Free Republic

July 19, 2016 — Ten miles south of Tel Aviv, I stand on a catwalk over two concrete reservoirs the size of football fields and watch water pour into them from a massive pipe emerging from the sand. The pipe is so large I could walk through it standing upright, were it not full of Mediterranean seawater pumped from an intake a mile offshore. “Now, that’s a pump!” Edo Bar-Zeev shouts to me over the din of the motors, grinning with undisguised awe at the scene before us. The reservoirs beneath us contain several feet of sand through which the...

The researchers compiled data from the California Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, which tracks oil and gas wells around the state. Researchers determined if water had been detected while drilling, and also gathered data about depth, salinity and pressure. After looking at 360 oil and gas fields spread across eight counties, the researchers say that they’ve documented a trove of fresh water just over half the size of Lake Michigan hidden in California’s bedrock 1,000 to nearly 10,000 feet below the surface. This is almost three times more groundwater than what was indicated in previous studies, many conducted...

DOHA: Monsson Group, leading company in renewable energy, yesterday announced its entry into the Qatari market with its Reverse Osmosis water desalination powered by renewable energy. The project is located in a farm owned by Ali Hussain Ali Al Sada and it is arguably the first fully automated and remotely controlled plant, with low energy consumption and without operating personnel. This new desalination plant is the answer to the rising energy demands coupled with diminishing fossil fuel reserves. It is the first of many such farms in Qatar for which Monsson will provide solutions. Using renewable energy technologies, Monsson is...

Increasing water scarcity is driving innovations in water production technologies, according to analysis by Frost & Sullivan that finds accelerated movement towards wastewater reuse and advanced water recycling technologies. Innovations in Water Production and Its Impact on Key Sectors finds that advancements in technologies, chemicals and processes are addressing the three most difficult challenges in water production. These are: â—¾the removal of nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus compounds in open body water sources â—¾sustainable desalination â—¾the removal of emerging chemical compounds from drinking water The report says the water production space as a whole is shifting toward renewable energy-based solutions to...

California has put the green lobby elite ahead of the normal human need for water, building no new reservoirs in decades and diverting the water of the Central Valley to flow to sea in order to protect a locally endangered smelt. Now an Israeli company is coming to the rescue of San Diego County, soon to be providing 10% of their water and creating 2,500 jobs through state-of-the-art reverse-osmosis technology. IDE Technologies dedicated the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere on Monday ..quenching the thirst of roughly 10 percent of San Diego County... The plant, which will be operated...

Producing fresh drinking water from the sea - desalination - has always seemed to be the most obvious answer to water shortages.Our oceans cover more than 70% of the earth's surface and contain 97% of its water. But the energy needed to achieve this seemingly simple process has been costly. Now, thanks to new technologies, costs have been halved and huge desalination plants are opening around the world.The largest seawater desalination plant ever, Israel's Sorek plant near Tel Aviv, just ramped up to full production. It will make 624 million litres of drinkable water daily, and sell 1,000 litres -...

Finding ways to create clean drinking water where there is none is a field of constant innovation. Desalination, the process of filtering seawater to make it fit for human use, is perhaps the most common and researchers around the globe are on a quest to bring cost-effective and portable desalination technology to rural areas where it is desperately needed. So it’s exciting news that researchers at Alexandria University in Egypt have developed a promising new method that can turn salt water into fresh water in just a few minutes. The new Egyptian method relies on salt-attracting membranes and vaporizing heat...

The pubbies need a grand organizing technological vision like Kennedy's man on the moon speech in 1961 or Reagan's star wars speech in 1982. Bill Gates could persuade Donald Trump in about 20 minutes that 10 years of federal spending on 4th generation nuclear reactors and desalination R&D-- or about 18 billion annually would collapse the cost of water desalination and transport thereby making it economically and commercially practical to desalinize seawater on any seacoast in the USA, Mexico and the world --and transport it 1000 miles inland to water commercially competitive crops. This would turn America's deserts green and...

Perth, Australia - Up to a third of Perth's drinking water starts life in the Indian Ocean where it is drawn into an intake pump about 400 metres inland. It is pumped another kilometre into the sprawling, open-plan complex at the Southern Seawater Desalination Plant in Binningup, Western Australia (WA). Here, the seawater goes through a complex five-step filtering process that includes 32,872 reverse osmosis membranes and 18,080 ultra-filtration membranes. About 45 percent of the seawater entering the system gets turned into fresh drinking water that can then be piped out north towards Perth, or even as far as Kalgoorlie...

California is a beautiful state, but its incompetent government has turned it into a national joke—a “meanwhile, in California” meme seems appropriate for whatever’s going on elsewhere, because odds are California is doing something even dumber, like declaring an Uber driver is an employee instead of a private contractor, making laws about your bathroom’s temperature, or banning “ex-gay” reparative therapy. Today, during one of California’s most severe droughts in recent history, we can illustrate like so: The Los Angeles Times ran an editorial in April opposing building more desalination plants like the brand new one opening in Carlsbad, which...

