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New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste
- fhdkweig 5mo agoThis appears to be the same New Rochester article as 4 days ago with 20 comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48349507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48349507
- kaonwarb 5mo agoThis reads like hyperbole: > The brine byproduct wreaks havoc on sea life when it’s deposited back into the ocean by raising the salt level and lowering oxygen in the water. Managing return of concentrated brine should be entirely tractable in the literal ocean.
- rconti 5mo agoSure, but typically desalination plants are located in a single physical place, so a discharge pipe dumping brine 24x7 is bad for all of the things around it, as the local concentration is extremely high.
- joshred 5mo agoSeems like you could run a long perforated tube to diminish that effect.
- 01100011 5mo agoAnd it doesn't even need to be a rigid pipe. A flexible pipe made out of, say, waterproof fabric, could be cheaply made to extend miles while remaining open due to the pressure of the water pumped into it.
- dylan604 5mo agoThings left underwater tend to collect things on it which would make this much less porous over time.
- dylan604 5mo agoI liked the idea of loading it up on a ship that sails out releasing as it goes out and back. Make it solar powered or even go old school with literal sails.
- sgc 5mo agoI thought they tend to pipe far out and discharge as far below the surface as possible, since there is a lot of surface life and it is less damaging this way. Ships (with long submerged pipes) would be prone to weather events and generally less reliable than an installed pipe. Perforation would be prone to clogging from build up so a nonstarter I would expect. Adding flex tubing and a relocation robot would be a maintenance headache as well. Not sure there is an easy optimization.
- dylan604 5mo agoShips wouldn't need a long submerged pipe. It'd just need a small hole like a bilge drain or maybe a live well on a fishing boat. Just let the boat cruise around slowly draining back into the ocean. As for surface life, I'm no oceanographer, but is that really the most vulnerable place? The surface is where fresh water rain meets the ocean, so that would dilute the salinity during storms. However, there's nothing to say that another pump couldn't be pulling from the ocean and mixing the brine into that so it's diluted before and not just pouring brine straight into the ocean
- sgc 5mo agoI think your sense of scale is off. 90% of sea life is on the surface. 0.029% of ocean water is replenished from rainfall annually. Desalination concentrates are absolutely toxic to life. The current daily volume of brine discharge would require more than half the tankers in the world to be filled and discharged every single day. They would of course not last long with such a routine.
- dylan604 5mo agoIs that a total for all of the oceans? I understand that as a whole, rainfall is literally but a drop in the ocean. However, confined just to the local area where the rain is falling, the area’s salinity has to change. Just like adding the the desalinated brine is a minuscule amount compared to the whole ocean, it has large effect locally. Regardless, it is totally possible to reintroduce the brine back to the ocean in a way to not be a shock to the local area. We have just chosen to make it harder on ourselves for some illogical reason.
- dieselgate 5mo agoI wonder what the linear diffusion gradient would look like for that. Like the perforated garden hoses or whatever for soaking soil. Aquatic organisms grow so quick though very curious on the constraints for something like this.
- XorNot 5mo agoThe short version is brine is weird: it's surprisingly resistant to diffusing and tends to flow more like an immisicible fluid. So you have to put quite a lot of effort into getting it to actually disperse rather then just fall to the seafloor.
- fc417fc802 5mo agoThat's silly, you'd mechanically mix it with seawater rather than wait for it to diffuse. The concern would be the volume of desalinated water extracted from the local region versus the flux from ocean current. As long as that ratio is acceptable there won't be any long term problem. Alternatively, in the absence of sensible regulations a cutthroat operator devoid of ethics constructs a plant that dumps concentrated brine in the immediate vicinity because that's the cheapest approach. Then reactionary elements raise talking points about environmental damage and pretend that it's a difficult problem to solve. Business as usual.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- dizhn 5mo agoThen they should become salt producers too. Win win (win).
- wolfi1 5mo agodepends of course, how easy does the brine dissolve, how long does it take that it is so diluted that it can't do any harm, without that information it's not easy to tell
- dylan604 5mo agoThese are often built near shallower parts along the coast where changes are more pronounced.
- boxed 5mo agoI mean.. we really want to permanently desalinate the ocean somewhat too so putting the brine back seems kinda stupid. Put it on land, let it dry, sell some as table salt and dump the rest into abandoned mines.
