high-pressure pumps — and running those pumps runs up the cost of delivery.
To get around that problem, a Bay Area company called OceanWell has already pilot-tested a scheme that involves putting the membrane filters into a sealed pod and placing it 1,300 feet below the surface so that the weight of the water overhead eliminates the need for pumps, potentially cutting costs by up to 40%.
By drawing water in slowly, OceanWell is minimizing damage to sea life. During the trial, cameras showed fish swimming around the screens and a diving bird hunting a school of fish right next to the equipment. The internal prefilters and automated backwash enabled live algae, diatoms, and copepods to avoid being swept into the pod.
The demonstration was run in the Las Virgenes Reservoir at only 50 feet below the surface and reduced dissolved solids levels in the treated drinking water from 320 ppm to just 50 ppm. The three-month trial also yielded more than 150,000 gallons of water at just 7% downtime, all for scheduled maintenance. Now OceanWell is ready to test the pods in Santa Monica Bay this fall.
This is an interesting notion indeed; instead of expensive, complicated pumps that require regular maintenance and occasional replacement, let the weight of the very water itself do the work by submerging the reverse osmosis (RO) filters at depth. As noted, it's not only more economical, but because it draws in water at a gradual pace, it's better for sea life in the area around the inlets.
Fascinating stuff. And remember where the places are that have the need for increased supplies of fresh water; they are often places where the sun shines a great deal of the time. You know, deserts. And that makes the notion of solar power, for once, make a little more sense, with yet another desalination technology now in development in China, of all places.
Chinese scientists, meanwhile, have been developing a new solar-powered desalination technology that uses no electricity at all to produce fresh water — making it especially attractive in water-short areas that are also deficient in electric power generation. The Chinese believe this technology can cut the cost of producing fresh water from seawater to below that of bottled water and can become a low-cost, sustainable solution to water shortages.
The Chinese scientists, drawing inspiration from a shirt button, constructed nanoparticle spheres and threaded them together with polymer just as yarn is pulled through the holes in a button. The resulting structure, consisting of billions of microspheres, proved extremely robust and durable in conditions that simulated a squally coastline.
Interesting, and it spares the drawdown of ancient aquifers with deep wells, and the interstate squabbling over rivers, like the Colorado.
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But wait! There's more!
Ocean mining to many involves giant scoops digging up seabeds. Controversies range from environmental concerns to geopolitical arguments over rights. But Texas-based SuperCritical Materials Corp. intends instead to mine uranium from seawater – and leave the seabed alone.
The company, which just won an exclusive license from the Department of Energy to extract uranium from seawater, intends to extract uranium from seawater with specially treated acrylic fibers to which dissolved uranium ions bind. While seawater contains an average of just 3.3 parts per billion of uranium, SuperCritical’s goal is to capture that uranium, convert it into a gas, enrich it, and fabricate it into fuel for nuclear power plants.
Founder and CEO Alexander Canon Bryan says his long-term goal is to transform the U.S. from a net importer to a net exporter of uranium and nuclear fuels. The company hopes its first plant can produce 1.85 million pounds of uranium annually for at least 40 years – enough to power 4 million households throughout its productive life.
Now, cue the panic-mongers who will start howling about the environmental impact of these desalination plants. Oh, the uranium extraction, as well; but they are already against nuclear power.
Here's the thing: There's a reason that Robert Heinlein applied the term, "the ungrokkable vastness of ocean." The world's oceans contain about 352.67 quintillion (3.5267 × 10²⁰) US gallons of water. That's an amount that we have difficulty comprehending, and the amount of fresh water taken from, and the brine put back into, the oceans doesn't even rise to the level of insignificant. For comparison, the amount of water humans use is about 1.06 quadrillion gallons per year, by all of humanity, for all purposes. That's 0.0003 percent of all the water, just in the oceans.
It's like our paltry amounts of CO2 emitted from our cars, trucks, and air conditioners; like spitting into a hurricane. The Earth's global climate is vast beyond our ability to easily comprehend, with systems and cycles that sometimes measure in thousands of years. The same is true of our oceans; the last places on the planet that remain a mystery to us are there, in that ungrokkable vastness.
We could desalinate water from the oceans for a million years and never make a noticeable difference.
We solve today's problems with tomorrow's technology. Advances in desalination technology are going to make a big difference in the lives of people in some pretty arid areas. Some of these systems can even enhance our energy portfolio. That's a win-win by any measure.
