I looked up the amount of water in all of the oceans on the earth. The number was utterly staggering. I don’t know why California doesn’t have two dozen desalinization plants going already.
But Israel has desalination plants!
Megascale Desalination
The world’s largest and cheapest reverse-osmosis desalination plant is up and running in Israel.
Availability: now Price: $0.58USD/cubic meter
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534996/megascale-desalination/
It is the world’s largest modern seawater desalination plant, providing 20 percent of the water consumed by the country’s households.
The new plant in Israel, called Sorek, was finished in late 2013 but is just now ramping up to its full capacity;
Those plants account for 40 percent of Israel’s water supply. By 2016, when additional plants will be running, some 50 percent of the country’s water is expected to come from desalination.
Israel Desalination Shows California Not to Fear Drought
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-02-13/israel-desalination-shows-california-not-to-fear-drought
“I don’t know why California doesn’t have two dozen desalinization plants going already.”
I’ll tell you why:
Northern California generally has enough water.
Southern California has abused the power of Sacramento to wring water out of — in order:
— the formerly agrarian Owens Valley
— the Colorado River
— the San Joaquin River (a.k.a. Northern California)
Bluntly stated, Southern California has simply NEVER been forced by the rest of the State to put on the big boy pants and get it’s own damned water from its own damned sources that it pays for with its own damned money. They’ve always been allowed to bully everyone else into selling them the water they want. Well, now the rest of the State is in a bind serious enough that those purchase agreements are beginning to be second-guessed, but not seriously. Not yet, anyway.
Just you let this drought roll on for another year, and you get the right players to finally grow some stones and turn off the spigot to L.A. and environs, and you’d see desalination plants shooting up along the coastline like corn in Nebraska.
BUT — and you KNEW there’d be one — the same fast-and-loose politicos the got L.A. sucking everyone around them dry, will bully their way around Sacramento and make everyone around them pay for those desalination plants.
Today, it’s “Give us water for our money.”
Tomorrow it’ll be, “Give us money not to use your water.”
Like a Mafia coin toss: heads they win, tails you lose.
Because they’d have to use nuclear, coal, oil or natural gas to run them. Nobody has figured out how to capture all the smug sniffing farts out there to harness all that methane.