- wizzwizz4 5mo agoExcellent idea! The largest abandoned mines I'm aware of are salt mines, which… hang on.
- boxed 5mo agoYea, that's one of the problems. We're literally digging up salt AND the mountains are being eroded to add more salt. The Earth is getting anti-terraformed and we're speeding it up. (Although obviously the fossil fuel situation is a much closer and worse problem)
- gausswho 5mo agoIt kinda depends where it's deposited, right? The expected AMOC collapse is fundamentally about salt imbalance.
- bilsbie 5mo agoThe brine thing is just a way to shut down conversation and let people feel superior for claiming there are no solutions to our problems except to reduce our standard of living. It’s obvious you can safely put salt back into the ocean with enough dilution. I bet a middle schooler could design a system to do it.
- rplnt 5mo agoYeah, middle schooler with middle school understanding can design anything. There are plenty of middle school solutions in the comments around. The problem is when they meet real world, beyond their high school level understanding of the issue.
- ajb 5mo agoThere is a fundamental minimum amount of energy needed to desalinate: you can't take less energy to do it,than you could gain back (from osmotic pressure) if you allowed the desalinated water to expand a cylinder containing the residual brine. This is large. This paper is a thermal method, so it doesn't have an electricity input, but to justify their efficiency claim, they should really compare against what you could do by using the same surface area for solar panels, driving a conventional setup. My (limited) understanding is that conventional reverse osmosis is not far from the theoretical optimum, energy-wise, the main difficulties being operational (the membranes need declogging). And of course RO is more expensive than rain. This paper is interesting, however, in directly producing crystalline salt, which is lower volume than brine and easier to dispose of, maybe even valuable.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- CuriouslyC 5mo agoIf this can be applied to mine effluent, you could replace the maybe with most certainly. Sulfuric acid effluent lakes leech all sorts of valuable metals out of the ground.
- xyzzyz 5mo agoBrine is very easy to dispose of: you just pump it back to where it came from. Solid crystalline salt, on the other hand, is a hassle.
- lightedman 5mo ago"Solid crystalline salt, on the other hand, is a hassle." Just make prettier-than-Himalayan salt lamps out of it and sell it to hippies. Easy solution.
- rapnie 5mo agoThat only shifts the problem. Now we need an increased supply of hippies that are hard to come by in a low hippie-tolerant environment.
- doublerabbit 5mo agoWhat about removing oil from water, have we conquered that yet?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- mkl 5mo ago> without waste ...except for the huge piles of salt. If the salt was not waste, surely people would already be extracting it from the brine and the existing methods would also be "without waste".
- eimrine 5mo agoPersian Gulf has 20% more salt in water because of the humans which are throwing the oversalinated waste back into the sea. Dehidrated salt may be a big deal for some areas because of no waste into input.
- Jblx2 5mo ago>Persian Gulf has 20% more salt in water because of the humans I would like to read more about this from an authoritative source.
- tdb7893 5mo agoThrough the magic of Googling "Persian Gulf salinity" it seems like it's more that it's a shallow Gulf in a dry area so it has significant evaporation. Desalination does effect it but it's only a few percent of the total evaporation (which is still surprisingly big) and doesn't sound like the main driving factor or an imminent ecological concern. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles/10.3389/fmars.2020.00573/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1463500325000071 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14635...
- Jblx2 5mo agoI thought the HN-way was to be more charitable than just directly calling out obvious bullshit.
- MyHonestOpinon 5mo agopardon my ignorance. But, all that salt was there already. right? Is it that we have less water there now ?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- b0rbb 5mo agoAwesome, love seeing stuff out of Rochester - RIT or UofR or any of the nearby schools. Totally underrated area for academic pursuits.
- 0x59 5mo agoAgree! Shout out to the Laboratory for Laser Energetics
- mmmBacon 5mo agoUofR physic grad that also worked at the LLE here. Agree Rochester schools are underrated (although admittedly a little biased). At least in the sciences you have access to lots of opportunities you don’t have at bigger name schools. They set me up in life in a way that I don’t think would have happened elsewhere.
- technothrasher 5mo agoI had a great time at UR in the early 90’s because they had the most computing hardware per interested student in the country. I was able to relatively quickly work my way up to access to pretty much any system the school owned that I wanted, including the Cray at the LLE.
