6 ms·

Turning desalination waste into a useful resource

heimatau 6y ago
HN community seems to really like desalination. Various innovations seem to hit the FP occasionally. I'll say this to the general sentiment. My 9th grade chemistry teacher say 'your generation will face two major problems: xxxxxx and water'[1]. He's been a sage in my life, retired for about 1.5 decades. I say all this to attempt to say that 'this is refreshing' that this community understands that we are in an impending crisis of water. Onward! :) [1] - I'm a millennium and I won't reveal 'xxxx' because I'm not trying to incite anger but he was correct about 'xxx'.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  xxx = pollution? energy? edit: or a certain political guy?
- andromeduck 6y ago
  My thesis in grade school thesis from ~17 years ago was that the two most important problems to by solved in my lifetime were going to be low cost, low emission and low land use energy production and efficient information processing and communication. I think desal is much less of a problem if we had a cheap, clean, and reliable source of energy to power it such as nuclear. Quality of life is strongly correlated with energy intensity.
  - heimatau 6y ago
    I'm not entirely sure how but in the past two years, I've become a believer in the capitalism structure for the markets and that it's able to solve any given problem (including what you're saying). Capitalism just needs to get nudged into a direction and the solutions will be a product of markets. To elaborate my point, through government subsidies: - American has seen massive production of food (so much that we waste an insane amount every year) - Massive creation with minimal resources (via petrol innovation; even if y'all don't like it, it was an easy win for society and we're living with the second order effects) - Vehicle fuel efficient rise - Green revolution is almost profitable without government subsidies. I'm not an economist but the game theory does seem to playout in such a way, for the past century, to confirm 'we'll find a way, given a nudge in the right direction'.
    - andromeduck 6y ago
      You should check out the Decouple podcast :) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694
    - toiletfuneral 6y ago
      Capital has shown it will not fix climate change but only try and profit on the destruction. If free markets could solve healthcare or the island of plastic in the pacific, it would’ve happened. Literally nothing is getting better while corporate earnings increase, so wake me up when the market figures out how to respond to actual problems, not just automate away labor.
- billfruit 6y ago
  Also another thing I hear a lot of hype about is Atmospheric Water Extraction, but as of now remains longway from being practical at scale.
- umvi 6y ago
  xxx = misinformation
- rbanffy 6y ago
  We don't have a water crisis. We have a clean energy one. With abundant energy we could simply boil sea water to get drinkable water. The biggest problem of the various desalination methods are their energy cost, and this method to reprocess the brine is meant to offset it by extracting commercial value from the desalination residue. While it's great to make desalination commercially viable, we also need to remember our energy needs will not drop. I have the nagging feeling that the "commercial" part is what we'll need to solve if our species is to survive long term. In some matters, whether its commercially viable should not be a concern.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    > With abundant energy we could simply boil sea water to get drinkable water. That still leaves you with either solid salt that needs to be disposed of (preferably, somewhere where it can't eventually leach out into groundwater) or highly concentrated brine which will kill anything near it.
    - philwelch 6y ago
      How much waste salt would we have compared to the amount of salt that we are going out of our way to extract or mine already? I mean, I literally pay money for sea salt at the grocery store.
      - enkid 6y ago
        How much salt do you use in a month? How much water do you drink?
        hansvm 6y ago
        That's not really a fair comparison. There's easily 25x as much water vs salt in the ocean, and a 10x higher fraction of water usage is residential than salt usage. The break-even point you're pointing to is closer to 250:1, not 1:1.
        6y ago
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  xxx = Mass migration? Depends on where you live, it is already happening. And it is sometimes caused by long droughts, actually.
- enkid 6y ago
  Why do the x's keep getting fewer? Is the crisis a lack of x's?
  - heimatau 6y ago
    > Why do the x's keep getting fewer? Is the crisis a lack of x's? Yeah. I ran out of ink.
- klyrs 6y ago
  I've got karma to burn, so I'll come out and address the controversy straight on. xxxx is the rarity of Charizard in Pokemon Go.
stareatgoats 6y ago
