Posted on 01/29/2021 7:51:26 PM PST by BenLurkin
So have the Dutch, in Aruba.
Aruba has the best drinking water on Earth; all of Aruba's water is de-salinated seawater.
The process produces water so pure that they have to pass it over minerals to give it some taste.
Oh yes, it is...see my above post about Aruba...
desalinated water is used all over the world. But the cost to too high to make it useful for anything but drinking water. Its just too expensive for large scale commercial irrigation.
But there will come a time when desalinated seawater is cheap enough for large scale commercial irrigation.
When that happens — the world change very deeply. and very profoundly.
I think that will happen in the next decade.
Have a look at Israel’s desal plants. They are producing 154,540,650,630 gallons a year.
There are low cost graphene/nanotube filters available which swap right out with traditional high cost filters — the format is the same. And the last I heard, the Koreans are working on bringing the production of graphene/nanotube desal filters way, way down through 3D printing.
Desal is here. Political will is not.
The salt can right back in the ocean just the same as nature does through evaporation. Not to mention the quantities would be far less than a drop in the bucket.
Anybody know if a lifestraw works with salt water?
I was a chemistry major, and pure water is often used for various purposes, distilled and deionzed. I was curious, so I drank a glass.
I was so tasteless it was a bit bizarre.
Of course, pure ethyl alcohol was also available, and out of curiosity, I sampled that as well.
Straight up was a bit much.
But it made a fine screwdriver...:)
This was not working with seawater but with a brine steam within an alternative energy production process at demonstration plant scale. I was scaling up in size to what it would take for full size production units.
I went through a prequalification step to ID companies with actual industrial scale expertise. Three companies were short listed to submit competitive bids. an US, an European and an Israeli company. For the bid evaluation step, I set up a grading process for the commercial and technical sections.
All three used ultrafiltration + reverse osmosis as the primary treatment with the concentrated brine going to a multi-effect evaporator and the permeate back to production. From the evaporator, most of the condensate was recycled back into production. A slip stream of condensate was polished with activated carbon then discharged as a treated wastewater under the terms of a discharge permit. A salt slurry was produced from the evaporator bottoms and fed to filter press units to produce a dry cake for landfill disposal.
The Israeli company had by far the best desalination technology. Multi-effect evaporation is a simple concept long used in industry but the devil is in the details and the Israeli technology in terms of evaporator design was way above the US and European competitors. Also, their resume of industrial scale installations world wide was more than the other two competitors combined. Business wise, the US company was selected because they were providing other pieces of the production plant thus could bundle everything together in a more competitive way cost wise.
If we start burning up water making things move, fly and operate, now long until the Erf runs out of water, and the Pacific Ocean is saltier than the Great Salt Lake? /S
Not to be xenophobic - (well maybe a LITTLE) - but
Why the Hell does the UoH need to let some guy(gal?) from someplace in China (Ying Yu from the College of Physical Science and Technology at Central China Normal University) even get a fingernail’s worth of grip on this process?
Might as well give that person a room, photocopier and every research note taken by the USA team.
...And prepaid shipping labels to the destination of China’s choice for FULL DISCLOSURE of this world-wide game-changing technology.
Hydrogen is a really small molecule that really, really wants to escape/leak when contained. It also creates embrittlement issues with steel, which tends to get used in IC engines and cars in large quantities. These are not trivial problems.
Might come to pass in combination with vertical industrial factory agriculture and hydroponics.
The energy used to extract the hydrogen is greater than what the hydrogen will produce, so this is a net energy loss.
Unlike like evil dino oil, in which the net energy from a barrel is greater than what it takes to get it out of the ground and refine it.
FAIL!
“I once heard a scientist speculate on what would happen if hydrogen could be produced cheaply and used to power automobiles. Its combustion product would be water vapor.”
Even then, Biden would sign an EO to ban it, citing “too much steam is heating the earth!”
Cali-fornia could mix the salt with all that fresh water they use to keep those 6 snail darters thriving upstream of San Francisco.
Hah!
I thought you were mocking the way John F’n Kerry speaks.
Did you know he was in Vietnam?
Fuel cells will be the future. Just add water.
Check out the bloom box. Google runs a whole complex using it.
“Closer to Commercialization”
I hope they figure it out but when I was a kid in the 70s I read all of these glowing articles in popsci about how PV, wind and H2 would be here in 10 years. Sort of like the fusion power systems are always only 15 years away.
something like that. water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
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