When my daughter was 10 years old, she asked me if they were able to make drinking water from seawater. I said yes, but it is more expensive than just starting with fresh water. So she replied, "Oh, so they are just going to use all the fresh water first and then be forced to desalination!" I think she was correct.
Lake Mead is about to hit Dead Pool status so she is correct we will wait until it is to late as we always do. Then that bottle of water will cost more than the gas right now.
I love Arizona but life has led me to michigan seeing the water problem in AZ is absolutely nuts you may think if you have a drilled well you're going to be OK.. maby but I doubt it I have seen to many wells run dry ...I'D CUT CALIFORNIA'S WATER SUPPLY calfornia is a lost cause anyways
@@shitballs782 Imagine we get to that tipping point where there is nothing they can do, but watch it all dry up and possibly burn. Las Vegas was built in a Desert where there was nothing and it can go back to that without water.
Forget solar, thorium nuclear is the way forward with DeSal tech because then you can setup this installation ANYWHERE but solar is limited by climate.
It's getting very late and infrastructures need time to be built, say roughly 10 years. I 'm all in in desalination, especially solar and brine mining.
The brine disposal problem is easy. The extraction of crude oil also extracts salt water which is pumped into salt water disposal wells. With many oil wells that are no longer profitable, there has to be plenty of subterranean space that use to have oil. Since salt water is already deep in the earth, there shouldn't be àny environmental concerns.
I still dont understand why Saudi Arabia does not power its desalination plants with nuclear power. Its clean energy and one small reactor plant can provide energy for at least half a century. The US Navy's aircraft carriers and submarines generate fresh water by heating sea water with the help of the reactor's heat. They power the ships for over 40-50 years with a mid-life refit or a refuel required only after reaching 25 years of operations. The nuclear waste generated is also very minimal,almost the size of 3 trucks for over a century of clean unlimited energy. And now with the moon being within our grasp we know where we can dump excess nuclear waste if we do not want them to be stored here on Earth.
71% of the earths surface, 3% of its mass. Increased salinity over time would exponentially increase issues in the ocean and the expense is ridiculous.
I think it would be interesting to invest in salt water batteries and use the brine produced by these plants to act as the electrolytic solution. It seems like that could be one way to decrease the brine release into the ocean.
They're not as popular as they should be because they aren't cost effective. It takes more energy and resources to get clean water than the process is worth, if that makes sense. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's not a sustainable source of fresh water
Using the sun to evaporate water has been around for at least 20 years. There's even ideas of using gigantic greenhouses in Saudi Arabia where solar panels run the pumps and they let the sun evaporate the water which then waters the crops inside the greenhouse. Well this might work in super hot areas, it's not going to work in the northern hemisphere because there's simply not enough sunlight. As for processing salt, we've been doing that here in the US for over at least a hundred years. In Death Valley there are companies that simply scrape the salt up and use them to extract minerals. Again this is not new. I wish them all the luck for those countries that are stuck on the equator. But for us in the US this is totally na.
Well, they're not in Canada because we have 20% if the planet's fresh water with less than one half of one percent of the population so they're not really necessary. I imagine Saudi Arabia is a different story.
Where do you live, that you need UV light to tamper with your tab water ? How much much enrgy/ plastic is used for these LARK filtes ? It's frikkin water..
Nice strategy I must say. I don't earn as much as this video claims but I earn about 3,250 USD from Hyperion Trust every week. However, I've read articles of investors that made as much as $350K profit within a few months I'd like to know what you think he invested in and how do i make such profit
I agree, investing through the guidance of a professional or a broker has its perks, I got in touch with a lady broker early this year, and through her assistance, I was able to invest in the right funds and grow a profit of $290K from January till now
@@sunshineonme *' Natalie * Andrea * Bows *' is the coach helping me out, and you can book an appointment with her through her website, just look her up online to get more info about her
While in the US NAVY the ship that I served on was nuclear powered. We used the reactors heat to distill sea water for the ships reactor coolant and drinking water, plus equipment coolant as sell. We never went on water rations. The best way to get electricity and fresh water is to build small nuclear power plants and have desalination plants next to the electric generators. Win win. Nuclear reactor technology had come a very long way since the 60's. Safer, simpler and cheaper to operate and maintain.
@@imakedookie Gravity can do the work to create a hard vacuum with just two tanks 12 meters apart one above the other fill the top tank with water and let it drain to the bottom tank.
@@davidhuttner275 Navy reactors are typically highly enriched so they last for decades. The quantity of waste is tiny and the radioactivity will drop much faster then traditional reactor waste. Eventually I'd hope these fission products will be recycled and valuable elements repurposed but since the quantity is so small this isn't a problem that needs to be addressed for a long time.
This video feels more like a marketing campaign for the city rather than an analysis as to why there aren't more desalination plants. The actual answer to the question was said in 10 seconds with no real dive into it. The Neom project sounds like another one of those model city plans that will ultimately fail because it relies on other systems which offset everything good that is done by the project. How can we ensure that removing these elements from the ocean is fine to do? How can you ensure that you don't remove too much water from the sea? How will this affect its biochemistry? Very little science was presented in this video and I am even skeptical even on what was presented. Is the Neom project the future of desalination? Who knows, because this guy sure doesn't. No specifics about the technology is discussed, just empty words and marketing terms.
hahahahhahahahaha i know u don't likr saudi but this is the worst argument to make. you seriously think we're gonna destabilise the ocean by taking water from it, you don't understand the size of the ocean and the amount of water it has. and saudi isn't gonna take the elements the ocean has because saudi isn't aiming to do that it's just a secondary product. even if your argument was an actual possibility it will probably take millions of years for any effects to happen and you shouldn't worry about that the sun will explode first
Don't forget that Neom being a straight line is the worst start to urban planning you could possibly make. Cities have been circles for thousands of years because it is the most efficient shape for minimizing the average distance between all points on its area.
Very good points. When something appears too good to be true, it always is. The solutions to our biggest environmental problems will require cultural change. Technological innovation will not save us-it will help, but innovation in technology without innovation in culture is a futile path.
As a chemical engineer working in a desalination station in Kuwait, my dream and goal in life is to bring the dome technology to Kuwait and all around the world. The neom project looks like heaven to me and id love nothing more than to be a part of it
Desalination plants should have been built many years ago but sadly a majority of our society is reactive and not proactive. This video was very insightful, thank you for the excellent presentation.
See the problem is we knew this was a problem years ago and instead of building desalination plants California decided to steal the water from Arizona, Colorado, Nevada
Here's a question I find interesting... What if we got extremely good as a planet at desalinating water? What if we then took all that technology, coupled it with reforesting practices, and began to slowly irrigate and change these huge desert areas where life really doesn't exist???? Can you imagine having a massive breakthrough in water desalination and using it to not just fulfill our needs as humans, but then pass that off to nature and give life to previously dead areas of the planet? We could bring down the temp of the planet, increase fresh oxygen, sequester more carbon, and beautify that desert area with green life.
@@ReeperRiopel I'm not advocating for foresting everything that's a desert. Just aiding the desert in being a healthier space on earth, and getting forests back where they belong.
@@Conceptsexplainedsimply deserts are deserts because of the Earth's macro-climate. There is absolutely no point trying to change them. They cannot be anything else (at least through human intervention). The only thing that is worth doing is to limit desertification.
Actually we must use desalination mostly to irrigate trees (fruits) as they have roots and are more water-efficient than crops, that will cause cooling effect and more local precipitation to kickstart ecosystem. Throwing desalinated water just for human consumption and building more cities is not sustainable and will have bad effect on plankton which are essential for marine life.
Our company was one of the first thin film composite reverse osmosis design engineering, manufacturer, installation companies. We created the drinking water from the red sea and made the desert bloom. However the key was to remove all the microscopic life in sea water prior to separation the salty water. Many companies dropped the ball on pretreatment requirement and their plants failed long term. Fresh water and conservation reusability can solve humanities water needs.
@@trueAnge1 Oceans are full of microscopic life which will grow as a biofilm on the surface of the reverse osmosis membranes reducing their ability to produce fresh water. Cleaning these biofilms becomes difficult and over time becomes costly and difficult. We turned down many projects because the civil engineers would not listen to us. Such projects failed within a year. Hope that helps.
Didn't know how important that is - I suppose it depends on the cost of membranes vs pre-treatment as to what makes more sense; pre-treat, or just burn through membranes. I have no idea of the costs.
Don't get excited. It's basicaly BS, coz to extract any of those materials you'd need so much effort that it's not even close to effective. Look at the graph they showed - it means there is a huge mountain of NaCl and somewhere in that pile there is a single grain of some Thorium (or whatever) salt.
Thank you for the video. In the submarine service we distilled seawater while underway. This water was used for consumption, the galley, showers, the laundry, and a variety of other purposes. Of course, it helped, having a nuclear power plant to produce the required energy. I remember only one time when water restrictions were called for and that was brief. A side note: being submerged for extended periods of time, we also produced Oxygen from seawater through a couple different methods.
@@imakedookie Not sure what you're trying to point out there, but I'm guessing you think that their potable water somehow becomes radioactive, for whatever unfounded reason.
@@h8GW i was referencing the habit of submariners being disciplined for unnecessary water waste, as in being reprimanded for rinsing their coffee mug. they will leave the coffee residue for weeks at a time as to not waste water cleaning it. even with nuclear powered facilities, the habit would still remain... the joke wasn't meant for ya
@@imakedookie Hm. Thanks for the insight, although I would imagine that would be more of a cultural issue than a logistical one. Maybe severe water rationing is a little outdated, or maybe submariners like their new brews to contain some taste from the old one? Kinda like how New Yorkers like hot dog water dirty.
What were the different methods for producing oxygen? I assume electrolysis was one, but what were the others? Also, was the electrolysis used on raw seawater, desalinated water, or something else?
really good point, I think I have some notes for a follow up. I do have some other water based ideas, especially since I'm starting a series on building the worlds most sustainable home. thank you!
@@TwoBitDaVinci First time I've seen any of your content. Personally I see the idea of this technology (RO Units) as being wasteful, trendy, and ignorant. And I've commissioned and operated a few of them. Your video demonstrated a basic passive survival technique in the desert, but that's about all its good for. I would suggest you explain the old and unsexy tech of Evaporator Condensers. By using HRU (Heat Recovery Units) to extract waste heat from existing heat sources, such as exhausts from coal boilers, Gas Turbine Generators, Land fill gas driven generators to produce steam. This steam can then be collapsed to create a vacuum. This vacuum package then feeds a shell tube exchanger and with a feed stock such as sea water, you effectively boil off the clean water from the sea water feed stock. Now this technology has been used in chemical plants and on sea going vessels/naval vessels forever. Small RO units are then used as emergency back-up units. The downside of using this technology is that you require "process tech's " who have a basic understanding of the fundamentals of the process and ultimately a industrial commitment to spend money retro fitting HRUs on existing hardware. Where I live, industry in the city is effectively given free water by the state government. So why spend any money. RO Units are like the Hydrogen revolution, sexy and going to save the world. Everyone has forgotten why the world passed over this tech (hydrogen) after the Hindenburg disaster.
@@darrentummon4855 and you have links to your business and videos showing us all the work you've done on this? I look forward to seeing all your work..
@@cotterpolt5309 no videos, but I do have 14 years of experience in using the evaporator condenser principles in the manufacturing of Ammonium nitrate explosives. In the AN process you introduce a 90% solution into a evaporator and boil off the excess water (-42 kpa from memory) until the AN solution has a Melt temperature of 141'C and a fudge temp of 122'C . Again from memory. It's not rocket science. None of it is rocket science, unfortunately in the west we are dumbing down our process techs and tradesmen so they don't"hurt" themselves. As a result, they become less skilled and then hurt themselves.
@@cotterpolt5309 Dear Cotter: It's been 11 months, and you haven't responded to Darren's cogent and thoughtful response below. Surely in a year's time you will have done some research of your own, yes?
The biggest problem i have with their city concept so far is the cloud seeding. Iirc cloud seeding can really screw over large swaths of land downwind of you by interfering with the water cycle. The desalination plant concept itself is actually really cool, and would probably work very efficiently for the first phase of extracting fresh water. I'm not so sure about being able to extract useful minerals from the salt however, but i'm not a wiz-kid when it comes to minerals and extracting things from other things so for all i know it is easier than it sounds for them.
Yeah, I think cloud seeding is concerning. It just makes me think of so many times that human intervention made more problems than it solved. We don't seem to learn from our mistakes quickly enough. It also makes me wonder how long it will take for water rights agreements to be drawn up for this newer technology. If I am up-stream and I divert a river, I'm denying anyone down-stream a right to water. I think cloud seeding might have similar effects but it will be much harder to figure out where the water is being diverted from.
Really appreciate the explanation which helped me better understand why there isn't more movement in that direction. I appreciate the downsides and perhaps more focus would lend to some better solutions. To me, the bottom line is what other solutions can take us into the future? There are other that options that currently contribute on a relatively small scale overall. IF the drought doesn't diminish, what else is there to accommodate for the demands for water in the next 30 years?
I think that you left out a major and minor advantages about solar evaporation: 1) use solar to boil, not just evaporate salt water. Use the steam to generate electricity. 2) let the leftover steam rise to a height to allow gravity to move it. 3) as mentioned, derivatives could pay for the desalination. Sites around the world evaporate sea water to get salt. Put these two together and sea salt out one side and water out the other.
I remember hearing this when I was a kid in the 80s. People were saying we would run out of water and oil by the year 2000. I was also told that Florida would be under water by the late 90s lol
that stuff is foolish lol... I just believe we are clever enough to find new and betters ways of doing stuff and being more aware of our impacts. I'm a total capitalist
I worked in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s; and solar and desalinization was on their 5-year plan - even back then. It is amazing that we in the USA have continued to elect idiots bent of fighting over the "zero-sum pie" when they should have been setting national policies... 🥵🥵🥵
@@TwoBitDaVinci salination plays an essential role in ocean currents and ocean life in general. Desalination will likely have disastrous consequences, especially if we attempt to capitalize on the oceans directly. The monetary incentive can’t save the climate and novel technologies won’t save our oceans. We need to reduce what we use and change the way society and individuals operate and gear the world towards an actually greener future
Do you know how much work has been done to keep us from the apocalyptic scenarios that alarmed scientists and whistleblowers in the 80s? Thanks to concerted global efforts, we’ve most likely dodged the worst case scenario, now we’re just trying to get the best possible future, though it’s highly unlikely we can skirt the consequences of the past, we can at least minimize it further
Just out of curiosity. Once you separate the non salt elements from the brine would it be feasible to then you use the salt elements for Sea Salt? If so then you're actually going more green because you could potentially replace salt mines by using every part of the brine.
I think the main problem is that desalination produces more salt than humans can ever have a use for. Extracting the small amount of the scarcer elements is fine but the salt (essentially just sodium chloride) has to be either returned to the ocean or dumped in huge mounds on solid ground. In the grand scheme of things the ocean is easily able to take back the salty brine after fresh water has been removed, but it is the local effects of this super-salty water that cause the problems. They need to find a way to distribute it over a larger area/volume rather than just dump it back in the ocean in one place. It needs to be mixed back in with the bulk of the ocean by wind, waves, currents and tides rather than being allowed to sink down and collect at the bottom before mixing.
@@michaelhart7569 As the water runs through the plant (I'm using a Navy System here) the water becomes more and more concentrated with salt (ie. brine). The input salt water is mixed with the discharge brine to dilute it to prevent damage to discharge pumps and piping. I'm not sure if you can set up a system using just brine to make salt unless you want to make it very expensive as the cheaper metals are going to corrode and break down the pipes/pumps.
@@lanceurwin3368 Yes, that's the sort of system I might have imagined for a plant designed just for desalination. I only mentioned solid material because the narration discussed recovery of other elements and also showed some pictures of crystalline salts. Presumably this would have to include some sort of fractional crystallisation as chemical engineers would always prefer to just work with solutions and fluids where possible, avoiding the issues of handling solids. While I've never been involved with such plants (a process scale-up chemist, not a full blown chemical engineer) I would still guess that many of the older ones were built with little regard to what happens to the brine when returned to the ocean. Perhaps just a few more pipes distributing it over a greater area and with more mixing is all that is required?