- haritha-j 5mo agoIndeed, it’s the same university that gave us room temperature superconductors.
- SimplyUnknown 5mo agoHuh? That was University of Utah/Brigham Young University right. That is, if you're referring to Pons and Fleischman.
- eesmith 5mo agoPons and Fleischman was cold fusion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion
- scythe 5mo agoThey are talking about lithium recovery, but there is a less exotic byproduct I'm interested in. One tonne (≈ 1 m^3) of seawater contains about 1.3 kilograms of magnesium, equivalent to about 4 kg of magnesite ore. Typical desal prices are on the order of $1 per tonne. Magnesite ore goes for about $100 per tonne, so the crude magnesium in a tonne of seawater is worth about $0.40, which could account for a substantial fraction of the desalination cost. (These numbers are very rough.) Now you ask: why don't we just recover magnesium from brines if it's so great? Magnesium recovery from seawater isn't that easy: typically you have to treat it with some kind of alkali (often Ca(OH)2), so the cost is dominated by the extraction process (your alkali is consumed!), and you're competing with a pretty cheap ore. But if you have a solid byproduct, instead of a liquid, the options for magnesium recovery might be a lot more efficient, potentially offsetting the cost. The fourth-most-prevalent ion, sulfate, might also be interesting, at least in a hypothetical post-petroleum future where sulfur as a byproduct of fossil fuel extraction is no longer "free". Sulfate is also annoying to extract from seawater, but again if we have a solid, the rules change. As for the "table" salt itself, I think we'd quickly saturate (!) the market.
- cjbenedikt 5mo agoCalcining Mg(OH)₂ -which is what you find in seawater - converts the soft compound into magnesium oxide, a valuable mineral commonly used in refractories, catalysts, and ceramics.The Chemical Equation: \(Mg(OH)_2 \xrightarrow{\Delta} MgO + H_2O\)Temperature Requirements: You need to heat the magnesium hydroxide to a temperature range between 500°C and 900°C. Heating at the lower end (around 500°C) yields a highly reactive, porous form of nano-MgO, while heating above 1,200°C creates "dead-burned" MgO used in high-heat industrial bricks.The Yield: The weight of your final MgO product will be roughly 69% of the original Mg(OH)₂ mass, as the evaporated water accounts for the 31% weight difference. Already energy intensive. To get to magnesium ore is another step.
- scythe 5mo ago>Calcining Mg(OH)₂ -which is what you find in seawater I'm not sure what to say, because it looks like you are copy-pasting from Wikipedia or something like that. Anyway, Mg(OH)2 is not found in seawater. Mg2+ is found as a dissociated ion. When you dry it, it mostly becomes MgCl2 with a little MgSO4. Mg(OH)2 is produced from seawater by the alkaline extraction process I mentioned before, and the process in TFA is interesting because it might be better. Also, nobody would ever make magnesite ore. I referenced magnesium ore prices to estimate the value of the magnesium-as-ore in sea salt, because using finished magnesium prices would be misleading. Magnesium is mostly consumed either as the metal or as the oxide in cements and ceramics.
- Animats 5mo agoThe paper: [1] They're still at lab scale in glass. They haven't built a usable system, even a small one. The big claim here is that it doesn't clog; capillary action moves the salt out of the active area to another area, where some yet to be developed mechanism removes it. That needs to be demonstrated. If they can come up with something that runs for years without clogging or replacing the active material, that's a real advance. Laser surface preparation is known.[2] It's useful for roughening smooth surfaces in a very structured way, in preparation for painting. The result is a smooth paint surface. If you sandblast to roughen, the first paint layer is somewhat irregular. Then you need to sand and paint again to get a smooth surface. Laser roughening has been tried for auto painting, but didn't go mainstream. A good question here is whether commercial laser surface prep systems can make the material this new process uses. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-026-02315-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-026-02315-4 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKYOglHYo_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKYOglHYo_Y
- Nifty3929 5mo agoIt reminds me of how the Panama canal was built, and actually the first major attempt failed and they gave up. What they learned for the second attempt was that digging was not the hard(est) part to solve - it was how to move the dirt! So much dirt! Great book on this BTW: Path Between the Seas. I couldn't put it down.
