Posted on 03/03/2015 8:27:49 AM PST by hauerf
On a Mediterranean beach 10 miles south of Tel Aviv, Israel, a vast new industrial facility hums around the clock. It is the world’s largest modern seawater desalination plant, providing 20 percent of the water consumed by the country’s households. Built for the Israeli government by Israel Desalination Enterprises, or IDE Technologies, at a cost of around $500 million, it uses a conventional desalination technology called reverse osmosis (RO). Thanks to a series of engineering and materials advances, however, it produces clean water from the sea cheaply and at a scale never before achieved ...
(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...
As an aside, as a resident of the once great state of California, this news has made me wonder whether we could not use a few of these plants along the coast more than we will ever use our budding nearly one billion dollar "high" speed rail line from nowhere to who knows where.
“As an aside, as a resident of the once great state of California, this news has made me wonder whether we could not use a few of these plants along the coast more than we will ever use our budding nearly one billion dollar “high” speed rail line from nowhere to who knows where.”
You can put 3-4 along the coast, run pipelines inland and grow vegetables, fruit as well as expand forests and other vegetation. All of which contributes to scrubbing Co2 and producing oxygen.
Basically, if California did this, they would be the biggest contributors to “fixing” global warming. So, if some enterprising young Conservatives promoted this, and went balls to the walls with videos and stories, it would put the environmentalists into a bind.
I smell a crowd sourcing opportunity.
Wish we could build that here in CA where we desperately need fresh water instead of wasting many billions on Gov. Moonbeam’s crazy train.
I hope (and expect) these plants are very well guarded.
California’s high speed rail is going to cost anywhere from $100 billion to $200 billion.
RE: it produces clean water from the sea cheaply and at a scale never before achieved ...
OK, it costs $500 Million to build. I have a few questions:
1) How many customers will it serve?
2) How much does it cost to maintain it?
3) Will it be profitable?
This + 3D Printing + off-shore gas sources would give Israel all that it needs to go FU to the whole planet.
I just wish they could transport the whole physical nation to the S. Pacific next to Australia where they can live in peace.
Moonbeam also wants to build two and possibly three 45 foot diameter pipes under the Delta to pump more water to Los Angeles. This is projected to cost $50 billion to $100 billion.
Lockheed Martin developed a nano-tech membrane in the past year or two that is much thinner but does as well as conventional desalinization via membrane.
The benefit is using a few percent of the current power requirements for desalinization via membrane filtering.
We should be building desalinization plants like this in Texas, California and Florida to meet freshwater demands, in addition to the wastewater recycling efforts.
I wish we could sell it to environmentalists as saving the smelt AND migrant farm workers, while making the defense contractor into a peaceful infrastructure developer. Build desalinization instead of jets!
But they’ll oppose anything new but artwork.
Watched a show on tv a week or so ago about how a desal plant works, very interesting. The process is unbelievably complex though. many many filtering steps.
One such plants is in Carlsbad, another well along towards approval in Huntington Beach, both California.
The local dems and “environmentalists” invent every false reason to block them.
Yeah, whenever California’s water woes come up I always think of the Israeli de-salinization industry.
I have wondered if there is enough current or a distant enough discharge of concentrated back flushing water to prevent raising local salinity levels. I do not despair over it like the Californians but wonder how the salinity levels will effect performance of the plant.
California could use this IF the plant gets it’s power to run from Solar panels and wind! Nuke fuel, coal or gas will doom the plant and keep California dry by keeping the prices of operating such a plant high!
What is the byproduct of desalinization? How much usable materials could be gleaned from this process?
Considering it could be the beginning of one of those droughts that lasts hundreds of years, maybe the California libs should stop taking baths and start using their left hand instead of toilet paper.
Or they could a desalination plant. Wonder if the illegals flooding in will impact the water supply? /sarc
Great idea. Throw in thorium power reactors funded by Bill Gates and you might have a winner. I’m in Nevada, we might pay to build to offset for Colorado River water.
Let the Central State reservoirs be used for flood control, agriculture and environmental uses (fish and waterfowl) not pumped to the cities. Dismantle Hetch Hetchy and the Owens Valley water projects; fill the coastal reservoirs with desal. Governor Choo-Choo could leave a better legacy for this state than a train to nowhere.
The solution, I think, is to build them on tanker hulls and make them mobile. Iirc the USN had desalinization ships for a long while supporting places like Gitmo.
Even better, make the things completely self-contained by powering them with nuclear reactors.
This won’t fly in California. They would never give up a beach just for affordable access to fresh water.
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