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I can assure you there is plenty of water. There are floods in lots of places every year. The oceans are full of water that for just 5kWh we can desalinate
by londons_explore 9mo ago
I can assure you there is plenty of water. There are floods in lots of places every year. The oceans are full of water that for just 5kWh we can desalinate 250 gallons.
The problem is that the water and energy aren't where the users want it to be.
But pipes are relatively cheap - if humanity cared enough, we could build pipes to distribute the plentiful water everywhere.
But it turns out the people without much water tend to be in very poor places and warzones where there isn't much appetite for spending money on pipes.
- pfdietz 9mo agoThere are also impediments to the economically rational allocation of water. Look at California for a prime example of this.
- calvinmorrison 9mo agotheres no drought in california. if we wanted to tomorrow we could stop it. its like complaining you are sweaty after working out
- bryanlarsen 9mo agoPedantically, you're correct. There's been drought in California for the previous 24 years, but this year there isn't one.
- rationalist 9mo ago> allocation of water I thought the GP was referring to the water allocated to farming.
- ajross 9mo ago> theres no drought in california. CA is not in a drought right now. CA has been in conditions of persistent drought, with no more than a year or two of respite, for two decades. The last sustained period of sustained at-or-above-desired-level precipitation ended in 2007. As always, Wikipedia explains this well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_in_California Your logic amounts to "I'm not poor because I just got paid! Let's go to the bar tonight!"
- calvinmorrison 9mo agoMy logic is "OH NO I KEEP HITTING MYSELF IN THE HEAD WITH A RUSTY POKER WHY DO I KEEP BLEEDING!" If we dont want a drought, stop messing with the water supply. "Much of the water used in California comes from the Colorado River. By usage, ~79% of the river goes to crop irrigation (70% of which is cattle feed), ~13% to residential water usage, ~4% for commercial use, and ~4% for thermal power plants"
- seanmcdirmid 9mo ago> If we dont want a drought, stop messing with the water supply. How is that different from "if you don't want drought, don't use water for most things"? Yes, we could curtail agriculture, power generation, etc..., but those all have their own problems.
- ajross 9mo agoSome pedantry first: you're describing "water shortage", which is a resource management issue, and not "drought", which is purely a precipitation thing. But yes: you need to manage resources if we want to live in the environment. The way you don't do that is by announcing "there is no drought in california" and then proceeding to use the water falling today without recognizing that we're almost certainly still in a period of sustained drought and that such consumption isn't any more sustainable in the current La Niña cycle than it was last year or next.
- seanmcdirmid 9mo agoYes, all shortages can be solved by using less of the resource that we have a shortage of. But that’s like telling a poor person to spend less money if you can’t tell them to make more money. Drought is simply a way of saying less water came from the sky than was expected. Obviously if less water comes for an extended period of time, you just call it the new normal and stop calling it a drought.
- 9mo ago
- tdeck 9mo agoThe "drought vs no drought" conversation hides the fact that a significant percentage of the water in the central valley aquifer has been pumped out for agriculture and other uses. Even if we stopped that tomorrow it would not recharge quickly, and the surface water is not sufficient for current demand.
- deepdarkforest 9mo agoYes 250 gallons can save a lot of people from dying of thirst but have you considered that with that same 5kwh we can also produce 1 tiktok ai slop video of the queen boxing with mike tyson?
- mycall 9mo agoSaudi Arabia has an incredible water piping system because they are rich. The poor cannot do that.
- mgaunard 9mo agoSaudi Arabia uses more than half of the petrol they extract on desalination. It's not sustainable and once it runs out, the country will go back to being a poor desert.
- louthy 9mo agoThere’s a big glowy thing in the sky that they can use to extract energy also. They have a lot of that energy too
- mycall 9mo agoOne estimate focused specifically on oil burned for desalination puts Saudi Arabia at about 300,000 barrels per day used for desalination. Separately, a reputable energy sector overview notes desalination is about 6% of Saudi Arabia’s electricity consumption (in 2020) [0] [1], which is nowhere near implying over half of extracted petroleum. 300,000 ÷ 9,500,000 ≈ 3.2% of crude production. [0] https://www.ifri.org/en/studies/geopolitics-seawater-desalination https://www.ifri.org/en/studies/geopolitics-seawater-desalin... [1] https://www.eia.gov/international/content/analysis/countries_long/Saudi_Arabia/pdf/Saudi-Arabia.pdf https://www.eia.gov/international/content/analysis/countries...
- londons_explore 9mo agoSome older and less efficient desalination plants directly burn oil/coal/gas to desalinate water, so no electricity is involved. That is perhaps the source of the discrepancy. With cheap oil, there is little financial incentive to upgrade these plants. Remember the government need not 'pay' market price for this oil - they can prop the market up by restricting oil exports whilst simultaneously using oil internally at production cost.
