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Can we start to talk about massive desalination projects? The Israelis seem to have made it work.[1] [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-prov

by dimal 5y ago

Can we start to talk about massive desalination projects? The Israelis seem to have made it work.[1] [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-desalination-era-is-here/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the...

throwawaysea 5y ago
It’s expensive to build and takes time, but is feasible especially if we have nuclear energy to meet increased demands. Sam Diego built a giant desalination plant a few years ago and hoped it would supply more of the city’s needs, but it is only good for about 7% of their demand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsbad_Desalination_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsba...). California the state would need a huge number of these.
- rolleiflex 5y ago
  The issue with these is that the other side of the output is hyper-salty brine, which kills pretty much any life it encounters, and that brine does get dumped to the ocean. The ocean has more than enough capacity to absorb the hit, but it still damages the ecosystem at the exit point nevertheless. Israel and Saudi Arabia do it because, well, if they don’t their country pretty much ceases to exist, but it’s much better cost/performance ratio to focus on whatever water California has before we go there. It’s also that even the most water-conscious agriculture practice uses obnoxious amounts of water just because of the sheer size of land involved. Supplying that kind of water via desalination plants pretty much by definition means having done all prior optimisations to the max before tapping into that stream. If you’re interested in agriculture from a layman’s perspective, I recommend Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime Video, where Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear figures out how to farm right, long way round.
  - simfree 5y ago
    Dilute it with more sea water and send it to the Salton Sea. This would improve water quality in the Salton Sea while detaining the brine.
rahimnathwani 5y ago
Have California farmers expressed interest in funding such projects?
- apcragg 5y ago
  Given how many of them receive absurdly subsidized water from the Bureau of Reclamation, I'm going to say no. Take Arizona, where the already subsidized (though not nearly as much as some BOR water projects) cost is ~$200 per Acre-foot from the Colorado River (via the Central Arizona Project) compared to the $2200 per Acre-foot price of Desalination water.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Farms in the Central Valley Project are paying < $20 per acre foot because the contracts were negotiated sixty years ago and not indexed to inflation.
    - apcragg 5y ago
      Yeah and on top of that many of them had their loan interest federally subsidized to build out their private infrastructure. The original 160 acre limit per farm of the 1902 Reclamation Act at least made sense in this context. Despite that, many of the multi-millionaire farmers flaunt that rule entirely even with it being raised to 960 acres in 1982.
apcragg 5y ago
Desalination plants are vastly more expensive than current water conservation solutions. Solving a problem with tech is sexy, especially on HN, but simple programs like canal lining and drip irrigation are much cost effective for now. It's not a forever solution, but conserving water resources will take a patchwork of half-measures and incremental progress. There does not appear to be a silver bullet.
- enraged_camel 5y ago
  The other problem with desalination is pollution. Brine, for example, needs to be released somewhere.
  - azinman2 5y ago
    Could it be turned into table salt?
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      I doubt there is that much demand for table salt. Maybe it could be used to deice roads in areas that have freezing weather in the wintertime, now most places use mined salt for that.
      - tamaharbor 5y ago
        The exhaust muffler industry would love that.
    - bbarnett 5y ago
      Sea salt is filled with mondo micro-plastic particles, so I think this would be that, plus other "stuff" thrown in. EG, leakage/contaminants from the desalination process. The best table salt we can currently get, it stuff mined from old oceans. No contaminants, no plastic, etc. For example, Windsor has huge mines in rural Windsor, ON, Canada.. and doesn't just supply table salt, but road salt, water softener salt, etc, the supply has been used for 100 years, sold internationally, and shows no sign of exhaustion... from one old-sea underground deposit. (There's plenty of table salt, no shortages...)
blooalien 5y ago
I been seein' a lotta little blurbs in my various science feeds about recent fairly shocking improvements in both cost and effectiveness of some really interesting new desalination methods, so it's absolutely a space to keep an eye on for interesting developments. Improvements also in solar power and battery tech, clean fuels, safe/clean(ish?) nuclear, and a bunch of other really exciting stuff invented lately. Leaps and bounds… Still, much of that is all still "in the lab" as it were, so we can't expect to see the benefits of some of that for years (or even decades?) maybe. Still. All of that good stuff happening in science should not be ignored. At least some humans are still working toward the goal of trying to avoid total disaster.
resonantjacket5 5y ago
Desalinations projects would not solve the issue. The 'water crisis' is really an economic problem with the underpricing of water leading to suboptimal practices not a engineering one. Even if desalination worked moderately -- Californian farmers would end up farming more rice and walnut trees and you'd end up in the same situation.
- adventured 5y ago
  Increasing the price of water would not work effectively either. Almonds have high margins and more pricing power than most crops. To say nothing of the obnoxious fact that around 2/3 of the US almond crop is exported (ie California is depleting their water supply to line the pockets of a billionaire almond cartel and exporting their scarce water resources in the process). And even if the rich almond growers could somehow afford dramatically higher water prices, it still doesn't make sense to allow them to consume so much of California's water - water which is a critical, scarce public good being converted to very narrow private wealth. The correct solution is to ban the growing of all almond, pistachio and walnut crops in California. The minimum they should do is ban the export of those crops, although that is likely still not enough.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    IDK. I love roasted almonds as a snack but they are pretty expensive. If they went much higher I'd cut back or stop buying them. As it is I only buy them on sale.
  - resonantjacket5 5y ago
    Increasing the price of water would of course work. There is nothing inherently special about water. What is special is how water has been underpriced for so long as well as the use of aquifers through wells temporarily 'increasing the supply' until they run out. Banning almonds, pistachos, walnut crops etc... is really just an indirect way of increasing the price of water for farmers. I've heard other suggestions to mandate more conservative water practices aka drip irrigation and ban water hungry crops and sure that kinda works -- but this is exactly what higher prices is supposed to fix already. There is no magical solution to the now permanent decreased water per year, it's not a 'temporary drought' anymore. Eventually the price of water will be set back to normal either through dollar cost or with lottery random shortages as the agency is currently forced to do.
dehrmann 5y ago
I doubt that desalination would work at agriculture scale because most of the fields and orchards are too far away from the ocean, and the water is just too expensive. That said, seeing water prices from desalination, I'm very frustrated California wants me to take a shorter showers when I would very happily pay an extra 50 cents for that long shower.
- IvyMike 5y ago
  One thing you could do is desalinate water in Los Angeles, and thus keep the water in the central valley rather than pumping it over the grapevine. I'm pretty sure agricultural use of water in CA dwarves urban use, so maybe it wouldn't make that much of a difference. (Maybe someone can find actual numbers, sorry I can't right now.)
  - apcragg 5y ago
    I bet this is the first use of large scale desalination. It already takes huge amounts of power to pump the water over the mountains to L.A. so reducing that load could make the desalination power requirements more palatable.
- glennvtx 5y ago
  You cannot use the desalinated water in this way, because the excess salt will build up in and destroy the soils fertility. Sounds just like the kind of thing government would mandate, further destroying the environment.
Animats 5y ago
California has huge desalinization plants.[1] 11 in operation now, more being built. Water price at output is US$0.005/gal. But that's $1630 for an acre/foot, very expensive for agriculture. [1] https://www.carlsbaddesal.com/ https://www.carlsbaddesal.com/
trimbo 5y ago
How much power is required to pump so much water from sea level to the elevation and distance of the Central Valley? Just as one example, Tulare is at 300 ft, ~100 mi from the ocean.
beej71 5y ago
If you wanted to replace all of California's water consumption with desal you'd need thousands of plants. But even 10% of thousands of plants is a lot.

