Posted on 05/25/2007 11:15:32 AM PDT by ckilmer
Last month the New York Times published an article about how the West is likely entering a prolonged period of water shortages. Similiar reports have recently been published in Australia detailing expected extended droughts over the next 50 years.
The USA and Australia have responded to these reports in different ways.
Several weeks ago I blogged about the current administration’s effort to push bulk water tranfers from Canada. This week Australia announced they were about to embark on a major desalination research project with the view of spending $250 million over seven years and cutting energy costs for desalination in half. Interestingly, their belief that such results are doable is based on recent research in the US. Further, they considered long distance bulk water transfers. They concluded, however, that doing the research to lower the cost of desalination was less expensive and complicated. And too, the ocean is a more reliable resource. See my concluding remarks after the article posted below.
Thirsty Australia Advances Desalination Technology
MELBOURNE, Australia, May 18, 2007 (ENS) - The delivery of energy efficient water desalination to drought-stricken Australia received a boost today with the establishment of a new collaboration between the government research agency CSIRO and nine Australian universities.
The research aims to advance water desalination as an alternative water supply option for Australia by increasing efficiency, and reducing the financial and environmental costs of producing desalinated water.
Australia, especially southern Australia, is short of water, and the country is experiencing the worst drought on record this year. Desalination of seawater is a possible additional supply, but it requires a lot of electricity, and is expensive, costing about A$1.10 per 1,000 liters (US$.90 per 264 gallons).
The new research effort, known as the Advanced Membrane Technologies for Water Treatment Research Cluster, is led by Professor Stephen Gray of Victoria University.
As a first step, the multi-disciplinary research team will carry out an evaluation of existing membranes and develop new energy efficient membranes.
“Many desalination and recycling programs rely on a process called reverse osmosis, where the water is forced through a semi-permeable membrane, removing salts and any other contaminants,” Gray explains.”These membranes need regular replacement and cleaning, but they also require a large amount of energy to force water through what are nano-sized pores,” he says.
When contaminants such as salts are removed from water, some of them adhere to the surface of the membrane, building up on the surface, increasing the pressure and energy required to desalinate the water.
“Chemicals are used to clean the membranes, but membrane surfaces that are less sticky would reduce the pressure and energy required and the frequency of cleaning,” Gray says.
The researchers aim to improve membrane anti-fouling properties, increasing the ability of the membranes to clean themselves without chemicals.
The research will link with and inform related CSIRO research into membrane and carbon nanotube water filtration technologies.
Carbon nanotubes, molecules made of carbon atoms, are hollow and more than 50,000 times thinner than a human hair. Billions of these tubes serve as the pores in a desalination membrane.
The smooth inner walls of the nanotubes allow liquids and gases to rapidly flow through, while the miniscule pore size keeps out larger molecules.Alan Gregory, urban water research leader at CSIRO, says, “In combination with other research projects led by CSIRO, we aim to reduce by up to 50 percent the amount of energy required to desalinate seawater using membranes. This same technology will have benefits for the treatment and recycling of wastewater.”
CSIRO researchers are using nanotechnology to develop a new membranes for desalination with electrodialysis technology, which they say may lead to breakthrough technologies in cost-effective and highly efficient water recovery systems.
Nanotechnology for water desalination is a rapidly developing field. In the United States, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced in May 2006 their creation of a membrane made of carbon nanotubes and silicon that may offer less expensive desalinization.
The CSIRO scientists are developing new “inorganic-organic nanocomposite membranes for desalination by electrodialysis membrane process, which involves the incorporation of oxide nanoparticles into ion-conducting polymers to form new nanocomposites.”
“This also means we could potentially provide more secure water supplies while minimizing greenhouse gas emissions,” said Gregory.
Other partners in the membrane research program are the University of New South Wales, Monash University, the University of Melbourne, RMIT University, Curtin University of Technology, the University of Queensland, Deakin University, and Murdoch University.
Funding for the research was announced by Minister for Education, Science and Training Julie Bishop under the Flagship Collaboration Fund.
Desalination membrane advances cannot come soon enough for Australia, which is opening giant desalination plants already based on existing membrane technology, even if the water they produce is costly.
In April, the Water Corporation of Western Australia opened the 45 gigaliter Perth Seawater Desalination Plant. The US$290 million project will guarantee 17 percent of Western Australia’s current water needs, regardless of rainfall or drought.On Tuesday Western Australia Premier Alan Carpenter announced that a second desalination plant of the same size would be built at Binningup.
Meanwhile, the New South Wales Government of Premier Morris Iemma is moving forward with a huge desalination plant south of Sydney at Kurnell. The plant will use reverse osmosis technology with membranes that remove salts and other impurities from seawater to produce drinking water.
The environmental assessment for the construction and operation of a pipeline for Sydney’s desalination plant is open for public comment to Monday May 28.
