By Dina Spector 11 hours ago
Posted on 03/12/2014 8:25:27 PM PDT by ckilmer
WaterFX
A parabolic trough collects energy from the sun. The heat is used to evaporate clean water from the salty agricultural drainage water of irrigated crops.
This year, farmers in California's Central Valley likely won't receive any water through the federal irrigation program, a network of reservoirs, rivers, and canals that is normally replenished yearly by ice melt from the Sierra mountains.
Crippling water shortages have made desalination technology more attractive, including a startup, WaterFX, that uses the sun to produce heat. The heat separates salt and water through evaporation.
WaterFX has fewer environmental repercussions than traditional methods of desalination that rely on fossil fuels to generate electricity.
The technology could not have come at a better time.
No end in sight
During a drought-free year, the federally run Central Valley Project provides enough water to irrigate 3 million acres of agricultural land. Last year, farmers only received 20% of their allotment.
The lack of water is not just worrying for growers. It affects all people who eat food. One third of the nation's produce is grown in the Central Valley — composed of Sacramento Valley in the north and San Joaquin Valley in the south — and the deep water cuts mean that more than half a million acres of crop land will be left unplanted.
Some scientists predict California's drought could last as long as a century . Going forward, the state is going to need a substantial water supply that doesn't rely on the aqueduct system, says Aaron Mandell, WaterFX chairman and founder.
However, in order to counter California's drought, the push must be toward renewable desalination plants rather than fossil-fuel dependent facilities that further contribute to climate change.
Making freshwater from sunshine
In WaterFX's system, a solar trough, which looks like a jumbo-sized curved mirror, collects energy from the sun's rays and transfers that heat to a pipe filled with mineral oil. The mineral oil feeds the heat into a system that evaporates the salty water being treated. Steam is produced, which condenses into pure liquid water. The remaining salt solidifies and can be removed, says Mandell. That salts can be used in other industries as building materials, metals, or fertilizers.
In order to operate continuously, the solar trough is very large so that it collects extra heat during the day. The energy is stored and used to run the system at night when the sun isn't shining.
By using sun as the fuel source, WaterFX uses roughly one-fifth of the electricity consumed by traditional desalination plants, according to Mandell. Less electricity means lower operating costs. With conventional desalination, electricity makes up 50-60% of the water costs, says Mandell. A typical desalination plant in San Diego operates at about $900 per acre-foot, while it costs around $450 to produce an acre-foot of water with WaterFX. (An acre-foot is 325,000 gallons, or the amount of water it takes to cover an acre at a depth of one foot).
WaterFX
WaterFX chairman and founder, Aaron Mandell.
"Solar desalination is still a very immature technology so there's a quite a bit of room to drive that cost down even further," said Mandell.
Many desalination facilities, including the $1 billion Carlsbad plant set to open in 2016, use a process known as reverse osmosis that forces seawater through billions of tiny holes that filter out salt and other impurities. This method can produce fresh water on a large scale, but has economic and environmental drawbacks. It uses an immense amount of electricity and only about half of the seawater that goes into the system comes out as clean water. The remaining half is dumped back into the ocean as salty brine where it can be harmful to marine plants and animals.
By contrast, Mandell says that WaterFX has a 93% recovery rate, meaning that for every 100 gallons of water that goes in, 93 gallons of usable water are spit out.
WaterFX also helps solve an issue that has long plagued irrigated land. Soils in the arid west of San Joaquin Valley naturally contain a lot of salt as well as high concentrations of metals, like selenium, which can be toxic to humans and wildlife. When the soil is irrigated, the salt, selenium, and other elements become concentrated in the drainage water that collects in a system of drains and pumps under the crops. In the past, harmful drainage water might have been discharged into rivers, wetlands, and aquifers in the San Joaquin Valley. Now, that otherwise unusable water can be diverted to WaterFX and turned into irrigation water again.
The first test
The Panoche Water District in Central Valley is home to the first demonstration plant, a 6,500-square foot system that is capable of producing around 10 gallons of freshwater a minute, or roughly 14,000 of freshwater each day.