Taking the salt out of seawater helped Israel move from the constant threat of drought to a plentiful supply of water, but Israel has learned that desalination is not the only answer. Ben-Gurion University's Institute for Water Research is deep in Israel's Negev desert and away from the sea. Prof. Jack Gilron, head of the Department of Desalination and Water Treatment, and other researchers here test concepts in desalination to see if they might hold promise for industrial development. Israel has long sought solutions to the threat of drought. Commercial desalination began in the 1970s in the city of Eilat,...

JERUSALEM — At the peak of the drought, Shabi Zvieli, an Israeli gardener, feared for his livelihood. A hefty tax was placed on excessive household water consumption, penalizing families with lawns, swimming pools or leaky pipes. So many of Zvieli’s clients went over to synthetic grass and swapped their seasonal blooms for hardy, indigenous plants more suited to a semiarid climate.

... Today, there is plenty of water in Israel. A lighter version of an old “Israel is drying up” campaign has been dusted off to advertise baby diapers. “The fear has gone,” said Mr. Zvieli, whose customers have gone back to planting flowers. As California and other western areas of the United States grapple with an extreme drought, a revolution has taken place here. A major national effort to desalinate Mediterranean seawater and to recycle wastewater has provided the country with enough water for all its needs, even during severe droughts. More than 50 percent of the water for Israeli...

n a Mediterranean beach 10 miles south of Tel Aviv, Israel, a vast new industrial facility hums around the clock. It is the world’s largest modern seawater desalination plant, providing 20 percent of the water consumed by the country’s households. Built for the Israeli government by Israel Desalination Enterprises, or IDE Technologies, at a cost of around $500 million, it uses a conventional desalination technology called reverse osmosis (RO). Thanks to a series of engineering and materials advances, however, it produces clean water from the sea cheaply and at a scale never before achieved. Worldwide, some 700 million people don’t...

As surely as the hot, dry Santa Ana winds bring blue skies to the coast and wildfires to the hills, severe California droughts bring calls to build desalination plants up and down the seashore. All that ocean water, begging to be converted to fresh and pumped into our pipelines, would solve our water supply problems instantly and permanently, boosters say. In the coming months, the drumbeat will only get louder. That's not only because the current drought is the longest and most severe in memory, but because a $1-billion desalination project scheduled to start operating in Carlsbad this fall will...

Crazy and not-so-crazy ideas for solving the California drought 52 Photos The dried up lake bed of Huntington Lake which is at only 30 percent capacity as a severe drought continues to affect California. MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images California Gov. Jerry Brown has sounded the alarm over the state's historic drought, warning that it will take "unprecedented actions" to solve the crisis.That battle cry has produced a brainstorming session like no other - prompting celebrities, tech gurus, politicians and business leaders to offer a range of innovative and outlandish solutions for easing the dry stretch that is now in its fourth...

Competition to highlight desalination technology By Cheyenne Cope Published: April 9, 2015, 6:54 am Updated: April 9, 2015, 4:50 pm   ALAMOGORDO, N.M. (KRQE) – Desalination is the process removing salt from water. The process is complicated, but the reason for it is simple. New Mexico is running out of fresh water for drinking.“Desalination is real important for this region there is very little freshwater and what little freshwater is available is usually stressed, there’s more demand than there is supply,” said Randy Shaw, facility manager of the Bureau of Reclamation Brackish Groundwater National Desalination and Research Facility.For years there has...

With the Sierra Nevada snowpack at its lowest level since 1950, California Governor Jerry Brown announced last week that he would implement the first mandatory water reductions in state history. But Brown also called on districts to streamline permitting practices for water projects, and to invest in new water infrastructure technologies. Brown’s comments amount to his first vocal support for widespread desalination (or desalinization). “Today we are standing on dry grass where there should be five feet of snow, “Governor Brown said at a press event in the Sierra Nevada mountains. “This historic drought demands unprecedented action. Therefore, I’m issuing an executive order...

Jordan and Israel signed an agreement on 26 February to go ahead with a World Bank-sponsored project to build a desalination plant in the Gulf of Aqaba and a pipeline linking the Red Sea with the Dead Sea. The plant will be built in the southern Jordanian port of Aqaba on the Red Sea and will desalinate water to be shared by Israelis and Palestinians. The brine that is a by-product of the process will be sent north in a 180km pipeline to the Dead Sea. The project will cost around $900m (£584.5m, €803m). It will take nearly three years...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Even in 2015, the New York Times is still pretending that desalination does not exist The New York Times just published this article on California’s water shortage:California Drought Tests History of Endless GrowthA punishing drought is forcing a reconsideration of whether the aspiration of untrammeled growth that has for so long been the state’s engine has run against the limits of nature.April 4, 2015LOS ANGELES — For more than a century, California has been the state where people flocked for a better life — 164,000 square miles of mountains, farmland and coastline, shimmering with ambition and...