As part of the desalination project, an 18 kilometer pipeline will be constructed from Kurnell, across Botany Bay, to Erskineville.
Sydney Water Managing Director Kerry Schott said the Kurnell plant would be 100 percent powered by green energy and would guarantee Sydney’s water supply.
“Given the uncertainty of climate change and Sydney’s growing population, alternative sources of water need to be developed,” said Schott.
“The desalination plant will supply about seven percent of Sydney’s water supply by 2009 but it can be scaled up further if required,” he said. “This gives us a supply of water that does not depend on rainfall.”
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I blogged last December about the LLNL scientists visit to Australia. Every provincial newspaper in Australia had a write up on that visit. This contrasts sharply with the notice that was given to the work of the LLNL scientists in the USA. Their write ups were mostly confined to science journals. Perhaps that’s why the Bush administration is actively considering bulk water transfers rather than accelerating the pace of desalination research. The US political class simply hasn’t been told whats going on in the US labs. Its not that the info isn’t available. Unlike a year ago,the implications of current research has pushed into corporate America. Two weeks ago I posted that IBM was entering into membrane research in the belief that great strides would be made in the next five years.
More to the point, as in the USA –the Australians considered pumping water over great distances and mountains and concluded that water desalination research was the better alternative. Consider this article.
Saltwater offers best hope, says scientist
Desalination and an inland pipeline are two of the options being considered by the State Government as it grapples with Melbourne’s water shortage.
Pumping water over the Great Dividing Range would probably be as energy intensive as desalination, he said, but the supply would be less reliable.
“We believe we can significantly reduce the amount of energy needed for desalination and this will make it even more competitive,” he said.
Its a shame sober men can’t come to the same conclusions in the USA.
US$.90 per 264 gallons
seesh that’s 250 times cheaper than bottled water:
http://www.ext.vt.edu/pubs/housing/356-486/356-486.html
According to the National Sanitation Foundation, in 1998, the average retail price of one gallon of domestic drinking water ranges from $.80 to $1.20
When governments control the public water utility, they are reluctant to invest the capital necessary to made additional capacity available and they are even more reluctant to price the water at a level that makes the utility economically sustainable.
I have seen this with my own eyes, where a city next to the ocean begged me to “conserve” water! I almost rolled on the floor in laughter. There in these cases, there is only a shortage of money.
Indeed, in the extreme case, the Island of Fiji is more than happy to sell you all the bottled fresh water you want, and FedEx is more than happy to deliver airplane loads of Fiji Water bottles anywhere in the developed world overnight.
So, let me repeat, there is no shortage of water. Shortage of free water, or nearly free water, yes indeed. Shortage of the will and determination to commit the capital to build a water treatment plant that turns sea water into fresh water, yes indeed. Shortage of whining that is structured, marketed and tuned to advance various ideological and socialist agendas? An never-ending supply.
The Aussies saw a billboard that said “Drink Canada Dry”....so they did
Regards,
GtG
The US has options, one of which is desalination. Australia has far fewer options.
And in the US, the economics of desalization versus import are going to be different in San Diego than they would be for Denver.
Desalinization would push technology and eliminate the need to ship water thousands of miles to coastal cities. This makes a lot more sense than plastering the environment with nineteenth-century dams and pipelines.
I have also seen this, it is for a simple reason, every major city on the US east coast, has its water supply reservoir. Many of these cities are approaching the max amount of water that can be consistently withdrawn from that reservoir under current conditions. Those cities are generally taking two approaches to the problem of increasing demand, either change conditions of the reservoir by changing the forest to one that has greater runoff, or reducing looses in transit to customers. The cover type conversions can increase runoff by up to 10%. The losses in the distribution system are slowly being dealt with, as most of the cities have hundreds of miles of pipe that in some places is over 100 years old.
There are two other options that cities have, try to persuade citizens to use less water, what you complained about. The other option is to build new reservoirs, which would be a political fight of epic proportions because this would be unlikely to make them popular with the neighbors (eminent domain seizers of land, Environmental impact statements, etc.)
Thus several cities actually are taking a closer look at desalinization, as a new source of water. The Author of the article did not say where in the US water from Canada was to be sent.
I spent a week on Malta (which is a delightful place and a great off-beat vacation spot), and they have several desalinizing plants to provide water. Israel just built a big plant and the cost per gallon of the water it produces is less than I am paying for well water from a cooperative water utility.
I thought it started raining cats and dogs in Australia this week! Sounds like they ought to have some way of capturing that rainfall. I’m sure the Sheep ranches in the Outback have collection systems!
a lot of water from colorado ends up in Los angeles.
LA pays 450@acre foot for colorado river water. you can see that ribbon of blue cross from arizona to LA if you’ve ever flown over the area. Utah has already talked about building a desalination plant for LA and then taking LA’s water alotment. I don’t think the deal will be really compelling until the cost of desalinized water is less than 450@acre foot. That day is only a couple years away.
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