Still Thristy, Part III

Still Thirsty, Part III

   With 97% of our water too salty to drink, but sitting out there lapping onto the shore, the oceans seem overly inviting.  The old phrase of water, water everywhere and not a drop to spare is temptingly close to our parched lands (the rising acidity of our ocean waters is another concern, the coral reefs being our "canaries in the mine" as they are among the most sensitive to the ph balance, the corals and the crustaceans).  So with so much water there, where do we stand with desalinization?

   In the U.S., San Diego is is expected to complete its first desalinization plant sometime next year, one that should supply some 50 million gallons of fresh water each day to its residents, according to an article in Fast Company.  That's the good news.  The bad news is that 50 million gallons represents just 7% of what it's population uses.  I bring that up because in order to grasp our water situation, we need to first view just how much water is actually used (you can get an easy glimpse of your own personal water usage at the Pacific Institute's calculator).  But desalinization is expensive, even though there are over 1450 such plants located throughout the world.  But the idea has been around for eons, our earth evaporating sea water, the vapor in clouds making their way to land (or sea) and dropping the freshwater rain or snow back to the earth, which runs back to the sea.

   Then there's reverse osmosis and forward osmosis.  The former you've likely seen under your sink, filtering our minerals and other impurities that your water plant may have let slip by (unfortunately, this might include pharmaceutical elements or nanoparticles that make it through). Developed in the 1960s, the process of osmosis relies on a membrane that filters out impurities, including salt, and generally requires a high energy output (this is the process being used at the Carlsbad desalinization plant).  If you can picture your kidney functioning, you should be able to get an idea of how the osmosis process works.  But the osmosis process is considered "mature," that is, close to its end as far as improvements or lowering costs.  So the search continues for more efficient way to desalinate sea water.

   Another process that is being looked at uses electricity to separate the salt from the water.  The Waterchip sends water into a y-shaped funnel and an electrical current moves through the single chamber, effectively removing about 25% of the salt.  Done over and over, the process may prove to be a simpler, if more time-consuming, method of desalinization.  But eyes are now shifting less from removing the salt to simply cleaning dirty or used water, everything from muddy water to sewage.  NASA is peering into such processes, but so are entrepreneurial inventors such as Dean Kamen.

   Known primarily for his invention of the Segway transport, Kamen is surrounded with his patents and his inventions have been adopted by companies as different as the Department of Defense to Coco-Cola.  But as Popular Science wrote, his latest water purifier, the Slingshot, "more than 10 years in the making, could have a bigger impact than all of his other inventions combined."  Here's a quick summary of how the article explains the process:  The system needs only enough energy to start the first boil, and a little more to power the compressor and pump.  That’s supplied by an outlet or a solar panel; all the subsequent boiling and cooling self-perpetuates.  One: The user places a hose in any dirty water source—say, a polluted river or well—and a small pump draws the fluid into a boiling chamber.  As the water reaches roughly 100°C, it turns to steam, which leaves behind any pollutants.  They flow out of the chamber via a separate hose.  Two: The steam rises into a compressor, which squeezes it and thereby raises its pressure and its temperature by about 10°C more.  The high-pressure vapor now has a higher boiling point, which means it can condense back into water at a temperature greater than 100°C.  Three: A counterflow heat exchanger runs the superheated water past the incoming flow of dirty water.  The process heats the incoming water and cools the hot water to room temperature.  That distilled water is ready to drink, while the dirty water vaporizes and begins the process all over again.