- Animats 5mo agoFragility is a common problem in surface treatments, sometimes called "nanotechnology". There are super hydrophobic surface treatments that are very effective. They generate a surface which is a forest of tiny sharp points. The surface tension of water is too high to cling to such a surface. You can make something that just will not get wet. The problem is that the points are fragile, and wear destroys the effect. Another example is ultra black coatings. Those are a forest of tiny black objects arranged so that light gets reflected multiple times and is absorbed. The commercial version is called "Vantablack". It doesn't wear well, but for optical applications such as the insides of camera lenses and telescopes, that's fine.
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- LogicFailsMe 5mo agoSo crazy question: take a dehumidifier, attach some solar panels, and deploy at scale for non-potable water suitable for crop irrigation anywhere that isn't a desert. Does it work? And if not, why?
- casey2 5mo agoWhat do you mean work? No, because there is no single dehumidifier on the market that will get you enough water, so you are out $80 grand, you could have just paid for water delivery.
- mrguyorama 5mo agoIt "works" in the sense that this is what 99% of "Get water from air" scams are. The reason it doesn't actually work is that it is extremely inefficient. Getting water to condense requires you to somehow reject massive quantities of heat. That's fundamental to physics. Also, literally anywhere a dehumidifier is reasonably effective, is humid and usually doesn't have such dire water problems. Deserts have extremely low humidity and dehumidifiers working in a desert will produce very little water. Even a good humidifier in a humid environment is burning KW to generate on the order of ten liters of water a day. There are a couple places on earth that are essentially deserts but have an early morning humid fog roll through regularly, and those places figured out capturing that water in the air long long before we invented the refrigeration cycle. It is literally cheaper to desalinate. Maybe you could build giant greenhouses to fill with sea water and let the sun evaporate the water and collect that with a dehumidifier? Still absurdly inefficient. Water has such an obscene specific capacity for heat that any thermal avenue of separating it from something else will use immense energy.
- LarsAlereon 5mo agoIt takes too much energy and produces water too slowly to scale. In general any area with sufficient moisture in the air to explore this also has easier access to rain and ground water.
- LogicFailsMe 5mo agoGreat point, in my case in the PNW, the water from my local well is infested with manganese (as in clogging the household plumbing in the absence of a sediment filter) and other contaminants and the water company providing it is owned by private equity. Legally, I can drill my own well for non-potable irrigation, but god forbid I filter and/or chlorinate it for my own household use. So I end up considering options like this, thanks for debunking.
- kogasa240p 5mo agoProbably some of the best news I've seen in a while.
- fluorinerocket 5mo agoCan we please ban university press releases
- cush 5mo agowhy
- gus_massa 5mo agoI'll bite, I'll bite. But first ... @GP: Instead of a plain complain, it's better to get an interesting discussion to write an explanation of why the post makes no sense, or instead find the good debunking comments and upvote them (there are two or three good comments near the top now). I try to be that guy (personal hall of shame https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=gus_massa%20horrible%20title&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... ) but life is too short and I have other things to do IRL. Also, it's not my area. It's close enough to have a good guess, but in this case for me it's better to let someone else give an accurate reply. --- Back to this post: It obviously makes no sense. You have salt water, you extract the water, you have to get rid of the salt. Why waste time reading the details? [There are some interesting technical ideas about new surfaces, more on this later.] Reading the details their brilliant idea is to make salt cubes and sell them. So there is no waste! When you get rid of the salt using brine, it's easier to transport and dilute the liquid. With solid salt you must scrape it form your high tech surface (without scratching it?!) and now the solid salt is difficult to transport. Also, to sell it you must purify it because it will include nasty things like crabs legs and sea smell. Once you extracted the 99% of the water, it's difficult to extract the other 1% of the water because it's saturated solution with a low osmotic pressure, vapor pressure and a high boiling temperature. Also, water inside the block of salt is difficult to extract, and you must crush the small blocks. Salt production is done in big salt lakes areas, where energy is "free". I like to consider it like a huge natural solar panel. You get heat for "free" and dry wind for "free". You must pay for them in an industrial facility. Also, the normal process still requires a lot of manual labor of guys/gals with [mechanical] shovels to makes piles of salt, wait, turn it a few times, wait, turn it a few times, wait, ... and you now have a nasty salt that you still have to purify to be able to sell it. So they will get salt that is too expensive to sell, and too much of it to flood the market, and if you put it in the garbage can it will be classified as [industrial] waste. --- The technical part looks interesting, but it's on the bottom of an unrealistic title and first paragraph. The interesting part is about the new surface with nano details and titanium oxide that absorbs Lithium. It sound interesting and they published it so there is some validation of the claim, but after the nonsensical first claims I'd want to take a look at the feasibility details. --- >> Can we please ban university press releases > Why? I work in an university and I expect technical accuracy from the press department of an university. We want people to give us money in exchange of doing real and interesting things. We want people to trust the medical doctors when they give health advice, or a lot of other specialist about other public policies. A lot of press release of the universities have a lot of exaggerations, burning the trust of the people. Before opening one here, I like to guess what is the real result and what is the bullshit part. I think that a complete ban of university press release here is too much, but I understand why the GP is annoyed.