by dimal 5y ago

throwawaysea 5y ago

It’s expensive to build and takes time, but is feasible especially if we have nuclear energy to meet increased demands. Sam Diego built a giant desalination plant a few years ago and hoped it would supply more of the city’s needs, but it is only good for about 7% of their demand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsbad_Desalination_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsba...). California the state would need a huge number of these.

rolleiflex 5y ago
The issue with these is that the other side of the output is hyper-salty brine, which kills pretty much any life it encounters, and that brine does get dumped to the ocean. The ocean has more than enough capacity to absorb the hit, but it still damages the ecosystem at the exit point nevertheless. Israel and Saudi Arabia do it because, well, if they don’t their country pretty much ceases to exist, but it’s much better cost/performance ratio to focus on whatever water California has before we go there. It’s also that even the most water-conscious agriculture practice uses obnoxious amounts of water just because of the sheer size of land involved. Supplying that kind of water via desalination plants pretty much by definition means having done all prior optimisations to the max before tapping into that stream. If you’re interested in agriculture from a layman’s perspective, I recommend Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime Video, where Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear figures out how to farm right, long way round.
- simfree 5y ago
  Dilute it with more sea water and send it to the Salton Sea. This would improve water quality in the Salton Sea while detaining the brine.

rahimnathwani 5y ago

Have California farmers expressed interest in funding such projects?

apcragg 5y ago
Given how many of them receive absurdly subsidized water from the Bureau of Reclamation, I'm going to say no. Take Arizona, where the already subsidized (though not nearly as much as some BOR water projects) cost is ~$200 per Acre-foot from the Colorado River (via the Central Arizona Project) compared to the $2200 per Acre-foot price of Desalination water.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Farms in the Central Valley Project are paying < $20 per acre foot because the contracts were negotiated sixty years ago and not indexed to inflation.
  - apcragg 5y ago
    Yeah and on top of that many of them had their loan interest federally subsidized to build out their private infrastructure. The original 160 acre limit per farm of the 1902 Reclamation Act at least made sense in this context. Despite that, many of the multi-millionaire farmers flaunt that rule entirely even with it being raised to 960 acres in 1982.

apcragg 5y ago

Desalination plants are vastly more expensive than current water conservation solutions. Solving a problem with tech is sexy, especially on HN, but simple programs like canal lining and drip irrigation are much cost effective for now. It's not a forever solution, but conserving water resources will take a patchwork of half-measures and incremental progress. There does not appear to be a silver bullet.

