Posted on 03/03/2015 8:27:49 AM PST by hauerf
On 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 ...
(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...
That is an environMENTALists complaint. The area near the discharge pipe has higher salinatity.
;-)
Exactly.
On a map, Israel isn't all that different a shape from New Zealand...
I'm in Nevada too.
Maybe we could build a coastal California plant and a pipeline big enough to turn the Great Basin into a vast inland sea?
Will the islamanizies embrace this technology like they have the cell phone, also pioneered by Israel.
If you Kalifornians would just ban private swimming pools you’d have plenty of water.
Santa Barbara has decided to re-open their plant. Carlsbad plant will be open next ear. We could use a dozen more. But the governor is spending billions for a high speed train in the central valet and “we” have voted to proceed.
There’s about fifty pounds of gold in every cubic mile of sea water....
Do you have a source for this illogical comment?
Gold is heavy, it would sink to the bottom making it very easy to scoop up. There may be parts of the ocean with high concentraions on the bottom but to extrapolate that to every cubic mile is jsut illogical.
NOAA
Is there gold in the ocean?
Ocean waters do hold gold – nearly 20 million tons of it. However, if you were hoping make your fortune mining the sea, consider this: Gold in the ocean is so dilute that its concentration is on the order of parts per trillion. Each liter of seawater contains, on average, about 13 billionths of a gram of gold.
There is also (undissolved) gold in/on the seafloor. The ocean, however, is deep, meaning that gold deposits are a mile or two under water. And once you reach the ocean floor, you’ll find that gold deposits are also encased in rock that must be mined through. Not easy.
Currently, there really isn’t a cost-effective way to mine or extract gold from the ocean to make a profit. But, if we could extract all of that gold, there’s enough of it that each person on Earth could have nine pounds of the precious metal. Eureka!
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/gold.html
Thanks for the clarification.
I was in Portsmouth one time when they were unloading a ship of salt. The ship was from South Korea and I was told by someone at the port that the salt came from plants in Saudi Arabia. I must have ASSumed it came desalination plants.
So, where does Saudi Arabia get their drinking water?
Saudi has a lot of Desalinization Plants. Maybe more than any other country. They tied the creation of them with a lot of power plants which is where I read a bunch about them.
But the output is saltier water. Removing all of the salt from a quantity of water is more complicated (expensive) than removing some clean water from salt water and sending the rest back as reject water. That reject water helps in a few ways, keeping a continuous process in liquid form that can be moved through pipes.
10 miles south of Tel Aviv, Israel... is the world’s largest modern seawater desalination plant, providing 20 percent of the water consumed by the country... it uses a conventional desalination technology called reverse osmosis... however, it produces clean water from the sea cheaply and at a scale never before achieved...Obviously, this is yet another disproportionate response by those Zionist Jews! /s
Yeah, but Obama ain't goin' for any pipelines....could upset a desert mouse or something...
It’s in the article excerpt that 20 percent of the country gets its water from it; the $500 million will obviously be amortized over the lifetime of the plant, and the operating costs of a typical large RO plant used to somewhat exceed $1 per cubic meter. The article states that this is cheaper. The figure for annual operating cost could be estimated by the number of people to be served and the per capita water use. In most societies, domestic, personal water use is under 10 percent of total use, most is used for other things, such as irrigation, and commercial and industrial uses (including food-related processes like canning, bottling, cleaning).
Based on a recent population estimate 6.2 million, one fifth of the population paid $404 a head for the construction, about $13 a year for 30 years; the per capita water use in Israel (2007 figure) is 281.9 cubic meters, but that’s all uses (including agricultural — Israel didn’t invent hydroponics and trickle irrigation, but is state of the art in both areas; used to be a net exporter, mostly to Europe, now a net importer I believe).
Water Desalination is becoming more profitable. I read an article that says it is possible to get the cost down to 49 cents per cubic meter using the newest ocean desalination methods. The current cost is 20 cents per cubic meter to make sure fresh water is sanitary. There are several desalination plants all around the world this may become a new industry. I was reading that there may be portable desalination plants as well.
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