- photochemsyn 5mo agoAfter looking at the paper, this looks like the core result: “We collected a total of 9.3 g freshwater along with 0.343 g of sea salt from the ABF-STIC with a 9 cm2 surface area over the course of 9 hours. This is equivalent to generating 10.33 liters m−2 of freshwater and 0.38 kg m−2 of sea salt per day. The salinity of the desalinated water is found well below the WHO and EPA standards for safe drinking water.” However the enclosure system required looks rather complicated and might be sensitive to external temperature (maybe a solar PV-powered cooling loop would help) and I imagine the cost-per-square-meter of the material is rather high, so this looks more like something for emergency response situations or maybe a desal system for a mega-yacht. If it could be scaled the idea is interesting, maybe as lithium separation from concentrated geological brines?
- excalibur 5mo ago> The solar-powered system uses specially engineered black metal to absorb sunlight. Brutal. 𖤐 \m/ 𖤐
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- noripcord 5mo agoyou can now extract (like mining) minerals from the ocean, sounds kind of dangerous for the ecosystem maybe? making it profitable to extract magnesium, lithium, salt... we can probably guess how this story goes. i'm hoping it doesn't scale, honestly.
- card_zero 5mo agoYou're worried we might use all the salt in the sea for some kind of ... salt pyramids, send the water back out through sewers, and consequently leave the world's oceans diluted? That's about 1 followed by 21 zeroes, I think, in liters.
- noripcord 5mo agono, just take the water, remove the salt & minerals. Over time it'll dilute. Water falls again in the form of rain, obviously, but not the salt. You're not worried? If it's for batteries? For sure they'll extract whatever they can.
- card_zero 5mo agoRight, remove the salt and minerals. We don't need that much salt, so we'd have to build pyramids or something with it. We drink the water, but then it ends up back in the oceans. The reason I mention that part is because if it didn't, if we could destroy the water, then the remaining water would retain the same salinity, and the concern would be that we drain the ocean dry, which is silly (I refer you back to how big it is). But we don't destroy water when we use it, so instead the worry is that we dilute all the world's ocean, which is also silly (I again refer you back to how big it is). We need a lot of batteries, but the sea is not useful as a source of lithium except as a byproduct. Even if it was the only source, the old batteries themselves would soon become a better source, as concentrated stores of lithium compared to the very-much-not-concentrated lithium in the ocean. But anyway the good places to mine lithium are on land (and are dried-up bits of ancient ocean, I think). (I checked, some deposits are old lakebeds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salar_de_Uyuni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salar_de_Uyuni and others are igneous.) It's also possible - true, I bet - that all the car batteries and storage batteries 8 billion people could possibly use are equivalent to only a tiny fraction of all the lithium in the ocean, but it would be harder arithmetic to confirm that, as well as being irrelevant on account of land-based mines existing.
- shevy-java 5mo agoIf true then this might be indeed a game changer, but numerous academic publications turned out to be unfit for upscaling. Who all has access to a femto laser? As far as I know these are all patented, and most of those patents (or at the least companies with rights to production) are in the USA, according to a professor who told us so some years ago in university (in central Europe, but he is quite old already, so I am not sure if his information was 100% up to date; but otherwise I do not doubt the validity of his claim made). So someone is going to milk rather than help. Will be interesting to see what happens to that in some years. My current guesstimate is that nothing will really happen or change.