@@johan8724 That certainly seems like an obvious choice. At least for those who live in areas that need roads-deicing. Not so much in places like Saudi Arabia that need desalination plants :) As a side note, I once read that many American states don't use simple salt on their roads. Not so much because of the eutectic point of NaCl, but because it causes more metal corrosion. They use some other inorganic salt. I can't remember which, but I think it was Magnesium-derived. Though not currently a US resident, I recall reading once that you are better off buying a used car in one of the sunshine States rather than their colder northern neighbors, for that reason.
Technically, you do not have to use pumps to pump water into solar water evaporizer. If you build it under the sea level, you can pump the water just by opening the valve. And, if you make that chamber airproof, using the fact, that gas have smaller density, you can "pump" fresh water out of it just by using higher pressure by the steam generating.
sounds like you have heard of the device noted as a ''water ram'' not as tech as what you mention but some of the same operational qualities, it works on gravity, travel distance, and air compression, i would love to see what you said work, I think it would solve a lot of problems
On another level, it's probably not wise to put facilities like these below sea level. The Fukushima disaster is a key example as to why we should not put important infrastructure below the water line. Although a desalination plant wouldn't be nearly as disastrous, it's still a good thing to keep in mind when building anything near the ocean.
What if we built a hollow space rope. like a space elevator but just a hollow hose, connect into the ocean with the open end in low earth orbit, the pressure difference would draw water up to the top of the rope, then you could have a second rope filled with reverse osmosis stuff that let gravity just pull it back down to earth, so you could have one set of reverse osmosis in the pressure pipe and another in the gravity shoot, by the time it went all the way up and back down, you got clean water? maybe even make the rope itself the osmosis filter, so clean fresh water flows and falls down the sides, and the crud would flow and fall down the middle....
@@mequavis No, because inside the rope will be exactly same pressure as outside of the rope. Like atmosphere, pressure is decreasing with higher altitude
A cheaper solution is to pump cold seawater and use it to condense fresh water from the air. Pumping is cheap, cold ocean water is abundant and there is no brine to deal with. Still, nice video.
I don't know if the amount of condensation would be worth the price of pumping ocean water. Plus when the water warms up you have to pump more and that happens fast
@@hopelessdecoy An excellent observation! I've run the numbers and here in central California where the humidity is relatively low you need to circulate 120 gallons of sea water for every gallon you condense from the air. In St. Croix, which is more tropical, you only need to circulate 37 gallons of sea water for every gallon of fresh water you make. The cost to pump is about 0.2 watt hours per gal. In other words, cheaper than reverse osmosis with no brine. But further, at a power plant that needs cooling water anyway, the pumping is almost free. At its peak, the central California Moss Landing power plant could have produced 12 million gallons per day of fresh water from the cooling water it was already pumping.
@@Barskor1 I have this stupid idea that carbon could be sorted in limestone, and used as a building product, with good insulation properties. Less avid in the oceans is good for reefs, and takes carbon out of the atmosphere at the same time.
Saddest thing is that so many areas will pull up ancient ground water, replenished only over centuries, and then use it to irrigate grass with fresh potable water, while at the same time dumping the clean grey water from the sewage system into rivers, because it is "dirty", and then also mandating that people must have these lawns to "keep up the appearance of the neighborhood" as well.
@@skeetsmcgrew3282 Yeah, I live in an area that gets decent rainfall. So what if the grass is brown for a month during the summer? It's 90 degrees out, that's natural. Yet around here we're just dumping thousands of gallons of treated water out for a short lived and relatively minor aesthetic improvement.
@9:10 Seawater contains 0.1 ppm of lithium. If you process 100 million cubic meters of seawater, you get 10 cubic meters of Lithium, or around 5.340 kg. Enough to build around 76 Tesla Model 3's.
It's always 40 years in the future with these projects. Meaning it will never happen. Those lithium concentrations are far too low to make it economical, not to mention that despite what people think, battery grade lithium is extremely sensitive to tight chemical tolerances that will never be achieved in a project like this. Makes a cool video though.
When I was young, there were four large desalination plants at Freeport Texas. In the late fifties they were dismantled and shipped to Guantanama Cuba. Fidel Castro cut off the fresh water supply to the base. They were rebuilt there for the U. S. Marine Corps. The water was so pure that the Marines had to pour it from container to container through the air to give it taste.
Brine could easily be repurposed for regions that use salt on the roads. Brine is great. It actually sticks to the surface you apply it too and coats way more. Salt lands in random spots. Brine gives you a solid consistent coat.
Spray salt water on the roads as much better than putting salt on the roads. It goes further and causes much less contamination, but the long-term is destroying the water supplies and the plants unless you live in a very rainy place the salt does damage to the plants and trees near the road, eventually winds up in the Wells
Great video. I'd like to see an examination of other factors related to water usage (i.e. population density, population growth, population migration related to water usage, crop related water consumption including alternatives, etc.). Finally, what happens to my water bottle during recycling? Thanks again.
Or, you know, just build a solar thermal powerplant, if you already plan to use a concentrated solar array, and then desalinate via its waste heat. This way you can co-produce clean water with energy. And in contrast to PV you get your energy storage basically for free. Also dumping brine in the ocean only becomes a problem if you do it the stupid way. Instead you need to dilute it with more sea water and spread it properly.
Solar membrane thermal over solar thermal ftw; sodium is light and is wont to move as much as water. Brine back to the deep ocean skips trying to dilute it and corresponds better to shore stewardship. Separating the brine still makes for a giant chlorine loop even if you make minerals again pretty quick.
Filters clog (R.O.), require uber maintenance, expensive all the way around; mini nukes are manageable, not yet affordable, but tech wise very doable; the subs just offload brine (through torpedo tubes? I really don’t know); I believe the cavitation brine reduction method meets the middle ground here (yes, beyond conjecture I reduced 80k ppm brine from my Kentucky wells to 350ppm) and that was in 1999. Bearcreekresearch Don Hall.
For the time being, I would prefer to see more support for water recycling. This will enable us to use less total water, but require much less energy than desalination. Furthermore, water recycling will continue to be important even after we go all in on desalination so it’s a great first step. My city recently laid new pipe and uses recycled water in order to water lawns in parks and other public places. Once we finish rolling out water recycling, I’ll be much more supportive of ramping up desalination. Great to see people already thinking about what the most responsible way to do desalination will be!
@@dustygreene3335 absolutely. I’d love to see either option paired with further water efficiency both at the government/corporate level and at the individual level. It’s such a precious resource and we unfortunately squander a lot of what we currently have
I saw a video about people living in rural New Mexico. They used things like organic soaps so that they could reuse their water for their greenhouse garden.
As I am taking a break from my LEED GA CE course, and worrying about water shortages, getting to net zero energy, and carbon emissions, I watched your video and could not believe the content. It could be the possible answer to these grave issues. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. I always enjoy your videos.
I worked on the desalination plant for the Rabigh community. The desalination equipment were plants using in ocean going ships. Plus boiler for providing heat for boiling the sea water. The water droplets were scavengered by a impeller sent to a heatexchanger and then to storage tanks. If I remember right, the water didn't comply to WHO standards, so chemicals were added to bring it up to standards. I also worked on R.O. plants, treating water from Aquifer. The futher the pump when down in the aquifer, the more salty the water got. Really interesting subject 🤔
I suspect those "WHO standards" prohibited drinking distilled water (which is equal to desalinated water), because through osmosis it flushes you out of microelements, ultimately killing you. So I suppose the standards required adding back around 1mg of brime (or an equivalent of more controlled mix in form of refined chemicals) to an each 1 liter of water.
Crazy timing on the YT algorithm. I was just discussing our drought issue here in California with someone recently, and he mentioned the desalination plants they had aboard the Navy vessels he had served on and pondered why they are not more widely used amongst the civilian sector. I never considered the brine waste the thermal plants outputted and how you could safely dispose the material. Fascinating and informative video, I'll be sure to share it.
@@BloodyKnives66 The planned plant was a bad one. The planned site was at risk of eventually being flood within a few decades if sea level continues to rise. Moreover, the proposed method of processing the water posed too much of a threat to the local ecosystem. Some forgot CA already has approved 11 desalination including the Carlsbad desalination plant, which is the biggest one in the US and been operating since 2015.
I currently live in the Mojave Desert, and the very recent hydrological history of this area has made me often think that everyone is looking at desalination, energy generation, and energy storage incorrectly. We tend to look at all of these as separate issues, but in fact the combination of them would be an excellent way to reduce the costs of each individually. For instance, where I live there are many dry lakebeds scattered around the desert, some of which like Owens Lake were once large persistent inland bodies of water within the last century. Combining those dry/nearly dry lakes (many of which are salty already with the desalination process seems like an excellent way to solve virtually all the issues of desalination and the problem of solar energy storage via the following approach: 1. Massive solar farms with a large excess of day generating capacity power the Southwestern US grid. Some of this power is used to pump large volumes of raw sea water inland to currently dry or hypersaline lakebeds in the Mojave Desert, filling them and turning them into inland reservoirs of sea-water. 2. Large reverse osmosis desalination plants are constructed near these lakes, possibly underground to reduce the visual impact of the plants, taking advantage of the fact that these areas are not current wet-lands areas to speed up the process. Some of the solar power generated every day is used to produce an excess of desalinated water with these plants. Brine is returned to the salt lakes, or processed solar thermally to remove remaining water and recover raw materials (like your video talks about). 3. A portion of the desalinated water sufficient to meet the needs of regional water users is returned to the cities and towns of the Southwest via existing distribution systems, or additional infrastructure (for pumping toward the Colorado river and beyond). The rest of the desalinated water is pumped into massive inland pumped hydro systems constructed in the currently arid but topographically ideal areas of the Mojave Desert. There are areas out there where elevation differences of thousands of feet can be within a few miles of each-other, with more than enough area to accommodate lakes large enough to provide energy storage for the entire area over extended durations. 4. The combined costs of the entire system are then distributed across both water and power for regional consumers. Furthermore, mineral extraction may also help with the costs as suggested in your video. Furthermore, the renewal of large inland bodies of water will replenish the ground water supply, over time, possibly increase regional rainfall, and lead to further regional groundwater benefit if LADWP and other large Southwestern water users no longer take water from the Colorado River, Northern California, and the entire Owens River valley area. This isn't a global solution, but generally in areas where desalination is needed these other factors are present as well (deserts with dry lakes and large available solar capacity).
Except for evaporation. Q: what are the two major atmospheric substances that are greenhouse effect inducing gasses, other than CO². Hint: One of them is NOT water Vapour...
@@wmpx34 It's actually COMPLETELY right. The two major gasses, both far worse than CO2, ARE in fact, Methane (Cow Farts) and Water Vapour. But there is NOTHING they can do about water vapour, and the Beef industry PAYS them to look the other way about Cattle Farts. So, everyone thinking that they will somehow distill the entire world's drinking water out of sea water is sorely mistaken. The extra water vapour is a greenhouse nightmare, and ALL of the heat of evaporation, 2.3 Million Joules per litre, has to be bled away into the environment. Desalination is a Hideously expensive, and Grossly inefficient way to get enough water to survive at an ENORMOUS cost to the environment. Get it up to commercial scale... you'll forget all about CO2...
I live in south Florida, on a hot day , my air conditioner produce 9 cups of clear water in an hour. I always think that if we can further filter that water which does not have any salt to begin with we would have plenty of drinking water. Beside, with the dehumidifier inside the house , I empty out about 1 to 2 gallons of water within 24 hours from the dehumidifier. Water tastes a bit plastic taste but not salty. I haven't try putting them into one of those pitcher to find out if it take out the plastic smell and drinkable and do lab test to see how clean is the water in term of chemicals. Limited by living with a partner who does not care about new invention or solving any human problem like me and very controlling. So, I ask if anyone has a means to test water from 2 sources I have mentioned through water filter pitcher and then in the lab, please, share the result.
Water runoff from air conditioners and dehumidifiers is unsafe for human consumption. It pulls contaminants out of the air along with the water. Bacteria also grows on the surfaces where the water condenses. It is possible for the water to be treated, and filtered, but please don't drink it or use it to water food plants.
I remember learning about desalination for survival purposes when I was very young. From that point on I’ve never understood why we’re not all pouring money into desalination.
@@TwoBitDaVinci Desalination of water by any method is no different than the smeltering of aluminum---both processes are very energy intensive. You and I are both middle-aged plus, and not one nuclear reactor has been built in Canada nor the USA since we were both in diapers. Promoting electric cars when base power is produced by coal, or advocating solar energy when there aren't the silver or rare-earth minerals readily available to even come close to supplying what is required, or advocating "hydrogen" when nuclear power.....is hydrogen. If you want to do a segment that goes far down a rabbit hole, then let's discuss why nuclear power has been a pariah for the past half-century for no obvious reason. Look into thorium salt reactors, and modern SMR reactor technology. The world would be much better off making the switch to carbon-free nuclear power, and distributing all this technology to 3rd world countries, for a reliable, affordable carbon-free power source, and also used to power desalination plants worldwide.
Simple, NIMBY syndrome. You have to build plants to desalinate the water, and nobody wants them in their back yard. Hence the Not In My Back Yard Syndrome.
@@TheGoat29078 I'm unaware of any recent objections to desalination plants just because locals don't like it, but, I'm willing to believe people would be NIMBYs about it.
The incoming cold seawater could be used to accelerate condensation when the dome is cooled from the outside, just let it flow over the dome before it is heated inside from beneath. Smaller units could use parabolic channel reflectors to heat a pipe from below, while being cooled above with lateral exits for the condensate and be eventually more efficient.
That would require a network of piping carrying the cold water possibly in an inverted conical shape maximizing the surface area of the cooled water speeding up the condensation
Isn't this going to refract the light from the parabolic mirrors and also result in the outside of the dome never heating up, which is exactly what causes the air temperature inside to promote evaporation?
In puru or chile, there is a RO plant being built with a pumped storage and a solar field. The 400 psi pressure diff. will operate the RO plant . The solar will provide the energy. the upper pool will provide the constant pressure for the RO.
I am a retired 3rd. Class Engineer, and when I was at sea, I was responsible for the Reverse Osmosis machines in order to convert sea water to drinking water and believe me it is very labour-intensive and consumes a lot of power. it would be very costly and require many skilled technicians to produce enough water to supply a city. The pump(s). use very high pressure to propel the sea water through the membranes and %95 percent of the feedwater is returned to source.
That may be true, but the available fresh water is depleting faster than nature can replenish it. There is no other way forward. Look at all the lakes and aquafers on the West Coast. All almost empty. If you have a better idea, now is the time to speak up.
@@rchokelal Do what Singapore does. Use the reverse osmosis technology on sewage water instead of salt water. Sewage water has significantly less impurities than seawater, so it is energetically less demanding to purify. There is the ick factor but people will get over it.
@@nickl5658 that might be possible, but it important to remember that sewage water is an output. It requires an input to become sewage water. Right now, I don't believe there is enough sewage water to fulfill the fresh water needs. The process you describe is used on the space station, but these type of systems are lossy.
Our government just spent $1 trillion on Covid where 90%+ of that money never went to Covid at all. Imagine if they used that 90% of the money to solve water problems. Funny how we keep giving more money and get more rules and regulations, but the government hasn't solved a single problem. Water levels... a "crisis". Food supplies... a "crisis"... energy, roads, bridges, education, etc. All a "crisis" Climate change... an "existential threat to humanity". When are people going to figure out: all these "crisis" were created by government. Nobody can name a single problem "solved" by government. Not one. So, why give the the two things that are demanded by government to solve literally every single problem: 1) more money, and 2) more power which equals more rules and regulations? Why? When government creates a committee to solve a problem, if they solve it, they fire themselves. Does that ever make sense? No, it doesn't, but its what they do and its why they will never, ever solve a problem. Every committee is "almost there"... problem will be solved with what? Oh yeah, give more money and lets create even more rules and regulations. The two choices that have never, ever worked. Brilliant!
@@rchokelal There are plenty of other ways forward. Aeroponics can reduce agricultural water usage by up to 95%. Most people are one dimensional when dealing with multi-dimensional problems.