   Ah, but where to get the fuel to start the thing.  Kamen solved that with his Sterling generator which can burn anything, leaves, sewage, twigs (one such test generator has run for six months on just cow dung).  But how to reach the people who need purified water the most?  Enter Coca-Cola who has the network and has partnered with Kamen to open Ekocenters, mini-7-11s run by local villagers.  Providing clean water could be the cornerstone of what’s known as a bottom-of-the-pyramid strategy for developing markets.  By providing the poorest people in the world with new technologies, services, and opportunities, a company can help lift them out of poverty and transform them into viable customers.  Hence, the Ekocenter concept took shape as a companion to the water purifier, at least in some markets.  “The commitment we made is to provide 500 million liters of safe drinking water to communities in need on a yearly basis,” Hendriksen (general manager of the Ekocenter project) says.  That would translate into improving the lives of 500,000 people a year.
Kamen, being Kamen, sees the current goals of the Coke partnership as the first step toward a much larger one.  “Fifty percent of all the people in the developing world suffer from waterborne pathogens,” he says.  “We’d empty half the beds in all the hospitals in the world if we just gave people clean water.”  The Slingshot won’t be the solution for all of those people, Kamen says, but he sees no reason not to strive for that.

   Another idea in use by other companies is that of mini-sensors placed in water delivery pipes or in intake valves.  The town of Long Beach in southern California is placing Smart Meters on some of their residential and business water meters, and now can receive updated water usage reports every 5 minutes.  In some cases, the meters have been credited with reducing some home usage by 80%.  Here's a partial excerpt from an interview by NPR:  It records how much water is used every five minutes and cellphone technology sends usage data to the cloud...We can just selectively put these in only where we need them. You know, the next day, we're getting data from these customers.   It'll be so powerful, you can't believe it...Powerful because it's relatively cheap and easy to deploy and because Wattier says a lot of waste is accidental.  Smart meters reveal leaky pipes, teenagers who take too-long showers and sprinkler systems with faulty settings.  So when people see what they're doing, they change.  He shows me data from a former scofflaw...This one's down about 80 percent from when we put the smart meter on and let them know that we were watching what they were doing.  
 
   In Israel, such meters are used on a much larger scale within the water distribution network itself, and have pinpointed wastage to a specific business or even a leaky fire hydrant (85% of Israel's water is reprocessed gray-water, water from run-off or desalinated water).  Most cities are thought to lose nearly 30% of their water simply due to leaky pipes in the delivery system (one such broken pipe in Los Angeles recently released 20 million gallons of fresh water).  Israel's water detection system, now being adopted in cities from Campo Grande, Brazil to Bilboa, Spain, loses less than 10% in water delivery.  The full article on the system Israel uses, TaKaDu, appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek.

   Yet another set of companies is rapidly developing plants growing on little more than air, their seeds peeking through an enclosed membrane and being lightly sprayed with a nutrient mist and oxygen-CO2 combination.  The plants grow rather quickly, despite having 90% less water, are harvested, and the membranes are easily cleaned and readied for the next planting.  One such company already supplies the leafy produce to 75 grocers in the Chicago area but sees no reason why the process cannot be expanded to other cities (a video of the process can be viewed here).

   As you can see, the water crisis will take more than just looking for new sources of water underground.  It will require a new mindset, one of conservation and valuing water as the precious commodity that it is.  It will also require looking outside of the box, to see other ways to stop wasting what water we have, or reusing the water we now so casually send down the drain or into our streets.  And there's yet another possible problem, our brief attention span.  Plants in Australia and Florida came online at huge expense, but the desalinated water was too expensive and people simply cut back their water usage.  Rains might come, the ocean currents could again shift, we might use a bit less water now that the kids have left the house, we could buy more efficient toilets and sinks and dishwashers.  We might, we could.  Big words that come and go. 

   As the desalinization article in Fast Company concluded,  There's also the potential that a plant may significantly impact fish populations harmed by the intake pipes or the supersalty discharge from the desalination process.  Still, experts like Pankratz see it as an inevitable choice.  "Desalination is like insurance," says Pankratz.  "The water situation is pretty bad in Southern California.  But until things hit catastrophic proportions, people are going to be talking about how expensive desalination is and how much energy it uses."  Eventually, he says, they'll be ready to pay—because by then, there may be no other options.