Posted on 08/18/2021 1:20:08 PM PDT by grundle
NEWARK, Calif. (KGO) -- As more communities impose water use restrictions because of the drought, the California Coastal Commission is likely to vote on a controversial proposal later this year that could ease water worries for millions of Orange County residents.
After decades of debate, Poseidon Water just needs approval from the commission to begin the construction of a desalination facility in Huntington Beach that would produce 50 million gallons of drinking water per day.
Poseidon Water already runs a desalination facility in Carlsbad which is the largest in the Western Hemisphere. The facility was built in 2015 and provides about 12% of the water used in San Diego County.
While desalination is not a new technology, it is controversial. Many communities have looked at desalination during times of drought but have been dissuaded by its cost and environmental impact.
Desalination is the process of converting seawater into drinking water by removing its salt content.
"The Pacific Ocean is the largest reservoir in the world. It's always full and we have the technology to turn that saltwater into drinking water," said Vice President for Project Development at Poseidon Water Scott Maloni.
Many countries have made big investments in desalination, especially in the Middle East.
Australia built several desalination plants during the "Millennium" drought but then shut many of them down when the drought ended. Several facilities are being restarted this year as drought conditions return.
California currently has 12 seawater desalination facilities in operation. The Huntington Beach proposal has the backing of Governor Gavin Newsom who said he wants to diversify the state's water supply.
But environmentalists have concerns.
"Seawater desalination is one option for California, but it's the most expensive option and it has significant energy and greenhouse gas impacts and it affects our marine environment," said the Director of Research at the Pacific Institute Heather Cooley.
Critics of desalination worry about the amount of energy needed to extract salt from seawater which is done by reverse osmosis.
That's a process that pushes water under high pressure through semi-permeable membranes effectively filtering out salts and minerals.
Historically, water has been cheap in California and that made desalination prohibitive. But that gap has narrowed as the cost of water has risen in the state.
The other concern is the environmental impact. While desalination can produce freshwater, it also generates brine, a highly concentrated salt water mixture that is then pumped back into the ocean.
The higher concentration of salt in the water can be damaging to marine life.
"When the water is discharged, it creates a plume around the discharge which is very salty. Even though marine organisms can handle salts, they do have a range in which they can handle it," said Cooley.
To minimize the impact, California adopted strict environmental regulations around desalination including the use of diffusers on the brine discharge so that it dissipates quicker in the ocean water.
But not all desalination treat seawater. A brackish desalination facility has been operating in Newark since 2003.
Brackish water contains a mixture of fresh water and saltwater. Since it is less salty than ocean water, it requires less energy to treat.
The Alameda County Water District built the Newark desalination facility to treat groundwater near the San Francisco Bay that had been contaminated with bay water.
Whereas before it would just pump out the saltier water, now it treats it and produces about 12 million gallons per day, or about 25% of the overall water supply for the southern Alameda County area.
"The facility has become especially important during drought conditions when we really need to rely on local supplies and local production," said Ed Stevenson, general manager of Alameda County Water District.
Running the facility requires much less energy than a seawater desalination plant would need. Any unused energy is sent back into the system. Stevenson said the overall cost of the facility is the lowest of all the water treatment plants operated by the district.
The brine produced is also handled differently. Since brackish water is already less salty than seawater, the resulting brine is also less salty, below the salt concentration of regular bay water. The concentrated stream is discharged at a location where the salt levels match the receiving water.
"With improvements in technology that are happening today and other advancements in water treatment, I think desalination will have a big part to play in the future of California and the West," said Stevenson.
In Antioch, which has dealt with water rationing in the past, construction is underway on a brackish water desalination facility that would be the first to operate in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
The Marin Municipal Water District is considering leasing two prepackaged desalination facilities from an Australian company to provide nearly a third of its drinking water needs.
Forecasts warn that Marin could run out of water by next summer if the drought does not improve this year.
"California water has been plentiful and cheap historically and now we're seeing with climate change that is no longer the case," said Maloni. "While seawater desalination was maybe not a viable option 20 years ago, it is today." Environmentalists want to see more investment in conservation and efficiency.
"There are opportunities around storm water capture and water reuse," said Cooley. "So instead of discharging waste water into the ocean, you're now treating it again and using it to meet your water demand."
I posted stuff from Rossi’s blog for 2&half MONTHS. I still get hounded about it after 10 YEARs. It’s entriguing to see how far this kind of bullshiite goes on from the ignorant Luddite anti-science crowd.