When the demonstration plant is operating in commercial mode, running 24 hours a day, it can put out 25 to 30 gallons of freshwater a minute, says Mandell.
WaterFX
The pilot project, funded by the California Department of Water Resources, will hopefully prove that the WaterFX system is more reliable (it doesn't depend on the Sierra snowpack) and affordable than other freshwater sources.
The water that's being treated by the pilot plant streams in from a canal that collects salty drainage water from around 200 farms in the area and brings it to a single location. In the pilot phase, the clean water that's produced is blended back in with the drainage water, but a commercial plant would send the water back to farmers through a series of canals that are already in place.
Additionally, small-scale systems could be used by individual farmers on site to recycle their own drainage water.
A bright future
WaterFX is not the first company to experiment with solar desalination. The Sahara Forest project in Qatar and an Australian company called Sundrop Farms are using the technology to grow food in greenhouses. But this is the first time a company has focused on using the sun's energy "to produce a scalable, long-term water supply," Mandell said.
The goal is to eventually be able to treat salty groundwater in addition to drainage water.
The immediate next step for WaterFX is to expand operations in Panoche to produce 2 million gallons of water per day. "From there it's about laying out a pathway for replicating this model all up and down the Central Valley," Mandell said. "We're trying to put a plan in place so that by 2020, we may be in a position to wean ourselves off the aqueduct system entirely."
Think about it: What if there was an entrenched set of real smart scientists who would have their funding DRASTICALLY reduced when Dolly was produced? They would have pulled out ALL the stops in their welcome of this new cloning technology that only works 1/1000th % of the time, wouldn’t they?
So... why don’t we have a bunch of clamor surrounding Dolly the Sheep? Because there is no such entrenched competition for resources, that’s why.
Nobody wise sees science as a zero sum game as long as it is truthful.
And competition conspiracy games?
Who wouldn’t WANT a cold fusion battery that you could count on? But they aren’t going to jump at the chance to do it until someone shows it isn’t smoke and mirrors.
Too often, hoaxes HAVE driven scientists astray.
This is like saying doctors don’t want cancer cured because now what happens to cancer treatment profits... forgetting that if what is a myriad of conditions could be cured in one fell swoop then that would leave a lot of surviving people that need OTHER kinds of health care still. If it isn’t cancer it’s Alzheimer’s. Or whatever. This mortal coil is guaranteed to come with sickness and death risk of some kind.
We cannot even assume MIT nor Caltech to be wise nor truthful in this pursuit.
So ignore them, they are not the whole world of science as if they could force it into a bottle.
Nonetheless if you ultimately want the big players to pay attention, then you got to get your reliability pretty well up there. Your choice on how to do it, but mad science to mainstream science is not going to happen if the mad scientists don’t try to make it happen.
And competition conspiracy games?
***No comprehende, senior.
Who wouldn’t WANT a cold fusion battery that you could count on?
***The guys who have been paid for decades NOT to produce such progress.
But they aren’t going to jump at the chance to do it until someone shows it isn’t smoke and mirrors.
***Of course, anyone who drew their salary from CHF would KNOW that the solution is 50 years off, so they would be utterly dismissive of a claim, even when it is clear for everyone else to see.
Too often, hoaxes HAVE driven scientists astray.
***Then those idiot scientists need to suck it up and learn something. LENR is littered with former skeptics such as Levi, Focardi, Kowalski, Essen, Tsakiris, Duncan, and even Storms (plus plenty others).
This is like saying doctors don’t want cancer cured because now what happens to cancer treatment profits...
***No, it isn’t like that at all. This is a suppressed science, where the work is done under the radar until the convincing demo like the Wright Brothers did, which threw all of current aeronautical science on its ear.
True enough, until crowd sourcing catches on.
So get your convincing demo. Soon everyone was building replicas of the Wright machine if not buying it from the Wrights.