> The team also continues to look at the possibility of extracting other, lower-concentration materials from the brine stream, he says, including various metals and other chemicals Lithium from desalination brines seems to be one potential (and promising) such [0], environmentally better in more than one way than the current methods of lithium mining [1]. [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313372304_Towards_lithium_recovery_from_desalination_brines_via_an_integrated_scheme https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313372304_Towards_l... [1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environmen...
- philwelch 6y ago
  You can also extract uranium from seawater, and use it to fuel nuclear reactors, and use the nuclear reactors to power your desalination.
  - enkid 6y ago
    Do you get enough volume for this to work? My intuition would be the levels of Uranium would be low enough that it would not be energy positive. Do you have more information about this process?
    - jbay808 6y ago
      I remember some projects going on at MIT on this topic. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/111821 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/111821
    - 08-15 6y ago
      Energy consumption of reverse osmosis is about 4kWh/t. The byproduct is a ton of brine. Sea water contains about 3ppb Uranium, so our brine contains 6mg of U per ton of fresh water produced. A 1GW nuclear power station consumes about 1t of U per year and produces about 8000GWh of electricity in that time. So we need about 1mg/8kWh. We got 12 times that much. So, it sort of works out. Of course, this assumes a breeder reactor and I pretended that brine is purified uranium. If breeders are commercialized, it might be worth looking into this. Right now, it isn't.
dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
> The researchers have discussed the concept with companies that may be interested in the next step of building a prototype plant to help work out the real-world economics of the process. “One big challenge is cost — both electricity cost and equipment cost,” at this stage, Kumar says. Huh, I thought their big breakthrough would be figuring out how to make this economically viable. It's not a big surprise you can make useful chemicals out of brine, right?
doodlebugging 6y ago
I would also point out that there is an endless stream of oil-field brines and related contaminated waters available for processing should anyone want to have a continuous source of raw material. The industry, in its never-ending quest to monetize waste products or to place the cleanup burdens on someone else (the public usually) is currently trying to get Texas to agree to allow pumping of these highly contaminated wastes into aquifers. Any time you produce oil or gas you always produce some waste water with it. Volumes will vary from well to well depending on a lot of variables unique to a field or a well. This water, or most of it, is not all water from production if I read the article correctly, a lot of it is flow-back water from the fracking process. That means it is not water that would normally be reinjected to help maintain formation pressures to allow continued production. It is water pulled from public and private potable water supplies including, lakes, aquifers, etc. This water should have been reserved for human consumption or for use in farm or ranch maintenance. T Boone Pickens set in motion the whole idea of gathering rights to large volumes of water and selling it to users far from the source. This really set the stage for the massive over-use of public water in fraacking in the Permian Basin and other related areas that saw a large fracking boom. The potable water is gone now, polluted by the O&G industry, and now they want to be able to just put it back where they found it and let God sort out the contaminants. Disgusting really. But, it sounds like a great opportunity for someone operating in the water treatment space to test and validate options for wastewater treatment and for recovering chemical and mineral contaminants from non-potable water.
dzhiurgis 6y ago
There was some research into using it in concrete. I thought perhaps it can be shipped to northern territories that spray brine onto streets in winter to melt snow.
detritus 6y ago
Use it to maintain salinity levels in deep ocean currents, to sustain current circulation patterns and reduce the impact of arctic runoff, impacting weather systems. Or something. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14474-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14474-y
dataflow 6y ago
Tangentially related: there are millions of abandoned oil wells emitting greenhouse gases like methane across the US. Vice had a great video about this last month, but it didn't get much attention here on HN. [1] [2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25516076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25516076 [2] https://welldonefoundation.com/ https://welldonefoundation.com/
- westurner 6y ago
  Is it possible to capture the natural gas leaking from oil wells like we already capture flue gas? Would that be economical?
  - dataflow 6y ago
    I'm guessing it's not economical or they would be doing it, but I don't know.
    - westurner 6y ago
      Maybe 3d-printed containment vessels and Seuss-like pumping toolery? Could geodesic domes solve this problem given market economics and current penalties and incentives?

