Seventy one percent of
our planet's surface is covered in water. Three
hundred and thirty two point five million cubic
miles of it. Three hundred and sixty
six billion billion gallons. That's over forty
eight billion gallons of water for every
person on Earth. But today, one out of
three people don't have access to safe
drinking water. Some projections will show
by 2050, more than half our population will
be living in water-stressed areas. That's
over four billion people. These aren't just
issues in developing countries. Something you
hear about elsewhere. These are things that
are happening in our communities all the time.
Worried and angry about lead contamination. The military
in remote parts of Puerto Rico. And that's
the result of many things. But one of them
is that ninety six point five percent of that water
is found in our oceans. It's saturated with
salt and undrinkable. And most of the earth's
freshwater is locked away in glaciers or
deep underground. Less than 1 percent of
it is available to us. When you dig a little
bit and look under the surface, even here in the
United States, we have large numbers of people that
don't have access to safe, clean
drinking water. So why can't we just
take all that seawater, filter out the salt and
have a nearly unlimited supply of clean,
drinkable water? Desalination broadly is the
process of removing salts from water. It's been practice
for years. In fact, it's
a natural process. It occurs when the sun
heats the ocean and fresh water evaporates off and
it falls again as rainfall. If you mix
salt into water, it dissolves. And if you
could watch microscopically while you did that, you'd
see that the water is actually breaking apart the
salt into charged particles that chemically
interact with the water. So salt water
is a chemically new solution. It's not just
water with some salt grains floating around
in it. And that's why desalination
is a fundamentally tricky process. The two
main types of desalination are thermal
desalination and reverse osmosis. Thermal desalination is
the oldest form of desalination. It's essentially boiling water
and then capturing the steam and turning
that into freshwater. But in the 60s, we
were able to develop reverse osmosis processes at UCLA
and these have now started to dominate
the market. So one of the chief
differences between the two is reverse osmosis doesn't
use heat, doesn't boil anything. You're really
just pressurizing the water to a tremendous
amount and you're forcing it through a membrane where
it doesn't want to go. It wants to
stay with the salt. But with this high pressure,
it is forced to separate from the salt. Broadly speaking, what you want
to look at for desalination is where's my
freshwater coming from and do I have enough of
it? And if I don't have enough of it, do I
need to augment supply? Desalination then starts to
become a very attractive or
interesting option. Which is why the
vast majority of desalination efforts right now are
happening in places like the Middle East
and North Africa. Rich with fossil fuels,
but also experiencing extreme water scarcity. Just two countries, Saudi
Arabia and UAE, they produce one fourth of
the desalination water that is produced currently
on this planet. Concerns about desalination
fall broadly into three categories: the amount
of energy required, how much it costs,
and its environmental impacts. There are some that really
see it as a key solution. There are others
that push back and argue that it's
very energy intensive. It's very expensive. It has impacts on the
marine environment and that we should pursue
alternatives first. It requires a tremendous
amount of energy to basically break up that
bond between the water and salt. Ocean water desal
can be twenty five times as energy intensive
as other freshwater approaches. Historically, the
impediment for sea water desalination being more
abundant or popular in North America
has been cost. It has been
cost prohibitive historically. The Cloud Lewis
Carlsbad desalination plant outside of San Diego is
the largest of its kind in the Western Hemisphere
and has been operating since 2015, producing 50
million gallons of clean water a day. It's in
San Diego County because of its dry, arid climate. The county has historically
imported nearly all of its water from the
Colorado River and Northern California. In San Diego,
in Carlsbad example, they are spending twice
as much for seawater desalination as they do
on imported water. Now, they were looking at
it and saying, well, at some point in the future,
the costs will be comparable. And I think some
folks point it to the fact that, well, when
that's the case, then that's probably when you
should build it. Today, desalinated water
in Carlsbad costs approximately twice as much
as imported water. You're comparing apples and
oranges because that imported water is coming
from systems that were built half a century ago
where all the capital investment has been
paid off. Standing down for 5 or
10 years, hoping there's some major breakthrough in
the technology is not going to materially reduce
the cost of building infrastructure. That's not unique
to desal and water. It's true of
all public infrastructure. We have a huge deficit. We need to start building
not just water, but transportation and
housing. Now, not 5 or
10 years from now. The Carlsbad Plant is
operated as a public/private partnership with
the Carlsbad Seawater desalination
plant. In the proposed
Huntington beach seawater desalination plant, we're
proposing a public/private partnership where the
plant is 100 percent privately financed and
then we enter into a longterm, fixed-price
water purchase agreement with the public
water agency. Essentially, we're recovering
our investment over time through the
sale of water. There's an infrastructure deficit
in the United States. There's certainly
an infrastructure deficit in California. And you can't expect
local, state and federal government to pay for
all of it. The private sector is going
to have to invest private dollars. And I
think there's a huge opportunity in water in a
way that both protects the ratepayers and also
allows for the investment of private capital beyond
the environmental costs of producing the energy
needed to power these plants. Another concern
arises because they're not just outputting
clean desalinated water. They're also producing huge
amounts of hyper salty water, called brine,
as a byproduct. Seawater desalination plants
that use reverse osmosis typically operate at
a 50 percent efficiency in that if you
take in two gallons of seawater, you're going to
produce one gallon of fresh water and one gallon
of hyper saline brine. It's a fixed volume of
salt that I'm trying to remove. So whether I put it
in half a gallon of water or a tenth of a
gallon of water, it's still going to be there and
it's going gonna be much more concentrated. As
desalination efforts grow, it's not clear what should
be done with these huge amounts of brine. Globally right now, we're
producing over 37 billion gallons a day. Most brine is in one
way or another emptied back into the ocean. But because
it has a much higher salt concentration than regular
seawater, it has the potential to, among other
things, sink to the sea floor and wreck havoc
on the plants and animals found there. In
addition, because these facilities are taking in
millions of gallons of seawater a day, the
intake itself could destroy local marine life. But
Poseidon Water, which operates the Carlsbad plant,
says the regulations in California provide
sufficient environmental protection. Numerous studies have
been done in California and around the
world that show that level of salinity increase
will not harm marine life. And you're also
providing drinking water to people in need. But a
recent study published in 2018 showed that we're
producing even more brine than we thought. For
every liter of desalinated water, we produce 1.5 liters of brine. In other words, overall,
we are producing more brine than we
produce desalinated water. And while some places
like California have robust regulations regarding brine in
place, it's not clear that as a whole
the industry is taking its disposal seriously
enough. Currently, we are disposing of
brine in a way which we use to dispose
of industrial waste water about 40-50 years ago. So if desalination uses a
huge amount of energy, is very expensive compared
to other options, and in the end we're
producing more potentially harmful brine than clean
water, why do we continue to pursue it? Desalination has its drawbacks,
but one of the benefits is that it's a
fairly stable and known process particular for dealing
with ocean water. You can be confident that
it will supply you water when you need it.