9:20 I'm sorry to say this, but it seems to me that you're wrong on the lithium extraction numbers by just about factor of a thousand. It would be more like 15 metric tons of Li / day not 10 000 tons. This being calculated from the lithium concentration you showed at 8:55
REASONS AGAINST DESALINATION: 1. POLLUTION: Enormous amounts of fuel required to force seawater through membrane filters. The fuel must be drilled (fracking pollution), refined (air pollution) transported (air pollution), burned (more air pollution). 2. POLLUTION: Huge amounts of brine wastewater must be disposed of causing environmental damage. Makes natural water aquifers more salty. 3. Kills massive amounts of sea life. There’s more reasons that it is a bad idea. If we take care of the environment properly, there would be enough clean water to go around.
Use thermonuclear power plants to boil the water in a way that it won’t be irradiated (since they already do that to cool down the reactors), collect the vapors in condensers, get fresh water, sell the sea salt. I swear environmentalist love over complicating things.
If anti-nuclear environmentalists cared about getting rid of nuclear waste, they'd be in favor of fast reactors that can deplete already "spent" nuclear fuels, but they're either ignorant or have had their heads up their asses for so long that they wouldn't be able to survive without breathing their own farts. But yeah, nuclear would fix so many problems. I know fusion is the holy grail, but even fully realized fission would fix our energy and water problems.
It takes 4.18 joules of heat energy to raise 1gr of water, 1°C. Sea water is going to be around 10°C. So, 4.18 x 90 or approx 370 Joules to evaporate it. That's for ONE GRAM of water. Water has a mass of 1 KILOgram per Litre. 370 THOUSAND joules. Per Litre. All of which would need to be removed again to change it back into liquid water, at 10°C. You could reduce that by 20% and have 30°water, but eventually, all that heat energy has to end up in the environment. And you think CARBON DIOXIDE is a problem?!
You don't need a heat source to desalinate water. The ideal thing to do with unused desert land would be to dig long shallow trenches for miles and miles and then install a huge primary heat exchanger right at the main pump(s) interface of the inflowing and outflowing seawater (so the dump light brine water is relatively the same temperature as influent seawater). Then in the entire length of trenches, install a dark durable material which lines the bottom of the trench the entire distance. Over the trench install durable clear plastic drip covers sealed over the trench from the outside atmosphere. Along the bottom of the drip covers install catch troughs and intermittent catch tanks with a series of solar driven pumps which tie into a main water line to a central collection facility. Something such as this type of system could be setup in a relatively short period of time, for much less money than expensive technology and generate hundreds of thousand of gallons of fresh water during daylight hours. Since the trench would be a constant flow of seawater from beginning to end, the brine levels would be naturally lighter and less disruptive to the sea. The effluent could also be released much further out into the sea where the water is much deeper and is able to disburse more easily. Also, the main system seawater pumps could also be driven by solar/wind power to make the system self-contained throughout.
wouldnt be enough, key is generate millions of gallons , your plan is flawed, what about land locked areas? in usa , then the states that would do this, would charge the states that dont have sea access, to make your hypothetical desal system.
@@beast36001 Any type of desal system wouldn't work in land-locked areas unless long pipelines were built, so saying "your plan is flawed" is the same as saying "all plans are flawed" in this situation.
Merle, I’d like to complement you on all the thought you’ve put into your post. As to the viability of your plan, I have no idea. Most importantly… you have a plan. We need more people thinking and making plans like you have. Thanks for the effort. Keep on trucking… it’s going to take all of us to keep water, energy and peace flowing.
There are so many problems with the Neom concept: 1) As you pointed out earlier, thermal desalination is terribly inefficient. It would be way more efficient and cost effective to use that solar to generate electricity and run an RO system. 2) All desalination plants produce brine. There isn't any magic in Neom's brine that makes it more economical to process into valuable commodities. Anything you do to process that brine is liable to consume more water than was produced in the first place. Desalination is typically meant to produce enough water to sustain agriculture. There simply isn't a market for that much sodium, chloride, etc. to make any exotic means of processing brine without water economically feasible. 3) The dome design isn't even very conducive to solar concentrator heating. It makes so little sense!
@@zahhari3170 They're related. "Profits," are the food and water you eat and breathe. They are the warmth to keep grandma and grandpa alive in the middle of the winter. They are the EMT crew that come to save your life after an accident.
I love this video! Thanks a million! I was in the military and when I went to the middle east, I observed how many desalinization plants they had. My question was...why does the rest of the world not fall in line with this idea and advance the technology to make it feasible? I would like to think there are many likeminded people such as yourself that can make this a larger scale reality. Great stuff! Thanks! I am a subscriber now!
It's waay to expensive. Even if we make nuclear plants and use it as a desalination plant it still waaay to expensive than just pumping it from renewable sources of water. Plus taking out those minerals from the ocean can have alot of drastic consequences to the delicate and already damaged ecosystem. Developed countries could do it but developed countries already have alot of fresh water
@@mobo8933 The reason you see so many Dplants in the middle east is because it's the desert. They're not needed anywhere else. If folks want to live in the desert, they should design, pay for and produce their own means of water procurement.
Great video! If I'm understanding correctly, I think you may have the numbers wrong for the example of extracting Lithium. If 100 million tonnes of sea water is processed each day, and there is ~0.1 parts per million of Lithium, then doing the multiplication (i.e. 100×10^6 × 0.1×10^-6) gives 10 tonnes of Lithium extracted per day. This is then only 10,000kg of Lithium per day not the 10 million kg from the video. Thought of another way, 1 ppm is 1mg/l, and 100 million cubic metres of water = 100 billion litres. So we'd expect 100 billion × ~0.1 mg = 10,000kg Lithium.
yes the lithium concentration in this video is orders of Magnitude too high, a single google search gives you 0.1-0.2 ppm Lithium in seawater not 10, it sounded way too good to be true, but it still has potential Edit: the numbers i found for the amount of Li used in a tesla battery was ranging from 10-15kg, based on that if the concentration in seawater is 0.1-0.2 ppm we could extract Li for 833-1666 tesla batterys if we assume 12kg per pack
It’s a complete scam and they’re looking for investors. It’s a great plot for science fiction though👍 On the upside it could bankrupt Saudi Arabia, that’s why Khashoggi was killed and dismembered by the crown prince, he pointed that out.
@@acemarcolawho's 'they'?! No need to get conspiratorial! It's not a scam to want to build more and better desalination plants. Hopefully they can all be run with renewable energy in the future. I think this was just one piece of misinformation which unfortunately hasn't been corrected 😕. Probably because Ricky hasn't noticed the few comments pointing it out.
@@NextGHaHaHa And all this is assuming that the lithium extraction process is commercially viable. Might be too expensive to render the lithium and cobalt into usable forms, as I'm sure the compounds that contain these elements in the seawater are not usable without further processing.
In Australia most major cities have desalination plants as a back up for times of drought. Melbourne Australia has one of the largest desalination plants in the world.
Here in the USA the arguments seem to reduce to a couple things... 1) communism, they don't want the desalination plant to be privately owned. I think that's stupid, but we can change that, just restructure the deal so that the local city owns the plant but the builder still makes a good profit in building it and providing training for its operation. 2) they think the main problem is human population, and would rather see us all stop having children, so the human species becomes extinct. This argument is deeply offensive to me on many levels, but when pressed, most who are against desalination eventually admit this.
@@vincentgrinn2665 "how the hell is privately owned communism, isnt that like the opposite of communism?" That's what I'm saying, they're communists so they're against a desalination plant being privately owned.
There would be no water problems, energy problems, environmental problems, and many more relevant problems if people wouldn't be stupid. We're adding 80 MILLION people to the planet EVERY year. It can't support us much longer. Birth control will be mandatory to survival. Within 10 to 20 years there will be wars over food and water. There already are over energy, and those will be more frequent...
Improving and lowering the cost of desalination would solve many problems. And removing and selling the minerals to help finance the process is a very clever idea.
I have my doubts of actually getting much use out of the metals found in the water. Even if we assume you could easily separate out the most abundant elements that n the sea water, lithium you’re only look at about .25 parts per million. 1 ppm is equivalent to 1 milligram per liter and 1 metric tonne of water is equal to 1,000 liters of water. This means for every 1 metric tonne of water produced you would only get 250 milligrams of lithium. You would need to process 10,000 metric tonnes of water just to get 2.5 kilograms of water, you would need about 25 times that amount of material just to produce a single Tesla battery. The cobalt nickel and other metals in the water come on even smaller amounts and just wouldn’t amount to anything significant worth extracting.
It becomes a measure of what extraction efficiency is to how much water is being processed. We use water nonstop so if extracted without too much trouble, given what demand is looking like for the elements, every little bit might count. If too inefficient, then doing it just for the sake of being green would just be dumb. Ahem...cough...plastic recycling... coughcough... Whew. Excuse me.
@@codyfan7161 every little bit DOES help but every little bit also.... has to be paid for. If it is not financially viable there's no reason for anyone to step forward and bear the financial responsibility for such projects.
The desal facility in the city where I live processes the brine by-product by mixing it with partially treated waste water, resulting in a solution that is slightly less salty than that of the ocean. It is then pumped offshore where it is assimilated back into the ocean without adversely affecting the environment.
@@markdennyritner7851 -- Recent solar installations are helping to carry the load. Reducing water demand in a coastal desert with many already practicing water conservation at levels unheard of elsewhere? Easy to say, I suppose.
@@markdennyritner7851 -- Uh-huh. "Lighten up, Francis." I figured you 'd be back to set the hook you were dragging with your first trolling reply. Take your hands off your hips, stop stamping your feet, and move along. Unless, of course, you're the kinda gal who has to have the last word.
I've wondered about this for many years. Living in California, I live in a city that's considered always in a drought. We have water restrictions. I have always wondered why one of the richest and most technical places ever allows themselves to be in a drought. I think it's because of rich people who are too scared of hurting their property along their precious beaches. Our lakes are very low and I always wondered why they allow this when we have the know how to have enough water. I really wish the government would incentivise someone to get this going in several areas.
The government has shut down every attempt to setup a utilities sized RO plant. Someone proposes it and the environmentalists sue and the govt pulls the permits.
@@GeoFry3 Give it 5 years, no water and former drug dealers scalping imported water bottles on the street corner....who am I kidding they won't change, they'll hack their way through a sea of endangered penguins and baby seals to tap an ice lake in the Arctic before they let that beach front investment go.
Yall may may not like us Fossil fuel guys, I'm a roughneck on a drilling rig, but without oil EVERYTHING around you and ALL economies collapse. Everything is built with oil. Unless you depopulate then the world will rely on Fossil fuels. Green energy doesn't exists without us
I've always wondered if you could just spread the brine out enough to not be a problem. If you fan out the outlet pipes into the sea far enough and have small holes along the way, the salt should just mix back into the water, right? There has to be some acceptable level of variation in water salinity that wouldn't kill everything. But hey, if you can extract useful resources from it, that works too. Pull thorium out of the water and run a MSR reactor to power the whole operation.
@@dansanger5340 if they want to get 1 ton of fresh water, th... I could go complicated... or dare you to try to breath with 0.5% less oxigen and say again that the problem is exaggerated.... mind you that tomorrow it'll be 1% less...
I wonder whether designing such a plant at the Salton Sea would make sense? Being below sea level would allow the passive flow of sea water to the area, and it would help reuse a blighted area as well as providing lithium mining.
Wet sea versus dry lithium mining. Maybe brine collection and processing would work. I could see Uranium and Thorium mining as well from the salt water. I think the dome method is wrong though. A liquid salt solar collector IMO is a better choice and have the zones be underground, insulated and flat inside. That way cheap industrial machines can harvest the dried salt mixture.
It's funny, I had actually thought about this before by using the "Power tower" plants to desalinate. It just makes so much sense. Desalination, by either method is a highly energy intensive exercise. RO maybe less so unless you count the membrane materials and the equipment needed. Unless they could figure out a way to recycle the membranes, it will always have a high amount of consumables. Thermal is definitely a more efficient way if you can do it with sustainable energy. I am excited to see this facility progress.
A far more unfashionable way of producing clean water is through the use of evaporator condensers. These have been used on military and merchant naval ships for probably close to 100 years. ROs are all the rage as they are a package unit and generally in industry we in the west are driven to dumb down our workers, rather than educate them. So water boils at sea level at 100*C. However, if you were to boil water on Mt Everest, it would boil at a lower temperature due to a lower atmospheric pressure. Lower the pressure, the lower the boiling temperature. So what happens is that design engineers on a bulk carrier vessel have a WRU (Wasteheat Recovery Unit - like a radiator in a car) to capture the thermal energy going up the ships exhaust chimney. The temperature of the exhaust of many engines is around 650*C. So if you capture this waste energy (heat) that goes up the stack, you can boil water. This boiled water can then be collapsed to create a vacuum. This vacuum is then fed into a shell tube exchanger with salt water as a feed stock, and here the lighter pure clean water can be boiled off at a much lower temperature than 100*C. This water vapor is then fed through a condenser unit, cooling medium being again sea water, and you end up with fresh clean water out the back end. And all you need for this is a few pressure gauges, a running primary engine for the ship and maybe a centrifugal pump or two. And if you make water that is too clean, the only drama could be that this super clean water could start to strip some salts and trace elements from you body thanks to the process of Reverse Osmosis inside your body.
Instead of wasting money on these “new” smart cities (which sounds really stupid), how about we fix the problems we already have, not create new ones. It’s not even practical when you look at what some of the materials required for these technologies to work. A lot of it (especially in energy production) requires the use of exotic materials that don’t exist and most likely won’t ever have the infrastructure to produce due to the expense and difficulty in production outside of a chemical laboratory. A lot of it as well, material scientists, metallurgists and engineers have yet to catch up to put into R&D. I don’t have faith in this “new” future when we can’t even get the present straight. Green technology is a pipe dream at this stage and in this century. We might as well look long term & just bite the bullet, accept the impracticality of some things and dedicate that time to research so future generations can build off of it and full fill that goal, sad to say, none of this technology will be practical and reliable like talking about it in our life time, it just won’t . All these failed initiatives and projects are just making billionaires look stupid and promoting them to become more hated by the day for wasting money on impractical nonsense. None of this would be such an issue now if in the past these greedy scumbag companies, bankers and policy makers wouldn’t have colluded for decades to suppress research and either buy out or threaten independent inventors for simply doing the right thing, but now it’s a problem? I apologize for the spill, but as an engineer I get fiercely enraged at these unfulfillable pipe dreams sold to the public like its gods word. You want a bright future? Fix the problems that already exist, tackle the unsexy issues like holding your elected leaders accountable or the manufacturing companies in your are using your water supply, instead of trying to run into a dead barren desert trying to build a “utopia” with tech that doesn’t exist yet, what a crock😂
I once did a project in grad school involving desalination and argued that one of the best ways to use desalination plants economically should be with power plants since they take seawater and need the conversion to freshwater to preserve the plants. Currently, they thermally pollute by dumping the freshwater back into the oceans, which could be saved for water reserves. I'm assuming these systems have to be financially and energy profitable anyway.
Thermal pollution? What the heck are you talking about? It's literally like a drop in the ocean. It does NOT change the temp of the ocean by even a fraction of a degree. Go back to school, study this time - and then publish.
@@foobarmaximus3506 Nobody scatters the hot water over the entire ocean. They pour it all back in one location and in that one location the water becomes very warm. O2 capacity is reduced and fish die. Manatees in winter love it though. In winter, they all gather near water discharge to keep warm.
@@foobarmaximus3506, tell us you don't know about localized effects on micro climates without telling us you don't know about localized effects on micro climates.
Lithium! I like the way you think. We can definitely use it and the nice minerals. There isn't much Gold, for example, but it is worth its weight in itself. Also, in greater than 1ppm concentrations we have Fluorine, Aluminum, Strontium, Silicon, and Boron, all of which are useful, especially in the energy sector. Nice reporting.
There are sodium batteries! Rechargeable no less. Chloride batteries maybe for some storage projects, I don't think I could want that in cars more than the lead ones already do...