- mgaunard 9mo ago
- estearum 9mo agoIn other words: a crisis.
- embedding-shape 9mo agoI don't think UN is sounding the alarm of the planet running out of water all of a sudden, even they understand we have huge oceans that aren't going anywhere. The report itself (https://collections.unu.edu/eserv/UNU:10445/Global_Water_Bankruptcy_Report__2026_.pdf https://collections.unu.edu/eserv/UNU:10445/Global_Water_Ban...) does actually talk about a lot of the background, why's and how we can start addressing it, in a very fleshed out form + an executive summary at page 13.
- omgJustTest 9mo agoHe's also not saying the world is running out of water or clean drinking water... etc.
- globular-toast 9mo ago> But it turns out the people without much water tend to be in very poor places Hmm... I wonder why those places are poor.
- omgJustTest 9mo agoIf you have references for these I would appreciate what you can find. In general I believe abundance of resources exist in modern society and that there is less and less consideration for the lives of others, not in the "generational trauma" sense, but in the real basics of food, water and shelter. A lot of people point to hard problems such as the "food miles problem"[1] but are, in many cases, conflicts that drive scarcity for one purpose or another. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_miles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_miles
- sigwinch 9mo ago5-10 kWh per cubic meter pumped to Riyadh makes sense if you include the older process which requires oil to be burned to heat water first. Per capita, maybe Nicaragua can afford that. There are 65 countries poorer than Nicaragua.
- strangescript 9mo agoSame with food. Plenty of food, just not where its needed.
- jonway 9mo agowell for food, its that "where its needed" is somewhere really specific: Plenty of food, just not paid for.
- athrowaway3z 9mo agoIt's as if they choose the word bankruptcy for a reason.
- water-data-dude 9mo agoOh boy, lemme tell you: water management is one of those things that's More Difficult Than It Seems. I'm going to recommend Cadillac Desert, which is by far the most entertaining and readable book on water. It goes into the history of water in the western US, a dry region that's very dependent on the Colorado River. The American West isn't a poor, war-torn area, and a LOT of money has been spent on various projects - but water is still a serious issue. Things like "big pipelines to move water around" have been tried, but they're enormously expensive, and they don't really put as much of a dent in the problem as you'd imagine. Dams can store some excess water, but they cause problems of their own (which is why we don't build as many, and are getting rid of dams we don't need), and they're a bandaid at best. There's not a good solution to "how do we move a TON of water around", at least not now.
- repelsteeltje 9mo agoIndeed, it's easy to overestimate the capacity of a large tube and underestimate that of a small river.
- api 9mo agoIsn’t the problem ultimately that water is heavy and it takes a lot of power to pump it and that’s expensive? You can pump water faster through a big tube but then you need big pumps and tons of electricity. If it’s going uphill that’s going to be serious power.
- Loughla 9mo ago1 ton of water is only 240 gallons. So if we're talking a tube that is 4 feet in diameter and 10 miles long, that's 12.5 million gallons, or 52100 tons (or 104,000,000 pounds). While it wouldn't take that much to move that if your pushing downhill, I have to imagine the energy cost would be AMAZING moving it uphill at all. But also fluid dynamics is the only college course I dropped because it was fucking witchcraft, so who knows.
- 9mo ago
- repelsteeltje 9mo agoA very efficient way to preserve large amounts of potable water for longer periods has traditionally been: glaciers in mountains. Climate change doesn't make water disappear but amplifies shortages as well as surplus. In many (previously) habitable parts of the world that change drives the price of water (and food mitigation) significant enough to render those areas uninhabitable. For example in Syria, Afghanistan and Iran this is a cause of poverty and conflict.
- kiba 9mo agoI assured you that water usage can be mismanaged even with plenty of pipes and water infrastructure.
- rafale 9mo agoSalt is engineers' kryotonite.
- i_cannot_hack 9mo agoWhat are your credentials on this topic? You speak with a lot of certainty, but fail to acknowledge any nuance that would complicate you world view, such that a lot of water shortages happen also in developed and peaceful regions (as it mentioned in the article). The people without much water are not only in very poor places and warzones, unless you are specifically referring to the people dying due to lack of water. How would your proposed solution of "the oceans are full of water, just desalinate" affect affordability in agriculture and industry? I assume it would require vast investments in infrastructure that has not been built and is not even planned to be built, what would be required for such an infrastructure to be put in place and what challenges need to be overcome? Are there ecological concerns with the required scale of the operation (such as massive brine runoff at the coast)? In short, you say "I can assure you there is plenty of water", but is that assurance coming from actual knowledge in the area at hand, or is it misplaced confidence due to dodging any inherent complexity before reaching your conclusion?
- GeoAtreides 9mo ago> What are your credentials on this topic? OP has 38K karma; some people take it as a signal of valuable contributions to HN, other people understand it's signal of throwing everything at the wall hoping something sticks.