HN community seems to really like desalination. Various innovations seem to hit the FP occasionally. I'll say this to the general sentiment. My 9th grade chemistry teacher say 'your generation will face two major problems: xxxxxx and water'[1]. He's been a sage in my life, retired for about 1.5 decades. I say all this to attempt to say that 'this is refreshing' that this community understands that we are in an impending crisis of water. Onward! :) [1] - I'm a millennium and I won't reveal 'xxxx' because I'm not trying to incite anger but he was correct about 'xxx'.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago
xxx = pollution? energy? edit: or a certain political guy?
andromeduck 6y ago
My thesis in grade school thesis from ~17 years ago was that the two most important problems to by solved in my lifetime were going to be low cost, low emission and low land use energy production and efficient information processing and communication. I think desal is much less of a problem if we had a cheap, clean, and reliable source of energy to power it such as nuclear. Quality of life is strongly correlated with energy intensity.
- heimatau 6y ago
  I'm not entirely sure how but in the past two years, I've become a believer in the capitalism structure for the markets and that it's able to solve any given problem (including what you're saying). Capitalism just needs to get nudged into a direction and the solutions will be a product of markets. To elaborate my point, through government subsidies: - American has seen massive production of food (so much that we waste an insane amount every year) - Massive creation with minimal resources (via petrol innovation; even if y'all don't like it, it was an easy win for society and we're living with the second order effects) - Vehicle fuel efficient rise - Green revolution is almost profitable without government subsidies. I'm not an economist but the game theory does seem to playout in such a way, for the past century, to confirm 'we'll find a way, given a nudge in the right direction'.
  - andromeduck 6y ago
    You should check out the Decouple podcast :) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694
  - toiletfuneral 6y ago
    Capital has shown it will not fix climate change but only try and profit on the destruction. If free markets could solve healthcare or the island of plastic in the pacific, it would’ve happened. Literally nothing is getting better while corporate earnings increase, so wake me up when the market figures out how to respond to actual problems, not just automate away labor.
billfruit 6y ago
Also another thing I hear a lot of hype about is Atmospheric Water Extraction, but as of now remains longway from being practical at scale.
umvi 6y ago
xxx = misinformation
rbanffy 6y ago
We don't have a water crisis. We have a clean energy one. With abundant energy we could simply boil sea water to get drinkable water. The biggest problem of the various desalination methods are their energy cost, and this method to reprocess the brine is meant to offset it by extracting commercial value from the desalination residue. While it's great to make desalination commercially viable, we also need to remember our energy needs will not drop. I have the nagging feeling that the "commercial" part is what we'll need to solve if our species is to survive long term. In some matters, whether its commercially viable should not be a concern.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > With abundant energy we could simply boil sea water to get drinkable water. That still leaves you with either solid salt that needs to be disposed of (preferably, somewhere where it can't eventually leach out into groundwater) or highly concentrated brine which will kill anything near it.
  - philwelch 6y ago
    How much waste salt would we have compared to the amount of salt that we are going out of our way to extract or mine already? I mean, I literally pay money for sea salt at the grocery store.
    - enkid 6y ago
      How much salt do you use in a month? How much water do you drink?
      - hansvm 6y ago
        That's not really a fair comparison. There's easily 25x as much water vs salt in the ocean, and a 10x higher fraction of water usage is residential than salt usage. The break-even point you're pointing to is closer to 250:1, not 1:1.
        6y ago
inglor_cz 6y ago
xxx = Mass migration? Depends on where you live, it is already happening. And it is sometimes caused by long droughts, actually.
enkid 6y ago
Why do the x's keep getting fewer? Is the crisis a lack of x's?
- heimatau 6y ago
  > Why do the x's keep getting fewer? Is the crisis a lack of x's? Yeah. I ran out of ink.
klyrs 6y ago
I've got karma to burn, so I'll come out and address the controversy straight on. xxxx is the rarity of Charizard in Pokemon Go.