enraged_camel 5y ago
The other problem with desalination is pollution. Brine, for example, needs to be released somewhere.
- azinman2 5y ago
  Could it be turned into table salt?
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    I doubt there is that much demand for table salt. Maybe it could be used to deice roads in areas that have freezing weather in the wintertime, now most places use mined salt for that.
    - tamaharbor 5y ago
      The exhaust muffler industry would love that.
  - bbarnett 5y ago
    Sea salt is filled with mondo micro-plastic particles, so I think this would be that, plus other "stuff" thrown in. EG, leakage/contaminants from the desalination process. The best table salt we can currently get, it stuff mined from old oceans. No contaminants, no plastic, etc. For example, Windsor has huge mines in rural Windsor, ON, Canada.. and doesn't just supply table salt, but road salt, water softener salt, etc, the supply has been used for 100 years, sold internationally, and shows no sign of exhaustion... from one old-sea underground deposit. (There's plenty of table salt, no shortages...)

blooalien 5y ago

I been seein' a lotta little blurbs in my various science feeds about recent fairly shocking improvements in both cost and effectiveness of some really interesting new desalination methods, so it's absolutely a space to keep an eye on for interesting developments. Improvements also in solar power and battery tech, clean fuels, safe/clean(ish?) nuclear, and a bunch of other really exciting stuff invented lately. Leaps and bounds… Still, much of that is all still "in the lab" as it were, so we can't expect to see the benefits of some of that for years (or even decades?) maybe. Still. All of that good stuff happening in science should not be ignored. At least some humans are still working toward the goal of trying to avoid total disaster.

resonantjacket5 5y ago

Desalinations projects would not solve the issue. The 'water crisis' is really an economic problem with the underpricing of water leading to suboptimal practices not a engineering one. Even if desalination worked moderately -- Californian farmers would end up farming more rice and walnut trees and you'd end up in the same situation.

adventured 5y ago
Increasing the price of water would not work effectively either. Almonds have high margins and more pricing power than most crops. To say nothing of the obnoxious fact that around 2/3 of the US almond crop is exported (ie California is depleting their water supply to line the pockets of a billionaire almond cartel and exporting their scarce water resources in the process). And even if the rich almond growers could somehow afford dramatically higher water prices, it still doesn't make sense to allow them to consume so much of California's water - water which is a critical, scarce public good being converted to very narrow private wealth. The correct solution is to ban the growing of all almond, pistachio and walnut crops in California. The minimum they should do is ban the export of those crops, although that is likely still not enough.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  IDK. I love roasted almonds as a snack but they are pretty expensive. If they went much higher I'd cut back or stop buying them. As it is I only buy them on sale.
- resonantjacket5 5y ago
  Increasing the price of water would of course work. There is nothing inherently special about water. What is special is how water has been underpriced for so long as well as the use of aquifers through wells temporarily 'increasing the supply' until they run out. Banning almonds, pistachos, walnut crops etc... is really just an indirect way of increasing the price of water for farmers. I've heard other suggestions to mandate more conservative water practices aka drip irrigation and ban water hungry crops and sure that kinda works -- but this is exactly what higher prices is supposed to fix already. There is no magical solution to the now permanent decreased water per year, it's not a 'temporary drought' anymore. Eventually the price of water will be set back to normal either through dollar cost or with lottery random shortages as the agency is currently forced to do.

dehrmann 5y ago

I doubt that desalination would work at agriculture scale because most of the fields and orchards are too far away from the ocean, and the water is just too expensive. That said, seeing water prices from desalination, I'm very frustrated California wants me to take a shorter showers when I would very happily pay an extra 50 cents for that long shower.

IvyMike 5y ago
One thing you could do is desalinate water in Los Angeles, and thus keep the water in the central valley rather than pumping it over the grapevine. I'm pretty sure agricultural use of water in CA dwarves urban use, so maybe it wouldn't make that much of a difference. (Maybe someone can find actual numbers, sorry I can't right now.)
- apcragg 5y ago
  I bet this is the first use of large scale desalination. It already takes huge amounts of power to pump the water over the mountains to L.A. so reducing that load could make the desalination power requirements more palatable.
glennvtx 5y ago
You cannot use the desalinated water in this way, because the excess salt will build up in and destroy the soils fertility. Sounds just like the kind of thing government would mandate, further destroying the environment.

Animats 5y ago

California has huge desalinization plants.[1] 11 in operation now, more being built. Water price at output is US$0.005/gal. But that's $1630 for an acre/foot, very expensive for agriculture. [1] https://www.carlsbaddesal.com/ https://www.carlsbaddesal.com/

trimbo 5y ago

How much power is required to pump so much water from sea level to the elevation and distance of the Central Valley? Just as one example, Tulare is at 300 ft, ~100 mi from the ocean.

beej71 5y ago

If you wanted to replace all of California's water consumption with desal you'd need thousands of plants. But even 10% of thousands of plants is a lot.