Fresh Water at Zero Energy Cost . How do they do that?

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The following submission statement was provided by /u/RPM314:


SS: As regions around the world plunge into water scarcity, the more affluent ones are turning to desalinated seawater to survive. Existing technology is highly energy intensive and outputs highly saline brine (toxic to marine life) back into the ocean, and is therefore unsustainable on both the material input and material output sides of the equation.

This startup seeks to deepen our state of ecological overshoot by manufacturing huge fleets of small, floating desalination boats which are to be tethered to the ocean floor and have their pumps driven by wave power pulling on the tether. This reduces lifetime energy costs and dilutes the brine output, but overall falls victim to the "efficiency will save us" fallacy. Regions which exceed their environment's capacity to supply drinking water will collapse regardless.


Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/z0c3mh/copium_zero_energy_cost_desalination_is_actually/ix4pud9/

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/StatementBot 📅︎︎ Nov 20 2022 🗫︎ replies

SS: As regions around the world plunge into water scarcity, the more affluent ones are turning to desalinated seawater to survive. Existing technology is highly energy intensive and outputs highly saline brine (toxic to marine life) back into the ocean, and is therefore unsustainable on both the material input and material output sides of the equation.

This startup seeks to deepen our state of ecological overshoot by manufacturing huge fleets of small, floating desalination boats which are to be tethered to the ocean floor and have their pumps driven by wave power pulling on the tether. This reduces lifetime energy costs and dilutes the brine output, but overall falls victim to the "efficiency will save us" fallacy. Regions which exceed their environment's capacity to supply drinking water will collapse regardless.

👍︎︎ 26 👤︎︎ u/RPM314 📅︎︎ Nov 20 2022 🗫︎ replies

This is why I lurv redditors. you don't even have to say its a scam.

Its free! because someone-not-me will pay for it, waaaay over there ------------>

👍︎︎ 15 👤︎︎ u/irkli 📅︎︎ Nov 20 2022 🗫︎ replies

The cope is strong with this one, need life support

👍︎︎ 5 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Nov 20 2022 🗫︎ replies

TANSTAAFL

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/ItyBityGreenieWeenie 📅︎︎ Nov 20 2022 🗫︎ replies

Zero energy costs huh? Somehow breaking the rules of thermodynamics is easy now.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/AzerFox 📅︎︎ Nov 21 2022 🗫︎ replies

It's going to be funny if somehow such machines spread out on the ocean and manage to change salinity enough to disrupt the THC.

The channel is full of technohopium, but it's not the usual hype.

👍︎︎ 5 👤︎︎ u/dumnezero 📅︎︎ Nov 20 2022 🗫︎ replies

This is a nice paper on an alternative though:

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/ee/c9ee04122b

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Thebitterestballen 📅︎︎ Nov 20 2022 🗫︎ replies

