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Water

Clarity on the water disparity…

by Thought Provoken on November 28, 2009

I just read this article that I had to post.  I don’t consider myself to be a futurist but I do think often about what the world will look like if we continue on our current path.  Often gone unspoken is the issue of water scarcity that we will experience in the next 20 years.  As individual wealth increases (on a global scale, people tend to eat more meat which in turn increases the need for agricultural products to feed the beef, chicken etc (this takes more water)… Additionally, as urbanization increases, the density of populations increases as does the need for water.  We have seen with the droughts in California and Australia that we are seeing a trend here.  The article below posted in Life Science offers an intriguing analysis of the technologies and constraints associated with giving us clean water…

ENJOY

3E

Why Desalination Doesn’t Work (Yet)

By Michael Schirber, Special to LiveScience

posted: 25 June 2007 08:49 am ET

With water fast becoming a hot commodity, especially in drought-prone regions with burgeoning populations, an obvious solution is to take the salt out of seawater. Desalination technology has been around for thousands of years, after all. Even Aristotle worked on the problem.

Tantalizing as desalinated water might sound, the energy costs have made it rather unpalatable.

“Until recently, seawater desalination was a very expensive water source solution,” said Gary Crisp, an engineer for the Water Corporation of Western Australia.

Drinking seawater straight is a bad idea because your body must expel the salt by urinating more water than it actually gains. Seawater contains roughly 130 grams of salt per gallon. Desalination can reduce salt levels to below 2 grams per gallon, which is the limit for safe human consumption.

Currently, between 10 and 13 billion gallons of water are desalinated worldwide per day. That’s only about 0.2 percent of global water consumption, but the number is increasing.

“There is significant growth in desalination capacity throughout the world, and it is anticipated to continue for sometime,” says Stephen Gray of Victoria University.

Gray has been chosen to lead a new research program in Australia—where many regions lack fresh water supplies—to improve the efficiency of desalination plants.

Aristotle’s efforts

Back in the 4th century B.C., Aristotle imagined using successive filters to remove the salt from seawater.

But the first actual practice of desalination involved collecting the freshwater steam from boiling saltwater. Around 200 A.D., sailors began desalinating seawater with simple boilers on their ships.

The energy required for this distillation process today makes it prohibitively expensive on a large scale. A lot of the current market for so-called “thermal desalination” has therefore been in oil-rich, water-poor countries in the Middle East.

Since the 1950s, researchers have been developing membranes that could filter out salt, similar to what Aristotle originally envisioned. Presently, this membrane technique, sometimes called “reverse osmosis,” requires one-fourth of the energy and costs half of the price of distilling saltwater.

“In the last ten years, seawater reverse-osmosis has matured into a viable alternative to thermal desalination,” Crisp says.

Energy is key

But even with membranes, large amounts of energy are needed to generate the high pressure that forces the water through the filter. Current methods require about 14 kilowatt-hours of energy to produce 1,000 gallons of desalinated seawater.

A typical American uses 80 to 100 gallons of water a day, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The entire country consumes about 323 billion gallons per day of surface water and another 84.5 billion gallons of ground water.

If half of this water came from desalination, the United States would need more than 100 extra electric power plants, each with a gigawatt of capacity.

Depending on local energy prices, 1,000 gallons of desalinated seawater can cost around $3 or $4. Although that might not seem like much, it is still cheaper in many places to pump water out of the ground or import it from somewhere else.

But the price difference will undoubtedly narrow, especially in regions that could experience more intense droughts owing to climate change.

Water use has been growing twice as fast as population growth, causing more and more communities to suffer water shortages. The demand for freshwater supplies will drive prices higher, making desalination increasingly attractive.

Brainstorming on membranes

The number of desalination plants worldwide has grown to more than 15,000, and efforts continue to make them more affordable.

Last month, Australia’s largest scientific research agency joined with nine major universities in a membrane research program to reduce desalination energy costs, as well as maintenance costs associated with gunk sticking to membranes and fouling them up.

“Lowering the energy required for desalination and the fouling propensity of membranes are the two biggest challenges facing desalination,” Gray says.

A team of diverse researchers will try to tackle these problems by developing new types of membrane materials. The goal is to cut in half the energy required for desalination.

“We would hope to have something available within the next 10 years,” Gray said.

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Water, Water, Everywhere? (Maybe not)…

by Thought Provoken on October 8, 2009

Often times, the successful survivors are called CRAZY. This is so because they fail to follow the herd mentality. Ask yourself how many times you thought about what it would be like to not have water. Millions of people die each year from the weapon called dirty water. We don’t think about it nor care about those deaths because we can wash our cars, bodies, and dogs without a care nor concern that “tha blu gold” will stop flowing.

The article below (although a little long) should be READ with the understanding that WARS have and will be fought over what we take for granted. I remember in high school I was thinking that they would find a way to trade water and I was called an idiot.  Jim Rogers was called crazy as well when he thought about trading commodities (now he is a zillionaire). Below is an article posted by the BBC News and can be seen HERE [This article is best enjoyed with a cold glass of H2O :) ]

How can water be fairly distributed?