The brine can be used for osmose-energy. Where brine and sea water are separated by a film, and the normal sea water is forced through the film by osmosis, producing energy (there are videos here that explain it better haha)
How about using our Natural Water supplies more sustainable first? Pumping out Groundwater, canalization of Rivers, Monoculture Farming/Forestry, waterpolluting… I know ppl have to drink and all, but instead of bandaging, tackling the Root cause for once would be better?😢
I definitely think that moving away from as much animal farming will have a huge impact on water usage. While researching my own video on water I found out that 50% of the water in California’s agriculture gets dedicated to feedstock for animals!
Great info! Thanks! Question tho.. do you know why salt water cant be placed in salt water lakes that can then seep through aquifers and create fresh water? That'd be awesome to know why it's not viable.. or at least I think.
@@ZenithTech35 no i get it.. it wouldn't totally remove all the salt.. but it would remove a lot out of it. Im know that as many of the US's aquifers like in the southwest were once underwater and it was salt water. And that water is being syphoned back and then used as fresh drinking water . An example.. west TX.
There are salt water aquifers you know ... No the ground definitely does not purify water.... The only reason sea side cities has fresh water aquifers is because the fresh water that comes from inland is by itself a barrier against the sea water ... For example if you take too much fresh water from a sea side aquifer the aquifer will become salty as sea water will replace the freshwater
Water is not scarce, it’s just humans have very wasteful lifestyles. It’s better to recycle the waste water you have rather than have expensive energy intensive desalination plants hence in the UK there is only one in London. Economically it would be more effective the treat sewage to a higher standard with modern technology and recycle water back into supply plus have more balancing reservoirs to capture water to meet seasonal supply demand issues. In the UK energy has never been cheap, renewables have to have back ups such as nuclear power which also has its own long term waste problems.
Combining solar thermal with vacuum distillation to lower the boiling point is definitely the way to go in hot regions. Alternatively, molten salt nuclear for cold regions.
I have only watched up to 3:39 so far, and it makes me wonder about nuclear waste power water boilers to desalinate. Seems an obvious replacement to me for fossil fuels. Paired with solar energy and hopefully innovation in solar storage.
I feel like there's daily things that we use fresh water for that can be replaced by saltine water. Simple one is a toilet, you (usually) don't drink out of it, you send all the water away.
I worked with desalination systems in the Navy, they are very high maintenance and the water can give some people intestinal problems. Nevertheless it does seem that this will be the path forward for any water shortages.
what, if we would simply try to collect oceanic rainwater in the tropics, where rain falls almost every day, and transport the collected volume in the biggest tanker fleets available to those dry coasts?
@@konradcomrade4845 doing things on extreme large scale and long term is extremely diffcult to plan since you dont want to make changes to the surrounding ecosystems that cant be restored afterwards. basically we are stealing the rainwater from the tropics that surely has its own purpose there. Also it sound like a super expensive way to deliver water..
If you extract the same perentage of fresh water, reverse osmosis generates the same amount of brine as thermal distillation. Also the brine from thermal and reverse osmosis is just as useful for mineral extraction as the solar system. If you think about it, the solar system is a thermal system.
@@kirkland5674 To dump it in multiple places at once thinly enough to not wreck ocean ecosystems is going to require LOADS of transport capacity. It could well be more expensive than the actual desalination plant and would likely either use loads of power/fuel in its own right to power all the transport vehicles required, or requiring the construction of an ocean wide sprinkler system to dispose of the brine.
The byproducts taken out with the water are part of what makes the waters ph livable for fish and plants but also contributes to the flavor and things we humans need aswell . I used to run a twps in my last years in the US Army and one of the coolest things i learned when i first changed MOS was how low of a total dissolved solids factor machines like whats discussed in this video produced, when compared to say a bottle of name brand water like dasani. 150-200 ppm lower. 🤯
I've been thinking about desalination plants since middle school, and we still don't have more of them. Also, the slat plains are disappearing. That sodium has a use, if you want to save those useless tracks of land.
I don't even know what the slat plains are so certainly not how sodium can help. Any use for sodium that gives it value would help though. Sodium ion batteries were what came to mind but curious about slat plains now.
On the mineral mining (from water) idea, I've heard that they do this sometimes from geothermal setups as well. As often the hot water returns with many more minerals than cold water does.
Yes, I know gold miners in particular use hydrothermal activity to search for mineral deposits (gold particles get trapped in quartz for example) when the water recedes or changes direction it leaves veins of mineral behind.
For years I thought we should pump water from high rain and flooding areas to dry out areas. I knew it would be very expensive, but I thought it would be worth it. I’m very glad that you are pursuing this idea and thinking of imaginative ways of reducing the cost like using existing pipe lines. Thank you for your work.
No still the idea of first capturing and storing rainfall better and then transferring water would be better. At the moment people just see high rainfall in a period as nothing but a problem, instead of the valuable resource for themselves or drier parts of the country. Look at lake Mead in the US. The catchment zone for the lake is the Mohave DESSERT and then the Hoover dam and everyone downstream have always taken more out of the system than nature can normally put in. But still when a hurricane offered to pour a lot of extra water into the zone they were still crying about it and trying to say that it was the fault of climate change. What you talked about before is exactly what we need - large scale water collection and distribution. Lots of places needing water are not even near the sea to build desalination plants. So unless we are all going to move nearer the coasts, we need to be able to move fresh water around.
I was interested in what this guy was saying until he started speaking of “the line” as a futuristic utopia. How can someone call the pure definition of a dystopian totalitarian environment build on the bases of inhumanity a utopia? Luckily this project is just the wet dream of the Saudi dictator and will fail on multiple levels, which will lead to it never being build.
@@dumptrump4ever maybe I’m thinking of the wrong sea, but I thought that that was still essentially R&D. They’re trying to figure out if they can scale it up to something that makes sense economically for the long term.
I will admit I got a chuckle regarding the comment on you shaving. I was thinking exactly the same thing but I never would have made a comment. Maybe before your time but think of all the votes eventual President Nixon lost due to a 5 shadow. Thank you for the information it was an interesting video.
Here in Victoria (Australia) we built a reverse osmosis desalination plant that has a maximum capacity of 150 billion litres of water a year and it is powered entirely by renewable energy, mostly solar during the day. I think it is the first of three that were planned for the future. It has allowed us to stabilize our dam water levels, after a drought we hit about 16% at the worst point, now we are about 86% or so, leaving a bit of slack for winter/spring rain. I am not sure what they are doing with the waste. It is interesting we have way more solar power than we have consumption for, it would be a good use of the power if you could also extract some valuable minerals like lithium.
well there is a slight difference in how they power the plant. it actually uses energy from the grid (since solar energy is currently still unreliable) but then offset it by buying Renewable energy certificate, then the fund is going to facilitate some windfarms or some things. The brine is pumped back to the ocean through diffuse nozzles (to minimise salt concentration around the dumping area) and they made extra long outlet tunnels under seabed to go pass sensitive marine areas! Cheers from Sydney.
If you want to know what happens when salt concentration gets too high, just look at the Great Salt Lake in Utah or the Dead Sea. It's called the Dead Sea for a reason. Yes, mining the minerals from the brine is a great idea, but what do you do with the rest of the waste? In any case, using solar power whether PV pannels or thermal in the hottest and dryest places on Earth makes perfect sense. I see a lot of people in the comments talking about using nuclear reactors to power this but adding heat in the middle of the desert is the absolute last thing you want to do.
I live next to the Great Salt Lake and the water levels are getting very low. Maybe there should be a pipeline to dump leftover brine into places like the Salt Lake?
You are overlooking a vital point. The Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea are very small bodies of water with a high evaporation rate. We are talking about a body of water that occupies almost 3/4 of the surface of the earth. Whatever we do with desalination will be totally insignificant, just like the methane argument about cows, or the CO2 argument! One forest fire dumps more CO2 into the air per day than all of the people in America. One small forest dumps more methane than all of the cows! People and other animal life are insignificant in the balance of nature. Get over that crazy green religion and start looking at REAL science for a change.
@@glenparker234 You want a list of green-washing BS? Here are a few to get you started: 1) Carbon capture: We already have a great carbon capture technology. It's called photosynthesis. It uses energy from the sun to turn CO2 and H2O into sugar and wood. The technological carbon capture uses lots of energy to do what? Drive CO2 into the ground so we can extract more oil? No thanks. 2) Hydrogen fuel cells: Sure, it sounds like a great idea. H2 plus O2 from the atmosphere and the exhaust is water. Then you realize that H2 makes metal brittel so the system has a limited life span, that they are burning methane, releasing CO2 to make H2, that the end to end energy efficiency is only about 40% and that fuel cells require precious metals making them hideously expensive. Again, no thanks. Personally, I have nothing against using desalinization to make unlimited amounts of fresh water. All that water eventually makes its way back to the source anyway, making me think there is NO net impact on the source of the water. Sometimes, environmentalists don't seem to have a grasp on reality. By using solar power to process the salt water, they are also doing it without adding any heat to the environment. It seems to me that this is an absolute win and a real solution for drought. Sorry if I wasn't clear with my previous comment.
But what happens to the salt (NaCl), it is still the most abundant? The biggest issue/problem still isn’t answered…? Considering the problem with the “big pumps”; PV can probably solve a large amount of the energy support
I live in Southern California. Most of our water travels for hundreds of miles thru canals, and pipelines. This involves pump stations and thousands of employees to maintain. Very expensive to operate.Seems stupid when the saltwater is next door. 😮😊
There must be a difference between salt taken from the ocean and that which gets mined.. I don't understand why the salt can't be sold? Is this because of big salt? I love the video of how evaporation works btw.
Not much. Salt deposits are the result of parts of ancient oceans somehow getting cut off and drying out. The trace minerals could be different but it's still mostly salt.
They market some of their products as working for raw water (lakes/streams). If it doesn't work well enough, I would think they will run into some legal problems down the road. The use of UV-c can kill most bacteria. How effective or necessary their solution in this use case is questionable. Personally, it seems more like a gimmick. Basic pitcher filters can improve the taste and "quality" of municipal or well water. In general (in the US) those sources are already more than safe enough for drinking, even if they have a bad smell or taste. If you live in a place that cannot provide safe drinking water, I wouldn't trust one of these basic filter systems to do the job.
We could also convert all that sodium into the sodium ion batteries right? sell the trace materials, fill up our fresh water and maybe allow people's excess home solar to power these deSal plants? I don't know the specifics but it sounds like it could solve a lot of issues especially having a outlet for all the excess solar and sodium.
Yea, but don’t forget that we don’t technically have EXCESS solar energy until all fossil fuel generation has been cut. But yea, what you describe is very possibly our long term future.
@@SaveMoneySavethePlanet There is excess solar in certain regions - California has _paid_ Arizona to take their excess energy. Lack of storage automatically makes solar easily go into excess in sunny regions even though it can't cover our needs, because it can generate more power than there is load on the grid on occasion and that power can't be saved until it's needed, forcing us to resort to fossil fuel.
Its a matter of energy. Why haven't we put new the reactor designs on line and placed the nuclear waste we have lying about in the vast safe repository that we built at such cost for that purpose? Because fixing problems costs money for those being paid under the current state of fiasco. So they arrange to stop the solution.
When my daughter was 10 years old, she asked me if they were able to make drinking water from seawater. I said yes, but it is more expensive than just starting with fresh water. So she replied, "Oh, so they are just going to use all the fresh water first and then be forced to desalination!" I think she was correct.
Lake Mead is about to hit Dead Pool status so she is correct we will wait until it is to late as we always do. Then that bottle of water will cost more than the gas right now.
I love Arizona but life has led me to michigan seeing the water problem in AZ is absolutely nuts you may think if you have a drilled well you're going to be OK.. maby but I doubt it I have seen to many wells run dry ...I'D CUT CALIFORNIA'S WATER SUPPLY calfornia is a lost cause anyways
@@shitballs782 Imagine we get to that tipping point where there is nothing they can do, but watch it all dry up and possibly burn. Las Vegas was built in a Desert where there was nothing and it can go back to that without water.
10 year old knowing the word Desalination is impressive
Smart daughter.
I've been saying this for years. We need to build pipe lines for WATER, not oil!
Let’s get this going! Brilliant video btw! New fan here! Greetings from Hollyweird,CA
Forget solar, thorium nuclear is the way forward with DeSal tech because then you can setup this installation ANYWHERE but solar is limited by climate.
It's getting very late and infrastructures need time to be built, say roughly 10 years. I 'm all in in desalination, especially solar and brine mining.
The brine disposal problem is easy. The extraction of crude oil also extracts salt water which is pumped into salt water disposal wells. With many oil wells that are no longer profitable, there has to be plenty of subterranean space that use to have oil. Since salt water is already deep in the earth, there shouldn't be àny environmental concerns.
I still dont understand why Saudi Arabia does not power its desalination plants with nuclear power. Its clean energy and one small reactor plant can provide energy for at least half a century. The US Navy's aircraft carriers and submarines generate fresh water by heating sea water with the help of the reactor's heat. They power the ships for over 40-50 years with a mid-life refit or a refuel required only after reaching 25 years of operations. The nuclear waste generated is also very minimal,almost the size of 3 trucks for over a century of clean unlimited energy. And now with the moon being within our grasp we know where we can dump excess nuclear waste if we do not want them to be stored here on Earth.
71% of the earths surface, 3% of its mass. Increased salinity over time would exponentially increase issues in the ocean and the expense is ridiculous.
I think it would be interesting to invest in salt water batteries and use the brine produced by these plants to act as the electrolytic solution. It seems like that could be one way to decrease the brine release into the ocean.
Well in the Late 70's this came out and California Said it cost to much so they stole more water.
They're not as popular as they should be because they aren't cost effective. It takes more energy and resources to get clean water than the process is worth, if that makes sense. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's not a sustainable source of fresh water
Using the sun to evaporate water has been around for at least 20 years. There's even ideas of using gigantic greenhouses in Saudi Arabia where solar panels run the pumps and they let the sun evaporate the water which then waters the crops inside the greenhouse. Well this might work in super hot areas, it's not going to work in the northern hemisphere because there's simply not enough sunlight. As for processing salt, we've been doing that here in the US for over at least a hundred years. In Death Valley there are companies that simply scrape the salt up and use them to extract minerals. Again this is not new. I wish them all the luck for those countries that are stuck on the equator. But for us in the US this is totally na.
Well, they're not in Canada because we have 20% if the planet's fresh water with less than one half of one percent of the population so they're not really necessary. I imagine Saudi Arabia is a different story.
Where do you live, that you need UV light to tamper with your tab water ? How much much enrgy/ plastic is used for these LARK filtes ? It's frikkin water..
Nice strategy I must say. I don't earn as much as this video claims but I earn about 3,250 USD from Hyperion Trust every week. However, I've read articles of investors that made as much as $350K profit within a few months I'd like to know what you think he invested in and how do i make such profit
Most probably stocks and real estate
Try to get a tutor or a mentor to help you out, they understand the market better
I agree, investing through the guidance of a professional or a broker has its perks, I got in touch with a lady broker early this year, and through her assistance, I was able to invest in the right funds and grow a profit of $290K from January till now
@@deanjewell4292 Please, your broker you mentioned, how do i get in touch with her?
@@sunshineonme *' Natalie * Andrea * Bows *' is the coach helping me out, and you can book an appointment with her through her website, just look her up online to get more info about her
While in the US NAVY the ship that I served on was nuclear powered. We used the reactors heat to distill sea water for the ships reactor coolant and drinking water, plus equipment coolant as sell. We never went on water rations.
The best way to get electricity and fresh water is to build small nuclear power plants and have desalination plants next to the electric generators. Win win.
Nuclear reactor technology had come a very long way since the 60's. Safer, simpler and cheaper to operate and maintain.
You don't even need much heat water boils at 30c in a vacuum.
@@Barskor1 heat or energy used to reduce atmosphere, potato potato, there is a requirement for latent vaporization
@@imakedookie Gravity can do the work to create a hard vacuum with just two tanks 12 meters apart one above the other fill the top tank with water and let it drain to the bottom tank.
And what did the navy do with the nuclear (fission) wastes?
@@davidhuttner275 Navy reactors are typically highly enriched so they last for decades. The quantity of waste is tiny and the radioactivity will drop much faster then traditional reactor waste. Eventually I'd hope these fission products will be recycled and valuable elements repurposed but since the quantity is so small this isn't a problem that needs to be addressed for a long time.
