Posted on 05/02/2008 1:15:00 PM PDT by grundle
With water shortages looming, it's time to commit to building seawater desalting plants. Prompt action can bring new rivers of freshwater and avert disasters. Desalination is likely to become one of the world's biggest industries. Growing communities and new industries must have dependable water supplies in order to prosper. If droughts, exhaustion of groundwater sources, decline of lake or river levels, or a combination of such factors threaten an area's water supply, siteseeking firms may look elsewhere, giving waterrich areas a competitive advantage.
Desalting systems have long proven effective in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. Where once there were bleak villages on barren deserts there are now bright modern cities with treelined streets. There are homes with lush gardens. In the countryside there are productive farms.
The big desalting plant at Jubail, Saudi Arabia, is a model for the world. A pipeline carries a river of freshwater 200 miles inland to the capital city of Riyadh, and desalted seawater has given a large region an entirely new future filled with opportunities.
There are more than 7,000 desalination plants, mostly small ones, in operation worldwide. About twothirds are located in the Middle East, and others are scattered across islands in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Aruba's hightech water plant has for many years met the needs of a thriving tourist industry.
The largest plant in the United States is the pioneering $158million project of the Tampa Bay Water agency. The project was let to contract in 1999 and after overcoming some technical problems in its early years is now performing well and causing no significant environmental problems. But no U.S. water agency has yet undertaken a really big project comparable to those found along the Arabian Gulf.
(Excerpt) Read more at redorbit.com ...
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/mar/21/desalination-gets-serious-look/
To build a desalination plant and use the water locally costs about $1,000 per acre-foot, he said, or $3.06 for 1,000 gallons.
Turning oil into water.
Great, so as the ocean levels rise from global warming, we’ll just pull it out for human consumption!
:)
The power generated alone will pay for most of the purification of the water, it is literally a win win situation.
http://www.world-mysteries.com/gw_freeenergy.htm
Desalination can be a by-product of thermal electricity generation — using, e.g., multi-stage flash distillation.
I worked in Belgium on many occasions in the early 90s. They use nuclear generating stations to provide electricity. The industrial load drops off at night, so they run lighting on the motorways as "ballast". The motorways are so well lit that you hardly need headlights. Nuclear power could easily be balanced between electrical generation needs and desalinization for our equivalent "ballast". Definitely a win-win approach.
No surprises, Malthus is still wrong. Of course, the logical use of nuclear power is off-limits so I’m sure next we’ll be hearing from the environmentalists about why we can’t turn seawater into fresh water. “For the fish!”
Here in the Florida keys, we had one of the first desal plants in the USA, it was in operation when I came to the Keys in 1976 and was used until the new pipeline came down from the mainland around 1984. The old desal plant is “in mothballs” right now and is maintained well enough so that it can be fired up if a major hurricane takes out the pipeline.
On another note, I’m a general contractor here in the Keys, new houses are mandated by the local planning department to have a secondary source of water. The two choices are to gutter your house and dump the rainwater into a cistern or if you live on the ocean you can have a private reverse osmosis desalinization unit. They are not all that expensive for private home use and for $1,700 or so, you can produce about 300 gallons per day.
Sounds like a simple idea to desalinize ocean water. Ocean is everywhere. We could use all the salt for sea salt in food. I like sea salt anyways. :)
I’ve been telling people this for the last five years. My intent was for S. California and could pump all the way over into Ariz. and Nevada.
Those of us not on city water, which is about 2/3 the population, truck water. There are several water companies and the trucks run all day every day delivering to their customers and the rest of us drive around half the time with a 300 gallon tank in the back of a pickup truck they can fill up at the utility plant downtown. 5 cents a gallon is what I pay.
There was a desalinization plant at the south end of San Diego bay in the early 60's. My family moved to northern Virginia from 1966 to 1968. When we returned, the plant was gone. It was located just south of the SDG&E power plant. The old site is now covered with evaporation ponds to provide sea salt.
So the Saudis can make their own water, I wonder how they will do at growing their own food in the sand? The day may be coming.
You don't need to do that. Work out a trade arrangement between Colorado River water and the desal water.
SO we should pump salt water out of the ocean, desalinate it, and then pump it to an underground storage location like an aquifer where we pump it out again to go thru purification again. That does not seem efficient, but I am not an engineer. T’would seem better to pump desalinated water directly to the system (city/town) that needs it.
Nah,
When the ice caps start breaking up ya just lasso a big one and use one or two ocean tugs to drag it down to L.A.
They said this was going to happen in the future when I was in school as a kid in L.A.
The sea water from Jubail goes to Riyadh where it is all used and then run through the sewage treatment plant and then it is all used again used as irrigation water. The Saudis grow massive quantities of wheat and other crops on pivot irrigation farms using the water in question.
By the way, Jubail is truly a modern miracle. A flat desert with absolutely nothing in 1977 is a city of chemical manufacturing plants and 250,00 people.
When Iraq duplicates Jubail in Bashra, the European chemical jobs will all go down the tubes. Saudi Arabian Bechtel That planned and developed Jubail will do it all over in Bashra.
No, the jobs will move to the Middle East. Much of the heavy intellectual work in KSA is still done by foreigners.
......the jobs will move to the Middle East.....
I think that is what I mean.
The companies may or may not be foreign owned but the production will be in the Gulf region that I now mean to include the emerging Iraq. They will utilize the gas and oil feedstocks in local facilities.
As an ex mideast intellectual :), I wonder where the current brain power is sourced?
Year before last, I had contact with a Jubail chemical project that included German design engineers working with American vendor companies that had Philippino, Saudi and Eqyptian engineers on site. I was pleased to meet the excited young Saudi EE who seemed very much on the ball.
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