Can't they repurposed whales for desal.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Fearless-Temporary29 📅︎︎ Nov 21 2022 🗫︎ replies
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Right, first things first. I've  got a new background. The thing is,   it was getting a bit cramped in the cabin at  the back of my house where I've been doing all   the filming and all the editing for about five  years now, so I've decided to keep the cabin   just for editing and I've moved the filming kit  inside my house, where it's also a bit warmer!   Some people will like the change, and some  of you will probably hate it. But I suspect   the vast majority of you will not be all  that bothered either way. And to be honest,   any one of those three reactions is absolutely  fine with me. So let's just get straight into   today's topic, which is a look at what is, in my  view, one of the most innovative and genuinely   useful pieces of real world sustainable  technology I've come across for some time. Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think. So what's  this amazing piece of tech I'm referring to? Well,   to paraphrase a well-known 60s Sci-Fi TV series  'it's desalination Jim but not as we know it!'   Now desalination's obviously been around for  a long time - almost six decades in fact,   ever since Alexander Zarchin patented a sea  water vacuum freezing device back in 1964.   But desalination technologies have been getting  a pretty bad rap in recent years for reasons that   we'll have a look at in a moment. So it was  unusually uplifting to discover a completely   new approach to desalination that pretty much does  away with all the problems of current technologies   and also manages to recycle hundreds of thousands  of single-use plastic bottles that would otherwise   have gone to landfill or been tossed into the  sea. I'll explain all that later in the video,   but first of all let's look at why the  existing tech is apparently so problematic.   Large-scale desalination is generally  achieved in one of two ways. The so-called   thermal method sucks in seawater and then  heats it up to produce a pure water vapour,   leaving behind a very concentrated brine  that then gets pumped back into the sea.   The more modern, and now much more widely  used, method involves something called a   reverse osmosis membrane, which I guess is the one  most of us have probably heard of. Essentially,   sea water is forced through one of these  membranes at very high pressure so that   all the salt and other contaminants are all  filtered out, leaving pure fresh water at the end.   You will still get some brine that needs to be  discharged somewhere, but reverse osmosis tends   to produce less brine than the thermal method,  plus it's cheaper and more efficient overall,   so reverse osmosis now accounts for about 70  percent of all desalination around the world.   Arguably the biggest criticism of these huge  centralized desalination plants though is that   they use enormous amounts of energy to process  large volumes of seawater, which in turn results   in high greenhouse gas emissions from the  generation of electricity. Those greenhouse   gas emissions warm the climate, which makes  water scarcity a bigger and bigger problem,   which means the world needs more and more  desalination plants and, well you get the idea!   It's a similar feedback loop to the one causing  an exponential rise in air conditioners around   the world, which is something we've  talked about in a previous video.   There are some small, medium and even large  desalination plants powered by on-grid renewables   like wind and solar, but even if renewable  energy was diverted on a mass scale to run   all desalination plans they would still be using  a huge amount of energy that arguably could and   should be used elsewhere to displace fossil fuels.  So that's problem number one. Problem number two   is the accidental intake of fish, larvae and  plankton, and any other kind of small marine   life that's unlucky enough to be swimming next to  an intake pipe when the system gets switched on.   Even with grilles on the front of the pipes,  millions of tiny marine creatures are still   inadvertently sucked into desalination systems  this way each year. The third problem is the brine   itself. If it's released from a single outflow  at a large plant or from a cluster of plants in a   small area, which is what happens in the Persian  Gulf region for example, then it represents an   extremely sudden and disruptive concentration of  very warm, very salty water that does all sorts   of nasty things to the local marine ecosystems. A  recent analysis by the United Nations found that   brine discharge from the 16,000 or so desalination  plants in operation around the globe today is 50%   higher than previous estimates. In actual  numbers that equates to about 142 million   cubic metres of concentrated brine being sent  back into localized coastal regions every single   day. That's enough to cover the entire state of  Florida in 30 centimetres or 12 inches of liquid.   Last but by no means least is the fact that  these enormous desalination plants are extremely   expensive to build and run. Those costs have to  be amortized over the lifetime of the project,   and if a large part of that amortization is based  on the dollar value of fresh water delivered then   of course, as energy costs rise, then inevitably  so does the cost of fresh water to the consumer.   Water scarcity is a growing problem all over  the world, even in affluent Western regions   like California and Nevada. In 2020 roughly one  percent of the human population relied solely on   desalination for their daily water supply. By 2050  that number is expected to increase to 10 percent.   That'll equate to about a billion people who  will have no access to fresh water without some   kind of desalination technology. If the world  continues to desalinate water using existing   methods then by mid-century the process will  account for about five percent of total global   greenhouse gas emissions which will contribute  heavily to the feedback loop I mentioned earlier.   So anyone coming along with a better  idea probably needs to be listened to.   And that's where a Canadian start-up called Oneka  Technologies comes in. The company was founded in   2015 by a mechanical engineer and entrepreneur  called Dragan Tucic, specifically to address   the issues we've just looked at. I caught up  with the company's commercial manager Camille   St Pierre via Zoom recently to get a better idea  of how their innovation works and why they believe   it could transform an entire sector. Not all  desalination takes place in coastal regions   but the vast majority of it does, and that begs  the question of whether it might be possible to   harness some of the energy in the ocean itself  to provide power for the desalination process.   Now when people like me talk about wave and tidal  energy technologies we're almost always talking   about devices that can convert that energy  into electricity, either for local use or for   transmission back into an electricity grid system.  That's not how Oneka have tackled the problem.   They've developed a system that harnesses the  motion of ocean waves in an entirely mechanical   way with no electricity generated or used in  any part of their desalination process at all.   