I’m just saying what that demo will look like. And it won’t look like black magic where the demons have to be in a good mood.
The thing to keep in mind is: The Wright brothers were no frauds. They kept their demo locked up for 5 friggin years while a stream of lookieloos came by asking about it, but none of those lookieloos would agree to buy their airplanes if it were demo’d. Those lookieloo A@@#0|e$ were just trying to steal the secret, figuring that if a couple of bicycle mechanics could unleash the amazing secret, it couldn’t be that hard. It took 5 friggin years before the Wrights had a contract they could demo to. The same dynamic operates today, but on a bigger scale with players that have $billions in their pocket and can STRONGLY influence the patent process and others involved.
Well done. Also, if they put the plant near the farms they’ll be using farm land to produce water instead of food. Solar technology isn’t as advanced as the desalination seems to be. And, being California I have no doubt the eco-nazis will find a reason why it can’t be used. I’m hearing stories of entire towns with dry wells where water is being trucked in every day and towns along I-5 running out of water for several hours a day requiring businesses to close. We are the new dust bowl and most of it is man made. This idea is not the solution. Too little too late.
Hey, crank right on if you got the resources. And God speed if there is truth in your powdered metals. I believe God will in fact speed it if there is.
To me it’s fascinating in a way, but this is not going to be a civilization saver. Nothing can be, as long as there is a sin problem. Nothing but God, that is.
Ultimately if it’s true it, too, will reflect well on the glory of God. And you may need to take heed to a spiritual problem that could be hindering it. As long as some human wants the glory it’s going to stumble. As soon as the glory goes to truth (God is the truth, way, and life) then it will be blessed.
Something needs to rule out physico-chemical effects though.
***That has been done multiple times. Example:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEstatusofcoa.pdf
I found the spiritual component of which you speak. There will be many freepers who do not understand.
1 Thessalonians 5:3
International Standard Version
When people say, “There is peace and security,” destruction will strike them as suddenly as labor pains come to a pregnant woman, and they will not be able to escape.
The effect was noted before the investigation of powdered metals to enhance it. Sintering and powdering was an attempt at increasing the surface area and, if you believe Storms, a means to introduce cracks for the NAE.
Nothing but God, that is.
***I agree. Until He comes on the clouds of Heaven, seated at the right hand of Power, we have an obligation to make this world a better place.
That is certainly salient. If we thought we could engineer a nice civilization, sin would rear its ugly head once more, showing that nobody could supplant God and trying to do so only opens a door to the devil.
But anyhow, the greater principle is that yes, this might prove a boon to mankind even though not a civilization saver. And God is perfectly copacetic with that. But the catch is, He really does want the glory. I had seen some earlier stages when a particular inventor was keeping it for his signature item. I could have told you that God wouldn’t bless that. Only when something goes open enough to be attributed to truth rather than to a person, will something be blessed.
We got to be careful where we get our definition of better. God’s definition overrides all others — gladly for us, it does incorporate some of our own, but in God’s way not ours.
Glorify God. In short term you might suffer. In long term you’ll be hallelujah’ing like there was no end (and there won’t be).
Well, um... I dunno how we got from talking about LENR as a desalinization technology to the sin of mankind, but as far as I can tell, you speak wisdom and I agree with you. LENR won’t be a panacea for society any more than the reasonably priced automobile was. But it WILL affect civilization as much or more than automobiles, so it makes sense to keep a sharp eye on it.
where we get our definition of better.
***The bible is a good place to start. But google search gives thousands of hits for “better life” + bible and only 2 hits for “more blessed life” + bible. So where do you suggest we start?
If one of these things will yield more energy than it took to put it together, then the celebration might begin.
Even before that it’s a plausible battery.
You’re probably thinking electrical plant. Hey if it can be stoked with this stuff at practical power levels... and it doesn’t need as much energy to make as it will yield... why not.
There’s still going to be the question of consumption of material. Can they take used fuel and make new good fuel out of it? Or does use mean it’s forever useless for the reaction now?
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