This video feels more like a marketing campaign for the city rather than an analysis as to why there aren't more desalination plants. The actual answer to the question was said in 10 seconds with no real dive into it.
The Neom project sounds like another one of those model city plans that will ultimately fail because it relies on other systems which offset everything good that is done by the project.
How can we ensure that removing these elements from the ocean is fine to do? How can you ensure that you don't remove too much water from the sea? How will this affect its biochemistry?
Very little science was presented in this video and I am even skeptical even on what was presented.
Is the Neom project the future of desalination? Who knows, because this guy sure doesn't. No specifics about the technology is discussed, just empty words and marketing terms.
hahahahhahahahaha i know u don't likr saudi but this is the worst argument to make.
you seriously think we're gonna destabilise the ocean by taking water from it, you don't understand the size of the ocean and the amount of water it has.
and saudi isn't gonna take the elements the ocean has because saudi isn't aiming to do that it's just a secondary product.
even if your argument was an actual possibility it will probably take millions of years for any effects to happen and you shouldn't worry about that the sun will explode first
Don't forget that Neom being a straight line is the worst start to urban planning you could possibly make. Cities have been circles for thousands of years because it is the most efficient shape for minimizing the average distance between all points on its area.
I got Matrix vibes when he started talking about that city.
Very good points. When something appears too good to be true, it always is.
The solutions to our biggest environmental problems will require cultural change. Technological innovation will not save us-it will help, but innovation in technology without innovation in culture is a futile path.
“empty words and marketing terms.”
Just because he doesn’t go 🤓 mode on doesn’t mean that his video is entirely fodder.
As a chemical engineer working in a desalination station in Kuwait, my dream and goal in life is to bring the dome technology to Kuwait and all around the world. The neom project looks like heaven to me and id love nothing more than to be a part of it
that's amazing! yeah I hear you, I'm pretty excited to see it come to life too
Is it using vacuum distillation?
must be a fascinating job
@@ironczar8975 yes it sure sounds like it
@@kiloton1920 I'd like to hear more
Desalination plants should have been built many years ago but sadly a majority of our society is reactive and not proactive. This video was very insightful, thank you for the excellent presentation.
"Society is reactive and not proactive," excellent.
It's also somewhat expensive.
@@peterzimmerman1114 It's not as expensive as running out of ground water.
See the problem is we knew this was a problem years ago and instead of building desalination plants California decided to steal the water from Arizona, Colorado, Nevada
most country don't need it. Some country have cheaper option.
And how expensive and at what recovery % are realistic with those trace elements. Seems pie in the sky to me
Here's a question I find interesting... What if we got extremely good as a planet at desalinating water? What if we then took all that technology, coupled it with reforesting practices, and began to slowly irrigate and change these huge desert areas where life really doesn't exist???? Can you imagine having a massive breakthrough in water desalination and using it to not just fulfill our needs as humans, but then pass that off to nature and give life to previously dead areas of the planet? We could bring down the temp of the planet, increase fresh oxygen, sequester more carbon, and beautify that desert area with green life.
Life does exist in deserts, they have their own ecosystems. However, stopping desertification is a good idea
@@ReeperRiopel I'm not advocating for foresting everything that's a desert. Just aiding the desert in being a healthier space on earth, and getting forests back where they belong.
@@Conceptsexplainedsimply deserts are deserts because of the Earth's macro-climate. There is absolutely no point trying to change them. They cannot be anything else (at least through human intervention). The only thing that is worth doing is to limit desertification.
One way to "terraform" this planet in the future. Nice idea tbh Kyle.
Actually we must use desalination mostly to irrigate trees (fruits) as they have roots and are more water-efficient than crops, that will cause cooling effect and more local precipitation to kickstart ecosystem. Throwing desalinated water just for human consumption and building more cities is not sustainable and will have bad effect on plankton which are essential for marine life.
Our company was one of the first thin film composite reverse osmosis design engineering, manufacturer, installation companies. We created the drinking water from the red sea and made the desert bloom. However the key was to remove all the microscopic life in sea water prior to separation the salty water. Many companies dropped the ball on pretreatment requirement and their plants failed long term. Fresh water and conservation reusability can solve humanities water needs.
Exactly the way to save the humanity from the global environment problems, we need to use the seawater as drinking water.
Hi Larry, could you tell me why it's important to take out the microscopic life forms first? Thanks
@@trueAnge1 Oceans are full of microscopic life which will grow as a biofilm on the surface of the reverse osmosis membranes reducing their ability to produce fresh water. Cleaning these biofilms becomes difficult and over time becomes costly and difficult. We turned down many projects because the civil engineers would not listen to us. Such projects failed within a year. Hope that helps.
@@larrystenger1247 thanks a lot
Didn't know how important that is - I suppose it depends on the cost of membranes vs pre-treatment as to what makes more sense; pre-treat, or just burn through membranes. I have no idea of the costs.
I was surprised to learn of all the other elements besides salt in ocean water. It makes sense to harvest those elements, especially thorium.
Don't get excited. It's basicaly BS, coz to extract any of those materials you'd need so much effort that it's not even close to effective. Look at the graph they showed - it means there is a huge mountain of NaCl and somewhere in that pile there is a single grain of some Thorium (or whatever) salt.
Lithium is there, but at 0.2 ppm, that means you need to process HUGE amounts of sea salt to get some.
Excellent video sir.
Thorium - nearly 0.01 ppm i.e. one gram thorium is present in 100 tonnes of water !
quite economical to separate from other salts ! 🙃
I mean the question is how would you efficiently extract such minute trace amounts? That is conveniently skipped over.
Thank you for the video. In the submarine service we distilled seawater while underway. This water was used for consumption, the galley, showers, the laundry, and a variety of other purposes. Of course, it helped, having a nuclear power plant to produce the required energy. I remember only one time when water restrictions were called for and that was brief. A side note: being submerged for extended periods of time, we also produced Oxygen from seawater through a couple different methods.
try to wash your coffee mug when you are at dock!!
@@imakedookie Not sure what you're trying to point out there, but I'm guessing you think that their potable water somehow becomes radioactive, for whatever unfounded reason.
@@h8GW i was referencing the habit of submariners being disciplined for unnecessary water waste, as in being reprimanded for rinsing their coffee mug. they will leave the coffee residue for weeks at a time as to not waste water cleaning it. even with nuclear powered facilities, the habit would still remain... the joke wasn't meant for ya
@@imakedookie Hm. Thanks for the insight, although I would imagine that would be more of a cultural issue than a logistical one.
Maybe severe water rationing is a little outdated, or maybe submariners like their new brews to contain some taste from the old one? Kinda like how New Yorkers like hot dog water dirty.
What were the different methods for producing oxygen? I assume electrolysis was one, but what were the others? Also, was the electrolysis used on raw seawater, desalinated water, or something else?
I am surprised you didn't include electrodialysis, especially PV powered electrodialysis. Works amazingly well for ground water desalination.
really good point, I think I have some notes for a follow up. I do have some other water based ideas, especially since I'm starting a series on building the worlds most sustainable home. thank you!
@@TwoBitDaVinci First time I've seen any of your content. Personally I see the idea of this technology (RO Units) as being wasteful, trendy, and ignorant. And I've commissioned and operated a few of them. Your video demonstrated a basic passive survival technique in the desert, but that's about all its good for. I would suggest you explain the old and unsexy tech of Evaporator Condensers. By using HRU (Heat Recovery Units) to extract waste heat from existing heat sources, such as exhausts from coal boilers, Gas Turbine Generators, Land fill gas driven generators to produce steam. This steam can then be collapsed to create a vacuum. This vacuum package then feeds a shell tube exchanger and with a feed stock such as sea water, you effectively boil off the clean water from the sea water feed stock. Now this technology has been used in chemical plants and on sea going vessels/naval vessels forever. Small RO units are then used as emergency back-up units. The downside of using this technology is that you require "process tech's " who have a basic understanding of the fundamentals of the process and ultimately a industrial commitment to spend money retro fitting HRUs on existing hardware. Where I live, industry in the city is effectively given free water by the state government. So why spend any money. RO Units are like the Hydrogen revolution, sexy and going to save the world. Everyone has forgotten why the world passed over this tech (hydrogen) after the Hindenburg disaster.
@@darrentummon4855 and you have links to your business and videos showing us all the work you've done on this? I look forward to seeing all your work..
@@cotterpolt5309 no videos, but I do have 14 years of experience in using the evaporator condenser principles in the manufacturing of Ammonium nitrate explosives. In the AN process you introduce a 90% solution into a evaporator and boil off the excess water (-42 kpa from memory) until the AN solution has a Melt temperature of 141'C and a fudge temp of 122'C . Again from memory. It's not rocket science. None of it is rocket science, unfortunately in the west we are dumbing down our process techs and tradesmen so they don't"hurt" themselves. As a result, they become less skilled and then hurt themselves.
@@cotterpolt5309 Dear Cotter: It's been 11 months, and you haven't responded to Darren's cogent and thoughtful response below. Surely in a year's time you will have done some research of your own, yes?
The biggest problem i have with their city concept so far is the cloud seeding. Iirc cloud seeding can really screw over large swaths of land downwind of you by interfering with the water cycle.
The desalination plant concept itself is actually really cool, and would probably work very efficiently for the first phase of extracting fresh water. I'm not so sure about being able to extract useful minerals from the salt however, but i'm not a wiz-kid when it comes to minerals and extracting things from other things so for all i know it is easier than it sounds for them.
Yeah, I think cloud seeding is concerning. It just makes me think of so many times that human intervention made more problems than it solved. We don't seem to learn from our mistakes quickly enough. It also makes me wonder how long it will take for water rights agreements to be drawn up for this newer technology. If I am up-stream and I divert a river, I'm denying anyone down-stream a right to water. I think cloud seeding might have similar effects but it will be much harder to figure out where the water is being diverted from.
I'd have thought the biggest problem is that it's a huge resource vampire that is objectively worse than normal cities in every possible way
Oh please, that entire city thing is just a joke. Don't even bother spending time thinking about it.
@@rchltrrs yeah this is what china did to Laos, and the Ethiopia with the Nile/Egypt
There's bajilion of problems with that utter idiotic idea.
Really appreciate the explanation which helped me better understand why there isn't more movement in that direction. I appreciate the downsides and perhaps more focus would lend to some better solutions. To me, the bottom line is what other solutions can take us into the future? There are other that options that currently contribute on a relatively small scale overall. IF the drought doesn't diminish, what else is there to accommodate for the demands for water in the next 30 years?
I wonder how Israel is succeeding so wildly with desalination? What are they doing to make it work so well?
I think that you left out a major and minor advantages about solar evaporation:
1) use solar to boil, not just evaporate salt water. Use the steam to generate electricity.
2) let the leftover steam rise to a height to allow gravity to move it.
3) as mentioned, derivatives could pay for the desalination. Sites around the world evaporate sea water to get salt. Put these two together and sea salt out one side and water out the other.
great point! Brilliant!
Perhaps use tidal power to drive pumps.
Theres more than just tablet salt to extract...
All hydropowerplants use this already. Moving the water up to a higher place using clouds and rain.
1/ Salt water / steam through a turbine won’t last long
I remember hearing this when I was a kid in the 80s. People were saying we would run out of water and oil by the year 2000. I was also told that Florida would be under water by the late 90s lol
that stuff is foolish lol... I just believe we are clever enough to find new and betters ways of doing stuff and being more aware of our impacts. I'm a total capitalist
It is an old, established rule: oil will run out in 20-30 years. It works for 100 years now!
I worked in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s; and solar and desalinization was on their 5-year plan - even back then.
It is amazing that we in the USA have continued to elect idiots bent of fighting over the "zero-sum pie" when they should have been setting national policies... 🥵🥵🥵
@@TwoBitDaVinci salination plays an essential role in ocean currents and ocean life in general. Desalination will likely have disastrous consequences, especially if we attempt to capitalize on the oceans directly. The monetary incentive can’t save the climate and novel technologies won’t save our oceans. We need to reduce what we use and change the way society and individuals operate and gear the world towards an actually greener future
Do you know how much work has been done to keep us from the apocalyptic scenarios that alarmed scientists and whistleblowers in the 80s? Thanks to concerted global efforts, we’ve most likely dodged the worst case scenario, now we’re just trying to get the best possible future, though it’s highly unlikely we can skirt the consequences of the past, we can at least minimize it further
Just out of curiosity. Once you separate the non salt elements from the brine would it be feasible to then you use the salt elements for Sea Salt? If so then you're actually going more green because you could potentially replace salt mines by using every part of the brine.
I think the main problem is that desalination produces more salt than humans can ever have a use for. Extracting the small amount of the scarcer elements is fine but the salt (essentially just sodium chloride) has to be either returned to the ocean or dumped in huge mounds on solid ground.
In the grand scheme of things the ocean is easily able to take back the salty brine after fresh water has been removed, but it is the local effects of this super-salty water that cause the problems. They need to find a way to distribute it over a larger area/volume rather than just dump it back in the ocean in one place. It needs to be mixed back in with the bulk of the ocean by wind, waves, currents and tides rather than being allowed to sink down and collect at the bottom before mixing.
@@michaelhart7569 As the water runs through the plant (I'm using a Navy System here) the water becomes more and more concentrated with salt (ie. brine). The input salt water is mixed with the discharge brine to dilute it to prevent damage to discharge pumps and piping. I'm not sure if you can set up a system using just brine to make salt unless you want to make it very expensive as the cheaper metals are going to corrode and break down the pipes/pumps.
@@lanceurwin3368 Yes, that's the sort of system I might have imagined for a plant designed just for desalination. I only mentioned solid material because the narration discussed recovery of other elements and also showed some pictures of crystalline salts. Presumably this would have to include some sort of fractional crystallisation as chemical engineers would always prefer to just work with solutions and fluids where possible, avoiding the issues of handling solids.
While I've never been involved with such plants (a process scale-up chemist, not a full blown chemical engineer) I would still guess that many of the older ones were built with little regard to what happens to the brine when returned to the ocean. Perhaps just a few more pipes distributing it over a greater area and with more mixing is all that is required?
@@michaelhart7569 excess salt could be used on icy roads maybe.
@@johan8724 That certainly seems like an obvious choice. At least for those who live in areas that need roads-deicing. Not so much in places like Saudi Arabia that need desalination plants :)
As a side note, I once read that many American states don't use simple salt on their roads. Not so much because of the eutectic point of NaCl, but because it causes more metal corrosion. They use some other inorganic salt. I can't remember which, but I think it was Magnesium-derived.
Though not currently a US resident, I recall reading once that you are better off buying a used car in one of the sunshine States rather than their colder northern neighbors, for that reason.
Technically, you do not have to use pumps to pump water into solar water evaporizer. If you build it under the sea level, you can pump the water just by opening the valve. And, if you make that chamber airproof, using the fact, that gas have smaller density, you can "pump" fresh water out of it just by using higher pressure by the steam generating.
sounds like you have heard of the device noted as a ''water ram'' not as tech as what you mention but some of the same operational qualities, it works on gravity, travel distance, and air compression, i would love to see what you said work, I think it would solve a lot of problems
On another level, it's probably not wise to put facilities like these below sea level. The Fukushima disaster is a key example as to why we should not put important infrastructure below the water line. Although a desalination plant wouldn't be nearly as disastrous, it's still a good thing to keep in mind when building anything near the ocean.
What if we built a hollow space rope. like a space elevator but just a hollow hose, connect into the ocean with the open end in low earth orbit, the pressure difference would draw water up to the top of the rope, then you could have a second rope filled with reverse osmosis stuff that let gravity just pull it back down to earth, so you could have one set of reverse osmosis in the pressure pipe and another in the gravity shoot, by the time it went all the way up and back down, you got clean water? maybe even make the rope itself the osmosis filter, so clean fresh water flows and falls down the sides, and the crud would flow and fall down the middle....
@@mequavis No, because inside the rope will be exactly same pressure as outside of the rope.
Like atmosphere, pressure is decreasing with higher altitude
@@mequavis is that called rain
A cheaper solution is to pump cold seawater and use it to condense fresh water from the air. Pumping is cheap, cold ocean water is abundant and there is no brine to deal with. Still, nice video.
Brine is a resource.
And good for bricks!