- gaiagraphia 5mo agoAlways wondered why the coast of the Red Sea isn't littered with channels which get flooded with seawater, which then evpporate into glassed ceilings; creating freshwater, and leaving behind salts for mining. Sand -> Glass -> heated saltwater -> freshwater + minerals -> ??? -> profit? Combined with some mangrove farms, surely desert coasts are able to support more life. Wonder if this is scalable tech, and how quickly it can 'process' water. I guess if they're combined with transparent solar panels, it could be quite an epic tech.
- jrumbut 5mo agoIf you've ever been to the beach, you can smell the salt air and rotting seaweed and hear the birds. It's all gonna get on the glass (from above and below), and eventually the salt left behind is going to build up. The salt left behind is very hard on any structure or machinery used to move it which makes repairing the large glass enclosure a pain. All this for a slow trickle of water is generally not worth it.
- gaiagraphia 5mo agoThe Saudis were fucking around with the idea of solar domes at one point. Haven't heard anything about it for a while though (probably due to maths, lol). A shame, I've always been fascinated by Egypt and the empty expanses of nothingness. On long bus journeys around the country, the imagination can run wild. https://www.solarwaterplc.com/featured-news/whats-inside-this-giant-solar-dome-coming-to-saudi-arabia/ https://www.solarwaterplc.com/featured-news/whats-inside-thi...
- fakedang 5mo agoThe issue with that idea is very simple - creating those inlets into the desert would risk soil erosion - in the desert. If your objective was to desalinate water, you're much better off using conventional desalination (there's still way more room to work around here first, like better and sustainable membranes, etc.) and offsetting your emissions by locking carbon away in mangrove reserves, which are native to those desert coasts.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5mo ago>> The solar-powered system uses specially engineered black metal to absorb sunlight. The new system replaces the earlier version that used specially engineered death metal.
- nandomrumber 5mo agoI’m not even going to night clicking on a title that is clearly a load of bullshit. I suppose you could water down the ocean water it’ll was drinkable, or like just add half a teaspoon of sea water to a cup or drinking water. Buy all work done eventually decades in to waste heat.
- hofo 5mo ago…but needs a specially engineered piece of metal…
- iceboundrock 5mo agoI am wondering if they combined photomolecular effect[1] to make it even more energy-efficient [1] https://news.mit.edu/2024/how-light-can-vaporize-water-without-heat-0423 https://news.mit.edu/2024/how-light-can-vaporize-water-witho...
- biodiesel 5mo agoDistillation of H2O, where it loses an oxygen molecule and becomes H2, or gains a hydrogen molecule and becomes H2O2.
- userbinator 5mo agoI believe the most efficient method to turn "ocean water into drinking water" is called "rain". We just need to better collect and transport the output of what is effectively the world's biggest solar-powered desalinator.
- Laurel1234 5mo agoWell, sometimes it doesn't rain and (at least for coast regions) being able to desalinate can be of critical importance.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- mettamage 5mo agoLet’s grab a giant pole and catch clouds. I wonder how much liter of water a giant cloud is. I also wonder what a good unit would be for a cloud. Small, medium and large is all I have
- alex_duf 5mo agoObviously this is region specific, but slowing down water is one of the best ways to have fresh water. Slow it down from trickling down a slope and you have two things: more vegetation (which also retains water) and more time for that water to penetrate the ground for local wells. You can completely "terraform" a desertic region https://youtube.com/shorts/cfhbtgon4Nk?is=oAExB5UeMAsShBux https://youtube.com/shorts/cfhbtgon4Nk?is=oAExB5UeMAsShBux
- ericzundel 5mo agoGeography and prevailing winds have conspired to make certain regions devoid of rain, even many that are right next to the ocean. Competition over resources like water are behind a lot of human misery. The more potential solutions for obtaining fresh water, the better.
- emsign 5mo agoThis is a big deal for gulf states, another revenue stream in a the post-fossil world for them. Makes a transition more attractive for them.
- melonman2106 5mo agointeresting read
- napierzaza 5mo ago[dead]
- mathfailure 5mo agoWhat, again?
- sathyayoshi 5mo ago[flagged]
- mycall 5mo agoNature desalinates seawater all the time in the form of water vapor without using electricity. There must be another way for humans to command and control the release of fresh water out of the ocean for our own needs.
- trumpdong 5mo agoThere is, but it takes plenty of energy in one form or another. Nature has the advantage of scale. One kilowatt per square meter over the whole oceans.