ANALYSIS
Clare Davidson
Business reporter, BBC News

By the time you read this you will have inevitably used water directly and indirectly since the start of the day.

The chances are you have no idea how much you have used.

But without it, many activities would have been impossible – from obvious processes such as drinking to washing – to having food to eat, using energy and enjoying any number of manufactured goods.

But as competing demands for water intensify, how can we ensure that water is fairly and affordably distributed?

Stress

By 2030, 3.9 billion people are forecast to be living in areas under severe water stress, the OECD predicts. This is in addition to around one billion who already lack clean water today. While the scale of the problem might be clear, opinions are fiercely divided over how to handle this pending crisis. At one extreme are those who say water should be traded through markets, like a commodity, to optimise its value.

At the other are those who argue water, specifically access to it, is a human right and is priceless. Talking at a recent UN event, Maude Barlow, senior advisor on water to the organisation and an author and campaigner on water issues, said: “Water is not first and foremost a commercial good – though of course it has an economic dimension – but rather a human right and a public trust”.

Daniel McCarthy, chief executive of Black and Veatch Water, a firm specialising in the treatment of water, says that water is indeed free.  But he goes on to add: “Of course, providing water is a business. What you pay for is the service that gets it to you in a reliable form.

Someone has to pay for infrastructure costs, ongoing maintenance, and staff, he says. “The question is the degree to which it should be profitable.”

Template

Looking ahead, many view Australia as a warning of what might happen elsewhere. It has faced severe water shortages, and in response has adopted a complex water trading system to distribute the commodity better. Under the country’s National Water Initiative, water rights can be transferred on a temporary or permanent basis between different parties, such as irrigators, environmental water managers, and water infrastructure operators. The government argues that it allows “scarce water resources to be transferred to their most productive uses”.

Don Blackmore, who was involved in the early stages of such a mechanism in Victoria in 1984 and today is chairman of eWater Cooperative Research Centre, goes as far as to say: “We would have gone to war without a water trading system”. Within such a framework, he says: “The value is what someone is prepared to pay you.”

Too cheap?

“Every water issue is a local issue,” says John Briscoe, professor of environmental engineering at Harvard University and until recently the senior water advisor of the World Bank. Many others echo this. “There is no one answer for providing or managing water,” says Mr Briscoe.

So there is no easy formula to define its true value or cost.

But many agree that there has been huge wastage of this precious resource.

It has often been heavily subsidised. Paradoxically, analysts argue, this has meant water has been overused because it has been misleadingly cheap for the end user.

Those in favour of trading argue that unless the true cost of having water is made clear there is no motivation to be more efficient.

Trade choices

Mr Briscoe says as supplies become more constrained, there is more and more emphasis on “more value per drop of water”.

“It was crazy for rice to be grown in [Australia's] desert. It was argued that the country needed it for food security.

“But if growing grapes and almonds creates more jobs and better exports, it’s a better use of water,” he argues.

Similarly, he says: “Having golf courses or casinos with water features in Nevada is not a moral issue.

“It is a practical issue.”

If that is the best way to add value by creating jobs, so be it.

Some places, including Saudi Arabia, are re-assessing what they produce due to water shortages.

They have shifted away, sensibly in Mr Briscoe’s view, from producing water-intensive crops like wheat.

Instead, they can import goods they need using money generated by oil.

But what about poor countries that are water-constrained? How will they trade?

The simple answer, says Mr Briscoe, is “with great difficulty”.

“In some cases there will be massive migration to places where there is work,” he adds.

If water is deemed a commodity, who will protect it, questions Ms Barlow.

“There is a risk that only the rich will have clean water, nature will have to fend for itself and there will be no incentive to stop pollution or conserve water,” she says.

Water Stress

Growth

It would be a mistake to think trading systems are easy or quick to implement. Australia has taken 20 years to develop what is a highly sophisticated mechanism.

And Mr Blackmore says certain preconditions are essential to ensure an efficient and transparent system, such as well-defined property and land rights – which is not the case everywhere.

While water trading is still relatively limited, several investment banks have underlined the opportunities in the sector through investment in utilities or firms that develop technology to treat water.

In a report last year, Goldman Sachs said it continued “to be bullish on the long-term defensive growth opportunities in the $425bn global water sector”.

Meanwhile, oil tycoon T Boone Pickens has been buying up ground water rights in Texas, as the state faces an increasing squeeze on demand.

It is hardly surprising some call water “blue gold”.

Cost of dirt

While lots of money might be up for grabs in water-related investments, there is another side of the coin, namely the cost of dirty water.

Polluted water is a major contributor to deaths in the developing world, with young children among the most affected.

But investing in water treatment systems and infrastructure itself does not guarantee that the neediest actually get the water they require.

“There has been a lack of investment in water. It only takes priority when it starts becoming unavailable,” says Black & Veatch’s Mr McCarthy.

But by then it could be too late.

MAKES YOU THINK ABOUT MORE THAN CSI MIAMI AND ENTOURAGE DOESN’T IT?

3E

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