I don't know if the amount of condensation would be worth the price of pumping ocean water. Plus when the water warms up you have to pump more and that happens fast
@@hopelessdecoy An excellent observation! I've run the numbers and here in central California where the humidity is relatively low you need to circulate 120 gallons of sea water for every gallon you condense from the air. In St. Croix, which is more tropical, you only need to circulate 37 gallons of sea water for every gallon of fresh water you make. The cost to pump is about 0.2 watt hours per gal. In other words, cheaper than reverse osmosis with no brine. But further, at a power plant that needs cooling water anyway, the pumping is almost free. At its peak, the central California Moss Landing power plant could have produced 12 million gallons per day of fresh water from the cooling water it was already pumping.
@@lukedegraaf1186 More information on the bricks, please.
@@Barskor1 I have this stupid idea that carbon could be sorted in limestone, and used as a building product, with good insulation properties. Less avid in the oceans is good for reefs, and takes carbon out of the atmosphere at the same time.
Saddest thing is that so many areas will pull up ancient ground water, replenished only over centuries, and then use it to irrigate grass with fresh potable water, while at the same time dumping the clean grey water from the sewage system into rivers, because it is "dirty", and then also mandating that people must have these lawns to "keep up the appearance of the neighborhood" as well.
Great points!
I would 100% be down for making watering lawns illegal. Like really illegal
@@skeetsmcgrew3282 For me watering the lawn most of the year not really needed, the rain does it.
@@skeetsmcgrew3282 Yeah, I live in an area that gets decent rainfall. So what if the grass is brown for a month during the summer? It's 90 degrees out, that's natural. Yet around here we're just dumping thousands of gallons of treated water out for a short lived and relatively minor aesthetic improvement.
Just FYI, sewage is black water, not grey water. It’s not clean enough to water lawns by a long shot.
With the salt as by product, they have the technology to do batteries.
@9:10 Seawater contains 0.1 ppm of lithium. If you process 100 million cubic meters of seawater, you get 10 cubic meters of Lithium, or around 5.340 kg. Enough to build around 76 Tesla Model 3's.
Thank you, I was searching the comment section for this.
It's always 40 years in the future with these projects. Meaning it will never happen. Those lithium concentrations are far too low to make it economical, not to mention that despite what people think, battery grade lithium is extremely sensitive to tight chemical tolerances that will never be achieved in a project like this. Makes a cool video though.
When I was young, there were four large desalination plants at Freeport Texas. In the late fifties they were dismantled and shipped to Guantanama Cuba. Fidel Castro cut off the fresh water supply to the base. They were rebuilt there for the U. S. Marine Corps. The water was so pure that the Marines had to pour it from container to container through the air to give it taste.
Brine could easily be repurposed for regions that use salt on the roads. Brine is great. It actually sticks to the surface you apply it too and coats way more. Salt lands in random spots. Brine gives you a solid consistent coat.
Spray salt water on the roads as much better than putting salt on the roads. It goes further and causes much less contamination, but the long-term is destroying the water supplies and the plants unless you live in a very rainy place the salt does damage to the plants and trees near the road, eventually winds up in the Wells
Great video. I'd like to see an examination of other factors related to water usage (i.e. population density, population growth, population migration related to water usage, crop related water consumption including alternatives, etc.). Finally, what happens to my water bottle during recycling? Thanks again.
Asian citys super dense no problem. Straight to lamd fill, poor countrys straight in the river
Or, you know, just build a solar thermal powerplant, if you already plan to use a concentrated solar array, and then desalinate via its waste heat. This way you can co-produce clean water with energy. And in contrast to PV you get your energy storage basically for free.
Also dumping brine in the ocean only becomes a problem if you do it the stupid way. Instead you need to dilute it with more sea water and spread it properly.
you are right ..cogeneration is very efficient 😊
Solar membrane thermal over solar thermal ftw; sodium is light and is wont to move as much as water. Brine back to the deep ocean skips trying to dilute it and corresponds better to shore stewardship. Separating the brine still makes for a giant chlorine loop even if you make minerals again pretty quick.
Filters clog (R.O.), require uber maintenance, expensive all the way around; mini nukes are manageable, not yet affordable, but tech wise very doable; the subs just offload brine (through torpedo tubes? I really don’t know); I believe the cavitation brine reduction method meets the middle ground here (yes, beyond conjecture I reduced 80k ppm brine from my Kentucky wells to 350ppm) and that was in 1999. Bearcreekresearch Don Hall.
For the time being, I would prefer to see more support for water recycling. This will enable us to use less total water, but require much less energy than desalination. Furthermore, water recycling will continue to be important even after we go all in on desalination so it’s a great first step.
My city recently laid new pipe and uses recycled water in order to water lawns in parks and other public places.
Once we finish rolling out water recycling, I’ll be much more supportive of ramping up desalination. Great to see people already thinking about what the most responsible way to do desalination will be!
Hiw we use our water is vital.
@@dustygreene3335 absolutely. I’d love to see either option paired with further water efficiency both at the government/corporate level and at the individual level.
It’s such a precious resource and we unfortunately squander a lot of what we currently have
@@SaveMoneySavethePlanet 100% we need to solve many problems holistically.
Shower water (if you use 100% eco friendly and compostable soaps) can be used to water plants. Sink water can be used to flush toilets. Etc, etc.
I saw a video about people living in rural New Mexico. They used things like organic soaps so that they could reuse their water for their greenhouse garden.
I am just a old man 76. how much iron & gold is produced by the best desalnation plant is it possible to build one that does that?
So you see flowing water and immediatly see a giant sleuth box? :) lol
As I am taking a break from my LEED GA CE course, and worrying about water shortages, getting to net zero energy, and carbon emissions, I watched your video and could not believe the content. It could be the possible answer to these grave issues. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. I always enjoy your videos.
The only way to zero emissions is for every person on earth to be dead. Prove me wrong.
I worked on the desalination plant for the Rabigh community. The desalination equipment were plants using in ocean going ships. Plus boiler for providing heat for boiling the sea water. The water droplets were scavengered by a impeller sent to a heatexchanger and then to storage tanks. If I remember right, the water didn't comply to WHO standards, so chemicals were added to bring it up to standards.
I also worked on R.O. plants, treating water from Aquifer. The futher the pump when down in the aquifer, the more salty the water got. Really interesting subject 🤔
I suspect those "WHO standards" prohibited drinking distilled water (which is equal to desalinated water), because through osmosis it flushes you out of microelements, ultimately killing you. So I suppose the standards required adding back around 1mg of brime (or an equivalent of more controlled mix in form of refined chemicals) to an each 1 liter of water.
@@michaniewiadomski7911 More like there is no chemicals to keep it clean while in transport in the pipes. Water gets contaminated very easily.
Crazy timing on the YT algorithm. I was just discussing our drought issue here in California with someone recently, and he mentioned the desalination plants they had aboard the Navy vessels he had served on and pondered why they are not more widely used amongst the civilian sector. I never considered the brine waste the thermal plants outputted and how you could safely dispose the material. Fascinating and informative video, I'll be sure to share it.
because it's too effective and they can't reasonably make $ off it
You make salt out of the brine.
Didn't California just decide to stop production of a new desalination plant? Seems like a terrible idea.
@@BloodyKnives66 control the water, control the people
@@BloodyKnives66 The planned plant was a bad one. The planned site was at risk of eventually being flood within a few decades if sea level continues to rise. Moreover, the proposed method of processing the water posed too much of a threat to the local ecosystem.
Some forgot CA already has approved 11 desalination including the Carlsbad desalination plant, which is the biggest one in the US and been operating since 2015.
I currently live in the Mojave Desert, and the very recent hydrological history of this area has made me often think that everyone is looking at desalination, energy generation, and energy storage incorrectly. We tend to look at all of these as separate issues, but in fact the combination of them would be an excellent way to reduce the costs of each individually. For instance, where I live there are many dry lakebeds scattered around the desert, some of which like Owens Lake were once large persistent inland bodies of water within the last century. Combining those dry/nearly dry lakes (many of which are salty already with the desalination process seems like an excellent way to solve virtually all the issues of desalination and the problem of solar energy storage via the following approach:
1. Massive solar farms with a large excess of day generating capacity power the Southwestern US grid. Some of this power is used to pump large volumes of raw sea water inland to currently dry or hypersaline lakebeds in the Mojave Desert, filling them and turning them into inland reservoirs of sea-water.
2. Large reverse osmosis desalination plants are constructed near these lakes, possibly underground to reduce the visual impact of the plants, taking advantage of the fact that these areas are not current wet-lands areas to speed up the process. Some of the solar power generated every day is used to produce an excess of desalinated water with these plants. Brine is returned to the salt lakes, or processed solar thermally to remove remaining water and recover raw materials (like your video talks about).
3. A portion of the desalinated water sufficient to meet the needs of regional water users is returned to the cities and towns of the Southwest via existing distribution systems, or additional infrastructure (for pumping toward the Colorado river and beyond). The rest of the desalinated water is pumped into massive inland pumped hydro systems constructed in the currently arid but topographically ideal areas of the Mojave Desert. There are areas out there where elevation differences of thousands of feet can be within a few miles of each-other, with more than enough area to accommodate lakes large enough to provide energy storage for the entire area over extended durations.
4. The combined costs of the entire system are then distributed across both water and power for regional consumers. Furthermore, mineral extraction may also help with the costs as suggested in your video. Furthermore, the renewal of large inland bodies of water will replenish the ground water supply, over time, possibly increase regional rainfall, and lead to further regional groundwater benefit if LADWP and other large Southwestern water users no longer take water from the Colorado River, Northern California, and the entire Owens River valley area.
This isn't a global solution, but generally in areas where desalination is needed these other factors are present as well (deserts with dry lakes and large available solar capacity).
Except for evaporation.
Q: what are the two major atmospheric substances that are greenhouse effect inducing gasses, other than CO².
Hint: One of them is NOT water Vapour...
@@1TwistedPoet Methane, although I had to look it up. I almost said "cow farts" as a joke, but I guess it's not completely wrong...
@@wmpx34
It's actually COMPLETELY right.
The two major gasses, both far worse than CO2, ARE in fact, Methane (Cow Farts) and Water Vapour.
But there is NOTHING they can do about water vapour, and the Beef industry PAYS them to look the other way about Cattle Farts.
So, everyone thinking that they will somehow distill the entire world's drinking water out of sea water is sorely mistaken.
The extra water vapour is a greenhouse nightmare, and ALL of the heat of evaporation, 2.3 Million Joules per litre, has to be bled away into the environment.
Desalination is a Hideously expensive, and Grossly inefficient way to get enough water to survive at an ENORMOUS cost to the environment.
Get it up to commercial scale... you'll forget all about CO2...
Living out in the Mojave would almost make me wish for a nuclear winter
Or you could just move out of the Mojave and to a place that isn’t a death trap… seems a lil simpler
I live in south Florida, on a hot day , my air conditioner produce 9 cups of clear water in an hour. I always think that if we can further filter that water which does not have any salt to begin with we would have plenty of drinking water.
Beside, with the dehumidifier inside the house , I empty out about 1 to 2 gallons of water within 24 hours from the dehumidifier. Water tastes a bit plastic taste but not salty.
I haven't try putting them into one of those pitcher to find out if it take out the plastic smell and drinkable and do lab test to see how clean is the water in term of chemicals. Limited by living with a partner who does not care about new
invention or solving any human problem like me and very controlling.
So, I ask if anyone has a means to test water from 2 sources I have mentioned through water filter pitcher and then in the lab, please, share the result.
Water runoff from air conditioners and dehumidifiers is unsafe for human consumption. It pulls contaminants out of the air along with the water. Bacteria also grows on the surfaces where the water condenses. It is possible for the water to be treated, and filtered, but please don't drink it or use it to water food plants.
south florida is extremely humid.....this wont work in the rest of the world
This works only because you're already living in a jungle-level humid enviroment...and beside the sea too
I remember learning about desalination for survival purposes when I was very young. From that point on I’ve never understood why we’re not all pouring money into desalination.
agreed
@@TwoBitDaVinci Desalination of water by any method is no different than the smeltering of aluminum---both processes are very energy intensive. You and I are both middle-aged plus, and not one nuclear reactor has been built in Canada nor the USA since we were both in diapers. Promoting electric cars when base power is produced by coal, or advocating solar energy when there aren't the silver or rare-earth minerals readily available to even come close to supplying what is required, or advocating "hydrogen" when nuclear power.....is hydrogen.
If you want to do a segment that goes far down a rabbit hole, then let's discuss why nuclear power has been a pariah for the past half-century for no obvious reason. Look into thorium salt reactors, and modern SMR reactor technology. The world would be much better off making the switch to carbon-free nuclear power, and distributing all this technology to 3rd world countries, for a reliable, affordable carbon-free power source, and also used to power desalination plants worldwide.
there is an opposition against it. An anti-human opposition.
Simple, NIMBY syndrome. You have to build plants to desalinate the water, and nobody wants them in their back yard. Hence the Not In My Back Yard Syndrome.
@@TheGoat29078 I'm unaware of any recent objections to desalination plants just because locals don't like it, but, I'm willing to believe people would be NIMBYs about it.
The incoming cold seawater could be used to accelerate condensation when the dome is cooled from the outside, just let it flow over the dome before it is heated inside from beneath. Smaller units could use parabolic channel reflectors to heat a pipe from below, while being cooled above with lateral exits for the condensate and be eventually more efficient.
That would require a network of piping carrying the cold water possibly in an inverted conical shape maximizing the surface area of the cooled water speeding up the condensation
@@terellcase9231 exactly, with the parabolic channel, you get the heat underneath. Develop sahara regreening and agriculture with the fresh water.
Go back to school, then publish your research. THEN post on UA-cam.
@@terellcase9231
Thats essentially the technique used in some DIY mini systems.. look at UN and NGO sponsored desalination devices.
Isn't this going to refract the light from the parabolic mirrors and also result in the outside of the dome never heating up, which is exactly what causes the air temperature inside to promote evaporation?
Solar energy plus desalination is a win-win situation!
In puru or chile, there is a RO plant being built with a pumped storage and a solar field. The 400 psi pressure diff. will operate the RO plant . The solar will provide the energy. the upper pool will provide the constant pressure for the RO.
Good to know! This needs to be shown in a youtube video asap!
I am a retired 3rd. Class Engineer, and when I was at sea, I was responsible for the Reverse Osmosis machines in order to convert sea water to drinking water and believe me it is very labour-intensive and consumes a lot of power. it would be very costly and require many skilled technicians to produce enough water to supply a city. The pump(s). use very high pressure to propel the sea water through the membranes and %95 percent of the feedwater is returned to source.
That may be true, but the available fresh water is depleting faster than nature can replenish it. There is no other way forward. Look at all the lakes and aquafers on the West Coast. All almost empty. If you have a better idea, now is the time to speak up.
@@rchokelal Do what Singapore does. Use the reverse osmosis technology on sewage water instead of salt water. Sewage water has significantly less impurities than seawater, so it is energetically less demanding to purify. There is the ick factor but people will get over it.
@@nickl5658 that might be possible, but it important to remember that sewage water is an output. It requires an input to become sewage water. Right now, I don't believe there is enough sewage water to fulfill the fresh water needs. The process you describe is used on the space station, but these type of systems are lossy.
Our government just spent $1 trillion on Covid where 90%+ of that money never went to Covid at all. Imagine if they used that 90% of the money to solve water problems. Funny how we keep giving more money and get more rules and regulations, but the government hasn't solved a single problem.
Water levels... a "crisis". Food supplies... a "crisis"... energy, roads, bridges, education, etc. All a "crisis" Climate change... an "existential threat to humanity". When are people going to figure out: all these "crisis" were created by government. Nobody can name a single problem "solved" by government. Not one.
So, why give the the two things that are demanded by government to solve literally every single problem: 1) more money, and 2) more power which equals more rules and regulations? Why?
When government creates a committee to solve a problem, if they solve it, they fire themselves. Does that ever make sense? No, it doesn't, but its what they do and its why they will never, ever solve a problem. Every committee is "almost there"... problem will be solved with what? Oh yeah, give more money and lets create even more rules and regulations. The two choices that have never, ever worked. Brilliant!