- seec 9mo agoHilariously, you got downvoted. Of course, HN is a popularity contest just like any other social media or social group for that matter. Truth doesn't matter that much for most people, they just want to belong with a tribe even if they need to come up or agree with a lot of bullshit along the way. Thankfully there are people who don't care too much and they push the envelope.
- cogman10 9mo agoThe problem is that while there is a lot of water available, more than our needs, we do not use water efficiently. In particular, food production is horribly wasteful with water. Even small farms will dump 100s of gallons of water per minute (yes minute) onto the ground to ultimately be washed away or evaporated. What that means is that the piping to get enough water everywhere is enormous. The global usage was 2 quadrillion gallons of water. [1] There are ways to use water much much more efficiently, but they are expensive to implement. Hydroponics can grow a lot of food, but it requires a lot of power and infrastructure to get setup. [1] https://www.htt.io/learning-center/water-usage-in-the-agricultural-industry https://www.htt.io/learning-center/water-usage-in-the-agricu...
- charles_f 9mo agoIt's fun that desalination is always the first thing to pop up as an answer to that, and never water usage reduction
- arter45 9mo agoIt's not just pipes. Filtering (from bacteria, pollution, ...) is another issue, and it also affects floods (floods are not periodic, so you have to store water, but storing water for a long term is not always safe). Even desalination costs are not trivial in all countries. Let's say 1 kWh = 50 gallons. UN estimates talk about at least 50 gallons/day per person. According to Wikipedia [1], the 2023 average electricity consumption in Burkina Faso was 0.14 MWh (=140 kWh) a year per person. Then there's gravity. If your main source of water comes from the sea, you have to pull water from a lower altitude to a higher altitude, which means you are going against gravity, which means you need pumps. Other energy is required. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
- jjk166 9mo ago> Let's say 1 kWh = 50 gallons. UN estimates talk about at least 50 gallons/day per person. The energy cost of desalination is to convert sea water into freshwater. A person utilizes lots of water per day, but that water doesn't magically disappear, nor get turned back into sea water. Treating wastewater takes about 1 kwh per 1000 gallons, or about .05 kwh per person per day which is 13% of the per capita electricity consumption of Burkina Faso. Desalination and long range transport are necessary only for what little is irrecoverably lost due to for example evaporation, and for offsetting the deficit from normal freshwater sources due to over-consumption.
- dahart 9mo ago> for just 5kWh we can desalinate 250 gallons … pipes are relatively cheap I live 1500km from the ocean at 1500m altitude with 3 million other people in a place that’s neither poor nor a war zone. Ignoring the cost of pipes for a minute (which is probably not small), googling the energy required to get 250 gallons (or about 1 cubic meter) of water from there to here, I get at least 140kWh [1], assuming a straight shot and no ups and downs along the way. If that cubic meter is distributed to 5 households per day (so ~30kWh / household), which is less water than the average household uses [2] but might be reasonable for drinking water needs, we’d still probably be doubling the energy requirement for the entire region from ~30kWh per household [3] to ~60kWh. And the current ~30kWh usage is somewhat elastic and reducible, where the energy to pump water is not. [1] (my calculation: large pipeline, 112MJ * 3<altitude> * 1.5<distance> ~= 140kWh) https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-would-it-cost-to-pump-1-m3-of-sea-water-to-1000-km-inland-at-500-m-altitude https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-would-it-cost-to-pump-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U.S._and_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U... [3] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricity-use-in-homes.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...
- arbitrary_name 9mo agoSorry but you have not done the math on the energy costs too pump water from the ocean. Why on earth is this the top post?
- quickthrowman 9mo ago> But pipes are relatively cheap - if humanity cared enough, we could build pipes to distribute the plentiful water everywhere. Once you start moving water uphill, it becomes vastly more expensive. It takes a lot of power to move water uphill.
- jandrewrogers 9mo agoA core piece of wisdom in chemical engineering is that anything is possible with sufficient energy. Fresh water being available in any particular part of the globe is the kind of classic thermal (read: energy) and mass transport problem that chemical engineering is all about. Increasing energy production buys a lot of optionality when solving these kinds of physical world problems. It allows you to solve problems by throwing energy at them. It may not always be the most theoretically efficient solution, like throwing hardware at software performance problems, but it may be the only practical solution. For this reason, it makes sense to build as much power generation capacity as possible even it isn't entirely clear what it will be used for. The inability of the developed world to massively scale power generation is the true environmental failure but people don't grok second-order effects.
- troyvit 9mo agoThe onion echoes your sentiments: https://theonion.com/report-every-place-on-earth-has-wrong-amount-of-water-1851544516/ https://theonion.com/report-every-place-on-earth-has-wrong-a... They actually scooped the UN by over a year :)