stareatgoats 6y ago

> The team also continues to look at the possibility of extracting other, lower-concentration materials from the brine stream, he says, including various metals and other chemicals Lithium from desalination brines seems to be one potential (and promising) such [0], environmentally better in more than one way than the current methods of lithium mining [1]. [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313372304_Towards_lithium_recovery_from_desalination_brines_via_an_integrated_scheme https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313372304_Towards_l... [1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environmen...

philwelch 6y ago
You can also extract uranium from seawater, and use it to fuel nuclear reactors, and use the nuclear reactors to power your desalination.
- enkid 6y ago
  Do you get enough volume for this to work? My intuition would be the levels of Uranium would be low enough that it would not be energy positive. Do you have more information about this process?
  - jbay808 6y ago
    I remember some projects going on at MIT on this topic. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/111821 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/111821
  - 08-15 6y ago
    Energy consumption of reverse osmosis is about 4kWh/t. The byproduct is a ton of brine. Sea water contains about 3ppb Uranium, so our brine contains 6mg of U per ton of fresh water produced. A 1GW nuclear power station consumes about 1t of U per year and produces about 8000GWh of electricity in that time. So we need about 1mg/8kWh. We got 12 times that much. So, it sort of works out. Of course, this assumes a breeder reactor and I pretended that brine is purified uranium. If breeders are commercialized, it might be worth looking into this. Right now, it isn't.

dj_mc_merlin 6y ago

> The researchers have discussed the concept with companies that may be interested in the next step of building a prototype plant to help work out the real-world economics of the process. “One big challenge is cost — both electricity cost and equipment cost,” at this stage, Kumar says. Huh, I thought their big breakthrough would be figuring out how to make this economically viable. It's not a big surprise you can make useful chemicals out of brine, right?

doodlebugging 6y ago

I would also point out that there is an endless stream of oil-field brines and related contaminated waters available for processing should anyone want to have a continuous source of raw material. The industry, in its never-ending quest to monetize waste products or to place the cleanup burdens on someone else (the public usually) is currently trying to get Texas to agree to allow pumping of these highly contaminated wastes into aquifers. Any time you produce oil or gas you always produce some waste water with it. Volumes will vary from well to well depending on a lot of variables unique to a field or a well. This water, or most of it, is not all water from production if I read the article correctly, a lot of it is flow-back water from the fracking process. That means it is not water that would normally be reinjected to help maintain formation pressures to allow continued production. It is water pulled from public and private potable water supplies including, lakes, aquifers, etc. This water should have been reserved for human consumption or for use in farm or ranch maintenance. T Boone Pickens set in motion the whole idea of gathering rights to large volumes of water and selling it to users far from the source. This really set the stage for the massive over-use of public water in fraacking in the Permian Basin and other related areas that saw a large fracking boom. The potable water is gone now, polluted by the O&G industry, and now they want to be able to just put it back where they found it and let God sort out the contaminants. Disgusting really. But, it sounds like a great opportunity for someone operating in the water treatment space to test and validate options for wastewater treatment and for recovering chemical and mineral contaminants from non-potable water.

dzhiurgis 6y ago

There was some research into using it in concrete. I thought perhaps it can be shipped to northern territories that spray brine onto streets in winter to melt snow.

detritus 6y ago

Use it to maintain salinity levels in deep ocean currents, to sustain current circulation patterns and reduce the impact of arctic runoff, impacting weather systems. Or something. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14474-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14474-y

dataflow 6y ago

Tangentially related: there are millions of abandoned oil wells emitting greenhouse gases like methane across the US. Vice had a great video about this last month, but it didn't get much attention here on HN. [1] [2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25516076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25516076 [2] https://welldonefoundation.com/ https://welldonefoundation.com/

westurner 6y ago
Is it possible to capture the natural gas leaking from oil wells like we already capture flue gas? Would that be economical?
- dataflow 6y ago
  I'm guessing it's not economical or they would be doing it, but I don't know.
  - westurner 6y ago
    Maybe 3d-printed containment vessels and Seuss-like pumping toolery? Could geodesic domes solve this problem given market economics and current penalties and incentives?