@@rchokelal There are plenty of other ways forward.
Aeroponics can reduce agricultural water usage by up to 95%.
Most people are one dimensional when dealing with multi-dimensional problems.
9:20 I'm sorry to say this, but it seems to me that you're wrong on the lithium extraction numbers by just about factor of a thousand. It would be more like 15 metric tons of Li / day not 10 000 tons. This being calculated from the lithium concentration you showed at 8:55
REASONS AGAINST DESALINATION:
1. POLLUTION: Enormous amounts of fuel required to force seawater through membrane filters. The fuel must be drilled (fracking pollution), refined (air pollution) transported (air pollution), burned (more air pollution).
2. POLLUTION: Huge amounts of brine wastewater must be disposed of causing environmental damage. Makes natural water aquifers more salty.
3. Kills massive amounts of sea life.
There’s more reasons that it is a bad idea. If we take care of the environment properly, there would be enough clean water to go around.
Use thermonuclear power plants to boil the water in a way that it won’t be irradiated (since they already do that to cool down the reactors), collect the vapors in condensers, get fresh water, sell the sea salt.
I swear environmentalist love over complicating things.
Or just use the nuclear power plants to power the desalination plants. 👍😁
If anti-nuclear environmentalists cared about getting rid of nuclear waste, they'd be in favor of fast reactors that can deplete already "spent" nuclear fuels, but they're either ignorant or have had their heads up their asses for so long that they wouldn't be able to survive without breathing their own farts. But yeah, nuclear would fix so many problems. I know fusion is the holy grail, but even fully realized fission would fix our energy and water problems.
It takes 4.18 joules of heat energy to raise 1gr of water, 1°C.
Sea water is going to be around 10°C.
So, 4.18 x 90 or approx 370 Joules to evaporate it.
That's for ONE GRAM of water.
Water has a mass of 1 KILOgram per Litre.
370 THOUSAND joules. Per Litre.
All of which would need to be removed again to change it back into liquid water, at 10°C.
You could reduce that by 20% and have 30°water, but eventually, all that heat energy has to end up in the environment.
And you think CARBON DIOXIDE is a problem?!
You don't need a heat source to desalinate water. The ideal thing to do with unused desert land would be to dig long shallow trenches for miles and miles and then install a huge primary heat exchanger right at the main pump(s) interface of the inflowing and outflowing seawater (so the dump light brine water is relatively the same temperature as influent seawater). Then in the entire length of trenches, install a dark durable material which lines the bottom of the trench the entire distance. Over the trench install durable clear plastic drip covers sealed over the trench from the outside atmosphere. Along the bottom of the drip covers install catch troughs and intermittent catch tanks with a series of solar driven pumps which tie into a main water line to a central collection facility. Something such as this type of system could be setup in a relatively short period of time, for much less money than expensive technology and generate hundreds of thousand of gallons of fresh water during daylight hours. Since the trench would be a constant flow of seawater from beginning to end, the brine levels would be naturally lighter and less disruptive to the sea. The effluent could also be released much further out into the sea where the water is much deeper and is able to disburse more easily. Also, the main system seawater pumps could also be driven by solar/wind power to make the system self-contained throughout.
@@omi_god The desert is more plentiful than forested regions. You wouldn't make a dent with desalinization channels.
wouldnt be enough, key is generate millions of gallons , your plan is flawed, what about land locked areas? in usa , then the states that would do this, would charge the states that dont have sea access, to make your hypothetical desal system.
@@beast36001 Any type of desal system wouldn't work in land-locked areas unless long pipelines were built, so saying "your plan is flawed" is the same as saying "all plans are flawed" in this situation.
Merle, I’d like to complement you on all the thought you’ve put into your post. As to the viability of your plan, I have no idea. Most importantly… you have a plan. We need more people thinking and making plans like you have. Thanks for the effort. Keep on trucking… it’s going to take all of us to keep water, energy and peace flowing.
@@johnhimz3832 Not so much a "plan" as it is a concept in the form of thinking-out-loud. Thanks for the compliment
There are so many problems with the Neom concept:
1) As you pointed out earlier, thermal desalination is terribly inefficient. It would be way more efficient and cost effective to use that solar to generate electricity and run an RO system.
2) All desalination plants produce brine. There isn't any magic in Neom's brine that makes it more economical to process into valuable commodities. Anything you do to process that brine is liable to consume more water than was produced in the first place. Desalination is typically meant to produce enough water to sustain agriculture. There simply isn't a market for that much sodium, chloride, etc. to make any exotic means of processing brine without water economically feasible.
3) The dome design isn't even very conducive to solar concentrator heating. It makes so little sense!
At some point we will need to realize long term survivability is more important than profits.
@@zahhari3170 Profitability is directly related to sustainability.
Thermal desalination is terribly inefficient if you use fossil fuels to evaporate the water, while Neon is using heat from the sun
Molten salt can produce explosion if you let it touch water, can't it be used to generate energy ?
@@zahhari3170 They're related. "Profits," are the food and water you eat and breathe. They are the warmth to keep grandma and grandpa alive in the middle of the winter. They are the EMT crew that come to save your life after an accident.
I love this video! Thanks a million! I was in the military and when I went to the middle east, I observed how many desalinization plants they had. My question was...why does the rest of the world not fall in line with this idea and advance the technology to make it feasible? I would like to think there are many likeminded people such as yourself that can make this a larger scale reality. Great stuff! Thanks! I am a subscriber now!
It's waay to expensive. Even if we make nuclear plants and use it as a desalination plant it still waaay to expensive than just pumping it from renewable sources of water. Plus taking out those minerals from the ocean can have alot of drastic consequences to the delicate and already damaged ecosystem. Developed countries could do it but developed countries already have alot of fresh water
@@mobo8933 The reason you see so many Dplants in the middle east is because it's the desert. They're not needed anywhere else. If folks want to live in the desert, they should design, pay for and produce their own means of water procurement.
I've always wondered why we don't have more de-desalination plants. I think they're part of the solution...
If we could use the salt for building material perhaps it’s more helpful.
@@murrayclarke2171 the salt would erode away any other building material like metal and concrete. It’s the opposite of a good building material…
Because it is so expensive
@Mark Stewger solar powered ?
@@rumples2698 no, the desalination process is expensive to build and very complicated no matter how you power it.
Great video!
If I'm understanding correctly, I think you may have the numbers wrong for the example of extracting Lithium.
If 100 million tonnes of sea water is processed each day, and there is ~0.1 parts per million of Lithium, then doing the multiplication (i.e. 100×10^6 × 0.1×10^-6) gives 10 tonnes of Lithium extracted per day. This is then only 10,000kg of Lithium per day not the 10 million kg from the video.
Thought of another way, 1 ppm is 1mg/l, and 100 million cubic metres of water = 100 billion litres. So we'd expect 100 billion × ~0.1 mg = 10,000kg Lithium.
yes the lithium concentration in this video is orders of Magnitude too high, a single google search gives you 0.1-0.2 ppm Lithium in seawater not 10, it sounded way too good to be true, but it still has potential
Edit: the numbers i found for the amount of Li used in a tesla battery was ranging from 10-15kg, based on that if the concentration in seawater is 0.1-0.2 ppm we could extract Li for 833-1666 tesla batterys if we assume 12kg per pack
It’s a complete scam and they’re looking for investors. It’s a great plot for science fiction though👍 On the upside it could bankrupt Saudi Arabia, that’s why Khashoggi was killed and dismembered by the crown prince, he pointed that out.
@@acemarcolawho's 'they'?! No need to get conspiratorial!
It's not a scam to want to build more and better desalination plants. Hopefully they can all be run with renewable energy in the future. I think this was just one piece of misinformation which unfortunately hasn't been corrected 😕. Probably because Ricky hasn't noticed the few comments pointing it out.
@@NextGHaHaHa And all this is assuming that the lithium extraction process is commercially viable. Might be too expensive to render the lithium and cobalt into usable forms, as I'm sure the compounds that contain these elements in the seawater are not usable without further processing.
@@LeganArabach true
In Australia most major cities have desalination plants as a back up for times of drought. Melbourne Australia has one of the largest desalination plants in the world.
yeah except for the part where during the drought a couple years ago, they were all still running at 5%(the lowest theyre legally allowed to go)
Here in the USA the arguments seem to reduce to a couple things...
1) communism, they don't want the desalination plant to be privately owned. I think that's stupid, but we can change that, just restructure the deal so that the local city owns the plant but the builder still makes a good profit in building it and providing training for its operation.
2) they think the main problem is human population, and would rather see us all stop having children, so the human species becomes extinct. This argument is deeply offensive to me on many levels, but when pressed, most who are against desalination eventually admit this.
@@neutrino78x how the hell is privately owned communism, isnt that like the opposite of communism?
@@vincentgrinn2665
"how the hell is privately owned communism, isnt that like the opposite of communism?"
That's what I'm saying, they're communists so they're against a desalination plant being privately owned.
There would be no water problems, energy problems, environmental problems, and many more relevant problems if people wouldn't be stupid. We're adding 80 MILLION people to the planet EVERY year. It can't support us much longer. Birth control will be mandatory to survival.
Within 10 to 20 years there will be wars over food and water. There already are over energy, and those will be more frequent...
Improving and lowering the cost of desalination would solve many problems. And removing and selling the minerals to help finance the process is a very clever idea.
I have my doubts of actually getting much use out of the metals found in the water. Even if we assume you could easily separate out the most abundant elements that n the sea water, lithium you’re only look at about .25 parts per million. 1 ppm is equivalent to 1 milligram per liter and 1 metric tonne of water is equal to 1,000 liters of water. This means for every 1 metric tonne of water produced you would only get 250 milligrams of lithium. You would need to process 10,000 metric tonnes of water just to get 2.5 kilograms of water, you would need about 25 times that amount of material just to produce a single Tesla battery. The cobalt nickel and other metals in the water come on even smaller amounts and just wouldn’t amount to anything significant worth extracting.
I think every little bit helps
Exactly this.
It becomes a measure of what extraction efficiency is to how much water is being processed. We use water nonstop so if extracted without too much trouble, given what demand is looking like for the elements, every little bit might count. If too inefficient, then doing it just for the sake of being green would just be dumb. Ahem...cough...plastic recycling... coughcough...
Whew. Excuse me.
I think the main idea is to produce freshwater. If the byproduct of desalination is lithium that could be recovered, BONUS
@@codyfan7161 every little bit DOES help but every little bit also.... has to be paid for.
If it is not financially viable there's no reason for anyone to step forward and bear the financial responsibility for such projects.
The desal facility in the city where I live processes the brine by-product by mixing it with partially treated waste water, resulting in a solution that is slightly less salty than that of the ocean. It is then pumped offshore where it is assimilated back into the ocean without adversely affecting the environment.
I was thinking the same
Except that the process requires massive amounts of energy. We need to work MUCH harder at reducing water demand.
@@markdennyritner7851 -- Recent solar installations are helping to carry the load. Reducing water demand in a coastal desert with many already practicing water conservation at levels unheard of elsewhere? Easy to say, I suppose.
@@tswrench Perhaps developers shouldn't be given easy access to keep pilaging.
@@markdennyritner7851 -- Uh-huh. "Lighten up, Francis." I figured you 'd be back to set the hook you were dragging with your first trolling reply. Take your hands off your hips, stop stamping your feet, and move along. Unless, of course, you're the kinda gal who has to have the last word.
I've wondered about this for many years. Living in California, I live in a city that's considered always in a drought. We have water restrictions. I have always wondered why one of the richest and most technical places ever allows themselves to be in a drought. I think it's because of rich people who are too scared of hurting their property along their precious beaches. Our lakes are very low and I always wondered why they allow this when we have the know how to have enough water. I really wish the government would incentivise someone to get this going in several areas.
That’s because your state is busy with liberalism
The government has shut down every attempt to setup a utilities sized RO plant. Someone proposes it and the environmentalists sue and the govt pulls the permits.
@@GeoFry3 Give it 5 years, no water and former drug dealers scalping imported water bottles on the street corner....who am I kidding they won't change, they'll hack their way through a sea of endangered penguins and baby seals to tap an ice lake in the Arctic before they let that beach front investment go.
California dumps its waste water into the Ocean. Start recycling all of this water and those drought and water restrictions go away.
@@GeoFry3 that's lame
Yall may may not like us Fossil fuel guys, I'm a roughneck on a drilling rig, but without oil EVERYTHING around you and ALL economies collapse. Everything is built with oil. Unless you depopulate then the world will rely on Fossil fuels. Green energy doesn't exists without us
I've always wondered if you could just spread the brine out enough to not be a problem. If you fan out the outlet pipes into the sea far enough and have small holes along the way, the salt should just mix back into the water, right? There has to be some acceptable level of variation in water salinity that wouldn't kill everything. But hey, if you can extract useful resources from it, that works too. Pull thorium out of the water and run a MSR reactor to power the whole operation.
That's exactly what they do. The problem is exaggerated. There's a lot of NIMBYism going on.
What if we made a pile and dried them? Then we could work on processing the pile the way they process mining tailings?
You could dehydrate it into salt. We need big mountains of salt for our roads up here in Canada.
@@-whackd How much energy does it take to reduce it to solids? You're right, it could be ground into a 5-10mm "sand" and then spread on roads.
@@dansanger5340 if they want to get 1 ton of fresh water, th... I could go complicated... or dare you to try to breath with 0.5% less oxigen and say again that the problem is exaggerated.... mind you that tomorrow it'll be 1% less...
I wonder whether designing such a plant at the Salton Sea would make sense? Being below sea level would allow the passive flow of sea water to the area, and it would help reuse a blighted area as well as providing lithium mining.
Wet sea versus dry lithium mining. Maybe brine collection and processing would work. I could see Uranium and Thorium mining as well from the salt water. I think the dome method is wrong though. A liquid salt solar collector IMO is a better choice and have the zones be underground, insulated and flat inside. That way cheap industrial machines can harvest the dried salt mixture.
California could put its brine waste water in the salt n sea. Desalination plant at camp pendleton
It's funny, I had actually thought about this before by using the "Power tower" plants to desalinate. It just makes so much sense. Desalination, by either method is a highly energy intensive exercise. RO maybe less so unless you count the membrane materials and the equipment needed. Unless they could figure out a way to recycle the membranes, it will always have a high amount of consumables. Thermal is definitely a more efficient way if you can do it with sustainable energy. I am excited to see this facility progress.
A far more unfashionable way of producing clean water is through the use of evaporator condensers. These have been used on military and merchant naval ships for probably close to 100 years. ROs are all the rage as they are a package unit and generally in industry we in the west are driven to dumb down our workers, rather than educate them. So water boils at sea level at 100*C. However, if you were to boil water on Mt Everest, it would boil at a lower temperature due to a lower atmospheric pressure. Lower the pressure, the lower the boiling temperature. So what happens is that design engineers on a bulk carrier vessel have a WRU (Wasteheat Recovery Unit - like a radiator in a car) to capture the thermal energy going up the ships exhaust chimney. The temperature of the exhaust of many engines is around 650*C. So if you capture this waste energy (heat) that goes up the stack, you can boil water. This boiled water can then be collapsed to create a vacuum. This vacuum is then fed into a shell tube exchanger with salt water as a feed stock, and here the lighter pure clean water can be boiled off at a much lower temperature than 100*C. This water vapor is then fed through a condenser unit, cooling medium being again sea water, and you end up with fresh clean water out the back end. And all you need for this is a few pressure gauges, a running primary engine for the ship and maybe a centrifugal pump or two. And if you make water that is too clean, the only drama could be that this super clean water could start to strip some salts and trace elements from you body thanks to the process of Reverse Osmosis inside your body.
The Earth is literally overloaded and bombarded with "sustainable" energy, from all sides. Geothermal and solar. What else do you need?