Reliability is the key. Water scarcity is a
complex, difficult problem. Climate change is
affecting everything and introducing growing
uncertainty. Weather is variable, but
if you have a desalination plant, energy, and
sea water, you can reliably get
clean water. But desalination undeniably uses
a large amount of energy. And for
some, it's just fundamentally difficult to advocate for
a technology that would be adding to our
ever growing energy needs. I think when we start
to look into these water-scarce worlds, we start
to think about well energy provides
us services. It heats our homes, it
lights our offices and buildings. And if we think
of energy as a service that could give us water
for some context, you know, the average person
in the U.S. uses about a hundred gallons
of water per day. If I were to produce
that hundred gallons per day with ocean water desal, that
would be the same electricity consumption that
my home would require over an hour. So to
kind of put things in context, I think we start
to think about our energy resources and where
do I invest it? How important is water? It is the most
basic element of life. And people go out and
they buy a venti Starbucks every day and spend more on
that than they do for a month's supply
of desalinated water. And they don't realize
it. It's clear that desalination alone is not
going to fix the world's water problems. Up in some places where
you're just water rich, desalination probably won't make
the most sense. Poseidon Water as a company
does not believe that seawater desalination is
a panacea. We can't just build one or
two or 10 and really solve our
water challenges. Desalination is not the
solution to water scarcity. It's one of the
options to narrow the gap between water
supply and demand. But for some communities
around the world, it's already making an
enormous local impact. It's currently a pretty
small fraction of the water supply globally and
probably will remain so. There are, though,
communities for which it is a fairly
significant contribution. It can be quite important
at the local level. Desalination is one
tool of many. And for it to have
maximum impact, it must be implemented alongside
other techniques. Israel maybe provides a
good example where they have invested quite a
bit in seawater desalination, but they also
made investments in efficiency such that their water
use on a per person basis is far lower
than we see here in California or in many, many
parts of the United States. So they did those
things first, so that they aren't wasting that
very expensive water. That then delayed their need
to build a plant. And when they built it, they
could build it a bit smaller than they
would have. So there's a cost, a
real cost savings there to the community. I would almost
look at it as a safe bet, you know,
to hedge your risks. A desalination plant is your
low risk option in your portfolio. Kind of
expensive, maybe, but it's going to deliver. I
think we do the cheaper, less environmentally damaging
things first. That seawater desalination
is an option. In some communities, they
don't have other options. Others, though, do
have other options. They can use water
more efficiently, which can save water, save energy,
can have less environmental impact. And while most attention
is given to seawater desalination, a similar process
can be used for treating many other sources
of water like wastewater. The volume of
waste water, if it's all collected and recycled,
that is almost equivalent to five times the
volume of water that passes through Niagara
Falls each year. And if we look at
the desalinated the water, the desalinated water, which we
produce globally, on an annual basis is almost
equal to half of the volume of the water
that passes through Niagara Falls. We don't want to
lose sight of other sorts of desal, brackish water, which
is, you can think of brackish water is it's
not as salty as ocean water, but it's
saltier than freshwater. It's that whole space
between and there the energy requirements are
substantially less simply because there's less salt.
So less salt, less stuff to remove,
less energy. Desalination is an important
tool in the fight against water scarcity. Its reliability is becoming
ever more important, but it's not a
cure-all and other techniques should always be
implemented alongside it. Desalination is already
vital for many water-scarce communities around
the world. And as climate change
continues to transform our planet, the balance between
concerns about energy use and the ability to
reliably get clean water is going to evolve.
How exactly desalination will fit into the future of clean
water is yet to be seen.
Not if controlled by US corporations.
The first step is still to deal with those, which means to deal with government corruption, which means throwing out assholes like Trump, Biden, Pelosi & co.
As long as people keep giving them power, then Biden is right. Nothing will fundamentally change.
I think we need to pursue splitting Oxygen and Hydrogen to make a self sustaining power plant couoled with green energy and industrial batteries.
If we can use the salts in the brine for something in say a chemical process, it might be useful.