The last thing government wants is real solutions.
You are anti-science because you harass legit scientific discussion 9&half years after that bullshiite was aired. After excerpts from Rossi’s blog stopped. After it was posted “let him follow his own rule of ‘in mercato veritas’”.
2&half months posted
2&half months afterward harassment — standard harassment
5 months harassment — probably standard harassment
10 months harassment — RICO level triple standard harassment
15 months harassment — crossing the line into jerkhood
20 months harassment — Trolling
25 months harassment — Anti-science trolling
30 months harassment — Anti science Luddite Trolling
.
.
.
40 months harassment — Anti science Luddite Trolling, just doing it because you’re an @$$#0/e and know you can get away with it.
.
,
.
100 months harassment — Worse than Anti-science. Stupid anti-science. Dumb.
.
.
.
However many months it’s been to today — You deserve an anti-science Troll’s timeout for several days, multiplied all the way back by how many months you’ve been a jerk.
There are no piles of salt with reverse osmosis desal. The typical recovery rate is 1:1 fresh water to brine. That brine has all the original salt of the seawater since it’s half the volume it’s twice as salty which for normal seawater at 35,000 ppm yields a 70,000 ppm brine sounds like a lot change the units to per cent and it’s 7% brine. This brine when elected under pressure into the seawater it came from rapidly mixed with more seawater to go back to nearly it’s original ppm value a few dozen meters from the outfall ejectors. One gallon ejected mixes with one gallon now it’s only 50% another gallon of mixing and half again you get the idea in very short distances it falls off to undetectable levels. It’s fear mongering by people with political agendas who harp about “toxic brine” the Israelis have the second largest RO plant in the world on the high salinity Mediterranean coastline even they have zero issue a with “toxic bribes”
If little Israel can afford it, so can California.
As for environmentalists, has the Legislature approved pelt
prices yet?
Thanks!
MIT has a better idea of what to do with the brine.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41929-018-0218-y
Split the sodium chloride salt into acid and base.
HCl and NaOH both very useful chemicals used in the millions of Kg every year.
NaOH has a added benefit of being able to absorb CO2 directly from the air when in solution. You could use it to form bicarbonate directly from the air then heat the bicarb to release pure CO2 which again has numerous uses. Very cheap bulk NaOH would yield very cheap pure CO2. NaOH is also capable of extracting raw proteins from green leaf plants when ground up and soaked in an basic solution as protein isolate this is high grade protein for animals feed. Cheap NaOH yield large amounts of protein isolate.
HCl is used all over the chemicals industry. It also has a very interesting property when exposed to cellulose and hemicellulose it depolymerizes both to the original sugars that make up a the base units. Glucose and hextrose having a very cheap source of bulk HCl means you can hydrolysis cellulose to sugars on a huge scale. Monogastric animals(pigs,chickens,humans) cannot eat cellulose but our primary carbohydrate energy source in our blood stream or diet is glucose. Hextrose is eaten by yeasts and any animal or insect with an aerobic gut biota. HCl turns wood scraps, straw, hay, corn stalks any plant materials into sugar that can be feed to animals that don’t have the four stomachs of a cow or goat ect. Cheap HCl in bulk makes for a huge new source of sugars , you can also turn those sugats into ethanol for fuels or food. Yes ethanol is food some people in this very board have a quarter or more of their daily caloric intake by the numbers of ethanol consumption ;)
Any source of cheap acid or base will immediately be put to use for humanity.
Or use it to make a cement replacement with zero CO2 emissions it’s actually CO2negative since the carbonate is formed from atmospheric CO2 should make the greens happy. If nothing else it opens up a massive source of new building materials for the single largest human use substance besides water on earth aka concrete no other material is used more.
I suspect that a significant portion of that greenhouse gas they are referring to there is water vapor, in addition to the power-production based CO2 release.
More environazi fear porn. Reverse osmosis typically produces about 10% of potable water with 90% being rejected with the extra salt and minerals. That means the returned water is only 10% higher in salt concentration than regular seawater, well within the tolerance range of all sea life except the most sensitive of corals. Of course, those corals are thousands of miles from the Kali coastline.
Rather, the dams in the Sierra foothills and canyons continue to be destroyed and ripped out by the enviros.
Their “concerns” about the desalination plants are excuses. Delaying tactics, because they are afraid they really will work.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.