It works like this. A floating platform is  anchored to the seabed and just like any   other ocean-going vessel it bobs up and down with  the motion of the water. As it moves downwards it   draws in seawater via a strainer on the underside  which has a very fine mesh across its opening to   vastly reduce the chances of sucking in any  tiny marine creatures that may be passing by.   The sea water then goes through filters to  remove the worst of any other rough stuff.   As the platform rises with the waves the sea  water passes through a mechanical pump followed   by a pressure and flow optimization system.  That provides enough pressure to force the   water through a reverse osmosis membrane very  similar to the technology I described earlier.   All of this is wave driven don't forget,  there's no electricity anywhere in the system.   Now here's where a second key difference comes  into play. The system desalinates 25 percent   of the water that passes through the membrane,  leaving 75 percent of the water as a relatively   low salinity brine which then gets sent back  through the pressure and flow optimization   system before going back into the water below  the platform. That means the discharge brine is   only about 30 percent more saline than the sea  water that it's being released into, compared   to conventional desalination plant discharge  which can have between 100 and 150 percent   higher salinity than the surrounding water.  As well as that a typical Oneka installation   will be comprised of multiple relatively small  platforms distributed over a very wide area,   as opposed to one huge centralized desalination  plant spewing out brine at a single location.   That creates what Oneka describe as 'multiple  outfalls' which combine with the natural sea   currents and waves to very quickly diffuse the  brine back to nominal levels. In fact Oneka's own   testing has demonstrated that within a distance  of only about two to three metres from each   platform no change in salinity can be detected.  Those findings are now being formally validated   by university researchers and environmental  engineering companies in Chile and California.   The fresh water is then sent to shore under  pressure via a single submerged pipeline,   again driven by the mechanical action of the  waves with no additional electrical power.   The only electrical components you'll find on one  of these platforms are the solar panels that are   there purely to drive the sensors that monitor  performance and send data to the cloud where   they're available online in real time. Oneka have  developed three distinct categories of platforms   to cater for more or less any size of application.  The smallest of the three is the Ice Cube class.   This is a unit that can be disassembled and  packed inside a standard size shipping crate,   which makes it extremely easy to send out to  remote coastal bases or as an emergency fast   response solution in disaster relief  situations. The platform's about 1.5   metres in diameter and produces about one  cubic metre of fresh water per day. And for   those of us who work in more basic units, that  equates to a thousand litres or 220 gallons.   Having carried out extensive lab testing and  computer simulations the Oneka team then produced   a slightly larger prototype for real-world  testing. This one was capable of producing 10   cubic metres of fresh water a day and it was taken  straight out into the extreme ocean conditions   off the coast of Canada where it endured, and  survived, waves of up to seven metres in height.   Next up is the Iceberg Class with about a six  metre diameter equivalent, and the capacity   to churn out up to 50 cubic metres of fresh water  per day, which is 50,000 litres or 11,000 gallons.   The floating platform is made from recycled  polyethylene terephthalate or PET, so it's perhaps   the most environmentally friendly way of chucking  discarded soda bottles into the sea that anyone   has ever devised. This size of installation  is ideal for small off-grid communities or   perhaps for tourism and remote resorts, or  even for smaller industrial applications.   A working example of the Iceberg Class is  currently deployed as part of the first phase of a   commercial project in Florida that will eventually  have a total generating capacity of 300 cubic   metres of water per day. Full production of the  Iceberg Class is scheduled to commence in 2023.   Oneka are now working flat out to develop  the largest of the three platforms, which   they call the Glacier class. This one will have a  diameter of between 12 and 15 metres and a typical   installation comprising 40 of these platforms  will be capable of producing more than 20 million   litres, or almost four and a half million gallons  of fresh water a day. An installation that size   would be usable by municipal authorities or in  large industrial or agricultural applications.   So what about cost? Well, the numbers can vary  quite significantly depending on things like   the size of the plants, the local cost  of electricity, the length of the water   supply agreement, cost of capital, the regulatory  environment, and even the quality of the water.   Huge centralized desalination plants  in the Middle East, typically powered   by cheap electricity from fossil fuels,  can produce between 300,000 and 900,000   cubic metres of fresh water per day for  around 50 cents to a dollar per cubic metre.   Smaller facilities that are closer in size to  Oneka installations typically sell fresh water   for between two and five dollars per cubic metre.  But electricity costs represent roughly half the   operating cost of a conventional desalination  plant, and that's an overhead that Oneka's system   simply doesn't have. So on a like for like  basis Oneka's team reckon their technology   can already produce water at a lower cost, and  as they scale up production and start operating   larger arrays they expect to be producing water  at only a quarter of the current market price.   So what's your view? Do you think this kind of  desalination technology can generally make a   difference, or do you see issues that we perhaps  haven't covered in this video? Maybe you're   working in the industry and you have some insights  that you can share with us all. If you do then,   as always, leave your thoughts in the comments  section below, and I'll be interested to see   what you think. That's it for this week though.  If you've enjoyed this video then please do give   us a like and hit that subscribe button if you  haven't already done so. And if you want to get   actively involved in guiding the content of the  channel and get exclusive monthly content from me   then why not come and join our amazing channel  supporters over at Patreon. And talking of   Patreon, I must just say a massive thank you to  some long-term supporters of the channel whose   names are scrolling up the screen here, all of  whom reached an anniversary of Patreon membership   during November. This channel would simply not  be possible without them, so they all have my   undying gratitude. And if you're Keen to learn  more about other sustainable technologies like   the one we've talked about today, then I reckon  you'll enjoy this video as well. As always, thanks   very much for watching. Have a great week, and  remember to just have a think. See you next week.
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Channel: Just Have a Think
Views: 198,837
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Desalination, ONEKA
Id: M5RG13AG4Bo
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 13min 52sec (832 seconds)
Published: Sun Nov 20 2022
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