Instead of wasting money on these “new” smart cities (which sounds really stupid), how about we fix the problems we already have, not create new ones. It’s not even practical when you look at what some of the materials required for these technologies to work. A lot of it (especially in energy production) requires the use of exotic materials that don’t exist and most likely won’t ever have the infrastructure to produce due to the expense and difficulty in production outside of a chemical laboratory. A lot of it as well, material scientists, metallurgists and engineers have yet to catch up to put into R&D. I don’t have faith in this “new” future when we can’t even get the present straight. Green technology is a pipe dream at this stage and in this century. We might as well look long term & just bite the bullet, accept the impracticality of some things and dedicate that time to research so future generations can build off of it and full fill that goal, sad to say, none of this technology will be practical and reliable like talking about it in our life time, it just won’t . All these failed initiatives and projects are just making billionaires look stupid and promoting them to become more hated by the day for wasting money on impractical nonsense. None of this would be such an issue now if in the past these greedy scumbag companies, bankers and policy makers wouldn’t have colluded for decades to suppress research and either buy out or threaten independent inventors for simply doing the right thing, but now it’s a problem? I apologize for the spill, but as an engineer I get fiercely enraged at these unfulfillable pipe dreams sold to the public like its gods word. You want a bright future? Fix the problems that already exist, tackle the unsexy issues like holding your elected leaders accountable or the manufacturing companies in your are using your water supply, instead of trying to run into a dead barren desert trying to build a “utopia” with tech that doesn’t exist yet, what a crock😂
I once did a project in grad school involving desalination and argued that one of the best ways to use desalination plants economically should be with power plants since they take seawater and need the conversion to freshwater to preserve the plants. Currently, they thermally pollute by dumping the freshwater back into the oceans, which could be saved for water reserves. I'm assuming these systems have to be financially and energy profitable anyway.
Thermal pollution? What the heck are you talking about? It's literally like a drop in the ocean. It does NOT change the temp of the ocean by even a fraction of a degree. Go back to school, study this time - and then publish.
@@foobarmaximus3506 Nobody scatters the hot water over the entire ocean. They pour it all back in one location and in that one location the water becomes very warm. O2 capacity is reduced and fish die. Manatees in winter love it though. In winter, they all gather near water discharge to keep warm.
@@foobarmaximus3506, tell us you don't know about localized effects on micro climates without telling us you don't know about localized effects on micro climates.
Lithium! I like the way you think. We can definitely use it and the nice minerals. There isn't much Gold, for example, but it is worth its weight in itself. Also, in greater than 1ppm concentrations we have Fluorine, Aluminum, Strontium, Silicon, and Boron, all of which are useful, especially in the energy sector. Nice reporting.
There are sodium batteries! Rechargeable no less. Chloride batteries maybe for some storage projects, I don't think I could want that in cars more than the lead ones already do...
The brine can be used for osmose-energy. Where brine and sea water are separated by a film, and the normal sea water is forced through the film by osmosis, producing energy (there are videos here that explain it better haha)
How about using our Natural Water supplies more sustainable first?
Pumping out Groundwater, canalization of Rivers, Monoculture Farming/Forestry, waterpolluting… I know ppl have to drink and all, but instead of bandaging, tackling the Root cause for once would be better?😢
We should instead look at replacing traditional farming with farming that uses less water. That makes much more sense.
I definitely think that moving away from as much animal farming will have a huge impact on water usage. While researching my own video on water I found out that 50% of the water in California’s agriculture gets dedicated to feedstock for animals!
@@SaveMoneySavethePlanet energy for humans from animal farming uses 22x more resources (land,water,etc.) compared to eating vegetables/etc.
Great info! Thanks! Question tho.. do you know why salt water cant be placed in salt water lakes that can then seep through aquifers and create fresh water? That'd be awesome to know why it's not viable.. or at least I think.
I'm no hydrologist, but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't remove the salt from the salt water, it would just mix salt into the fresh water, and ruin it.
@@ZenithTech35 no i get it.. it wouldn't totally remove all the salt.. but it would remove a lot out of it. Im know that as many of the US's aquifers like in the southwest were once underwater and it was salt water. And that water is being syphoned back and then used as fresh drinking water . An example.. west TX.
@@rodmad6661 Really? I never knew that! Not sure what the deal is there, then. I'm sure there's some reason they don't do it, but who knows
There are salt water aquifers you know ... No the ground definitely does not purify water.... The only reason sea side cities has fresh water aquifers is because the fresh water that comes from inland is by itself a barrier against the sea water ... For example if you take too much fresh water from a sea side aquifer the aquifer will become salty as sea water will replace the freshwater
@@agnosticevolutionist3567 maybe.. but most of the continent was under sea water at once right? But i don't know... that's why im asking lol
Water is not scarce, it’s just humans have very wasteful lifestyles. It’s better to recycle the waste water you have rather than have expensive energy intensive desalination plants hence in the UK there is only one in London. Economically it would be more effective the treat sewage to a higher standard with modern technology and recycle water back into supply plus have more balancing reservoirs to capture water to meet seasonal supply demand issues.
In the UK energy has never been cheap, renewables have to have back ups such as nuclear power which also has its own long term waste problems.
Combining solar thermal with vacuum distillation to lower the boiling point is definitely the way to go in hot regions.
Alternatively, molten salt nuclear for cold regions.
I agree..that what we do when we put an air conditioning unit under vacumm. to extract the water in the system.
I have only watched up to 3:39 so far, and it makes me wonder about nuclear waste power water boilers to desalinate. Seems an obvious replacement to me for fossil fuels. Paired with solar energy and hopefully innovation in solar storage.
Governments don't like complexity haha. Has to be nuclear plant or salt plant not both Hahaha
@@grantstacy1084 Oh boy. Don’t tell me it’ll take an Uber rich private corporation to do the deed. (Is that what it would take?)
I feel like there's daily things that we use fresh water for that can be replaced by saltine water. Simple one is a toilet, you (usually) don't drink out of it, you send all the water away.
@Not Expat Joe Fun fact, salt water is actually _recommended_ for pasta by many Italians. So, you're doing it right!
I worked with desalination systems in the Navy, they are very high maintenance and the water can give some people
intestinal problems. Nevertheless it does seem that this will be the path forward for any water shortages.
what, if we would simply try to collect oceanic rainwater in the tropics, where rain falls almost every day, and transport the collected volume in the biggest tanker fleets available to those dry coasts?
@@konradcomrade4845 Sounds like a good idea. We are going to use energy anyway producing water so why not capture rainwater on a huge tanker?
@@konradcomrade4845 doing things on extreme large scale and long term is extremely diffcult to plan since you dont want to make changes to the surrounding ecosystems that cant be restored afterwards. basically we are stealing the rainwater from the tropics that surely has its own purpose there. Also it sound like a super expensive way to deliver water..
@@misterae6430 Israel's been desalinating water for decades.
@@brettb614 Saudi arabia is the leader in desalination I believe
If you extract the same perentage of fresh water, reverse osmosis generates the same amount of brine as thermal distillation. Also the brine from thermal and reverse osmosis is just as useful for mineral extraction as the solar system. If you think about it, the solar system is a thermal system.
Yeah, the brine is only an issue if they don’t dilute with seawater first and dump it all in one place.
@@kirkland5674 To dump it in multiple places at once thinly enough to not wreck ocean ecosystems is going to require LOADS of transport capacity. It could well be more expensive than the actual desalination plant and would likely either use loads of power/fuel in its own right to power all the transport vehicles required, or requiring the construction of an ocean wide sprinkler system to dispose of the brine.
The byproducts taken out with the water are part of what makes the waters ph livable for fish and plants but also contributes to the flavor and things we humans need aswell . I used to run a twps in my last years in the US Army and one of the coolest things i learned when i first changed MOS was how low of a total dissolved solids factor machines like whats discussed in this video produced, when compared to say a bottle of name brand water like dasani. 150-200 ppm lower. 🤯
Someone needs to build a salt battery
Bro let it grow. A beard makes you smarter.
I've been thinking about desalination plants since middle school, and we still don't have more of them. Also, the slat plains are disappearing. That sodium has a use, if you want to save those useless tracks of land.
I don't even know what the slat plains are so certainly not how sodium can help. Any use for sodium that gives it value would help though. Sodium ion batteries were what came to mind but curious about slat plains now.
@@cmw3737 That was a typo. Salt plains. They're made of salt and dirt bikers destroy them.
The salt flats west of the great salt lake are being eaten up by salt production plant
Or. We could stop eating salt, filling swimming pools and irrigating golf courses. Better way isnt always most convenient
On the mineral mining (from water) idea, I've heard that they do this sometimes from geothermal setups as well. As often the hot water returns with many more minerals than cold water does.
Yes, I know gold miners in particular use hydrothermal activity to search for mineral deposits (gold particles get trapped in quartz for example) when the water recedes or changes direction it leaves veins of mineral behind.
For years I thought we should pump water from high rain and flooding areas to dry out areas. I knew it would be very expensive, but I thought it would be worth it. I’m very glad that you are pursuing this idea and thinking of imaginative ways of reducing the cost like using existing pipe lines. Thank you for your work.
No still the idea of first capturing and storing rainfall better and then transferring water would be better. At the moment people just see high rainfall in a period as nothing but a problem, instead of the valuable resource for themselves or drier parts of the country. Look at lake Mead in the US. The catchment zone for the lake is the Mohave DESSERT and then the Hoover dam and everyone downstream have always taken more out of the system than nature can normally put in. But still when a hurricane offered to pour a lot of extra water into the zone they were still crying about it and trying to say that it was the fault of climate change.
What you talked about before is exactly what we need - large scale water collection and distribution. Lots of places needing water are not even near the sea to build desalination plants. So unless we are all going to move nearer the coasts, we need to be able to move fresh water around.
@@watchman4todayreloaded192 We already do. They're called rivers. And they're free.
I was interested in what this guy was saying until he started speaking of “the line” as a futuristic utopia. How can someone call the pure definition of a dystopian totalitarian environment build on the bases of inhumanity a utopia? Luckily this project is just the wet dream of the Saudi dictator and will fail on multiple levels, which will lead to it never being build.
I have always thought it was something logical to obtain lithium from the brine byproducts of desalinization.
Yea it’ll be interesting to see if it ever really scales up.
@@SaveMoneySavethePlanet it's happening in the Salton Sea
@@dumptrump4ever maybe I’m thinking of the wrong sea, but I thought that that was still essentially R&D. They’re trying to figure out if they can scale it up to something that makes sense economically for the long term.
After getting the lithium you still end up with tons and tons of sodium chloride ag Salt.
@@thatsawesome2060 Which would not be a problem if that sodium and chlorine were used for something else instead of throwing the salt back to the sea.
I really liked the video (informative, interesting, educational) and your narration is excellent. Really well done!
I appreciate you Roberto! 🙏
Very good informative show. I am impressed and grateful you produced this.
I will admit I got a chuckle regarding the comment on you shaving. I was thinking exactly the same thing but I never would have made a comment. Maybe before your time but think of all the votes eventual President Nixon lost due to a 5 shadow. Thank you for the information it was an interesting video.
Here in Victoria (Australia) we built a reverse osmosis desalination plant that has a maximum capacity of 150 billion litres of water a year and it is powered entirely by renewable energy, mostly solar during the day. I think it is the first of three that were planned for the future. It has allowed us to stabilize our dam water levels, after a drought we hit about 16% at the worst point, now we are about 86% or so, leaving a bit of slack for winter/spring rain.
I am not sure what they are doing with the waste. It is interesting we have way more solar power than we have consumption for, it would be a good use of the power if you could also extract some valuable minerals like lithium.
well there is a slight difference in how they power the plant. it actually uses energy from the grid (since solar energy is currently still unreliable) but then offset it by buying Renewable energy certificate, then the fund is going to facilitate some windfarms or some things. The brine is pumped back to the ocean through diffuse nozzles (to minimise salt concentration around the dumping area) and they made extra long outlet tunnels under seabed to go pass sensitive marine areas! Cheers from Sydney.
If you want to know what happens when salt concentration gets too high, just look at the Great Salt Lake in Utah or the Dead Sea. It's called the Dead Sea for a reason.
Yes, mining the minerals from the brine is a great idea, but what do you do with the rest of the waste? In any case, using solar power whether PV pannels or thermal in the hottest and dryest places on Earth makes perfect sense. I see a lot of people in the comments talking about using nuclear reactors to power this but adding heat in the middle of the desert is the absolute last thing you want to do.
I live next to the Great Salt Lake and the water levels are getting very low.
Maybe there should be a pipeline to dump leftover brine into places like the Salt Lake?
@@skwashua Pretty good idea. In the Great Salt Lake, it wouldn't be a contaminant, it would be a resource.
You are overlooking a vital point. The Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea are very small bodies of water with a high evaporation rate. We are talking about a body of water that occupies almost 3/4 of the surface of the earth. Whatever we do with desalination will be totally insignificant, just like the methane argument about cows, or the CO2 argument! One forest fire dumps more CO2 into the air per day than all of the people in America. One small forest dumps more methane than all of the cows! People and other animal life are insignificant in the balance of nature. Get over that crazy green religion and start looking at REAL science for a change.
@@glenparker234 You want a list of green-washing BS? Here are a few to get you started:
1) Carbon capture: We already have a great carbon capture technology. It's called photosynthesis. It uses energy from the sun to turn CO2 and H2O into sugar and wood. The technological carbon capture uses lots of energy to do what? Drive CO2 into the ground so we can extract more oil? No thanks.
2) Hydrogen fuel cells: Sure, it sounds like a great idea. H2 plus O2 from the atmosphere and the exhaust is water. Then you realize that H2 makes metal brittel so the system has a limited life span, that they are burning methane, releasing CO2 to make H2, that the end to end energy efficiency is only about 40% and that fuel cells require precious metals making them hideously expensive. Again, no thanks.
Personally, I have nothing against using desalinization to make unlimited amounts of fresh water. All that water eventually makes its way back to the source anyway, making me think there is NO net impact on the source of the water. Sometimes, environmentalists don't seem to have a grasp on reality. By using solar power to process the salt water, they are also doing it without adding any heat to the environment. It seems to me that this is an absolute win and a real solution for drought.
Sorry if I wasn't clear with my previous comment.
So glad you mentioned the brine issues! It really is affecting our oceans!
Thanx!
Absolutely!
But what happens to the salt (NaCl), it is still the most abundant? The biggest issue/problem still isn’t answered…? Considering the problem with the “big pumps”; PV can probably solve a large amount of the energy support
I live in Southern California. Most of our water travels for hundreds of miles thru canals, and pipelines. This involves pump stations and thousands of employees to maintain. Very expensive to operate.Seems stupid when the saltwater is next door. 😮😊
There must be a difference between salt taken from the ocean and that which gets mined.. I don't understand why the salt can't be sold? Is this because of big salt? I love the video of how evaporation works btw.
Not much. Salt deposits are the result of parts of ancient oceans somehow getting cut off and drying out. The trace minerals could be different but it's still mostly salt.
I'd be interested in a video doing a scientific test on your advertiser. Like a bacteria content and total dissolved solids versus control
They market some of their products as working for raw water (lakes/streams). If it doesn't work well enough, I would think they will run into some legal problems down the road. The use of UV-c can kill most bacteria. How effective or necessary their solution in this use case is questionable. Personally, it seems more like a gimmick. Basic pitcher filters can improve the taste and "quality" of municipal or well water. In general (in the US) those sources are already more than safe enough for drinking, even if they have a bad smell or taste. If you live in a place that cannot provide safe drinking water, I wouldn't trust one of these basic filter systems to do the job.
Have they (loopastraw or whatever) not done relevant tests? 🧐 Check 'm out.
We could also convert all that sodium into the sodium ion batteries right? sell the trace materials, fill up our fresh water and maybe allow people's excess home solar to power these deSal plants? I don't know the specifics but it sounds like it could solve a lot of issues especially having a outlet for all the excess solar and sodium.
Yea, but don’t forget that we don’t technically have EXCESS solar energy until all fossil fuel generation has been cut. But yea, what you describe is very possibly our long term future.
@@SaveMoneySavethePlanet There is excess solar in certain regions - California has _paid_ Arizona to take their excess energy. Lack of storage automatically makes solar easily go into excess in sunny regions even though it can't cover our needs, because it can generate more power than there is load on the grid on occasion and that power can't be saved until it's needed, forcing us to resort to fossil fuel.
Its a matter of energy. Why haven't we put new the reactor designs on line and placed the nuclear waste we have lying about in the vast safe repository that we built at such cost for that purpose? Because fixing problems costs money for those being paid under the current state of fiasco. So they arrange to stop the solution.