There's an abundance of freshwater in the east coast, northwest and midwest. Why not shift some of the exess water from the great lakes, east coast and northwest to southwest? Can't we pipeline the water to giant reservoirs in the sw or even carve extend tributaries from the missouri river or create canals down to the sw? It's not exactly rocket science.
A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest
101–110 of 161 posts
Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest
#102Apart from whether the economics make sense brine disposal from desalinization is a big issue. Waste with high salt concentrations can wipe out marine life - it would be nice if this piece took the issue a little more seriously. It's a continuing problem in the Canary Islands which are dependent on desalinization plants: "Rejected brine is a serious threat to marine ecosystems, causing negative effects on both flora…
Brine discharge is an issue, but the geography of the North American West Coast is favorable for that. In most places the seafloor drops down fairly deep just a short distance offshore. Past about 400 ft / 120 m there is no flora at all, and most fauna is clustered around rock structures. So, the impact of brine discharge can be minimized with careful pipeline siting.
Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest
#103We desperately need to focus on conservation efforts instead of attempting to engineer "solutions" that only end up encouraging further consumption. Hot take: Maybe the American SouthWest wasn't meant to support > 1/3 of America's agricultural output. Solar desalination of the Salton traps humanity in an energy contract when we could achieve meaningful conservation efforts instantaneously by banning the production of…
> We desperately need to focus on conservation efforts instead of attempting to engineer "solutions" that only end up encouraging further consumption. With respect, why can't we do both?
I’m not against using technology but my concern is that we need to treat resource consumption as a form of addiction. Humanity frequently uses technology as an excuse to further consume instead of using it to pay off ecological debt.
Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
In an environment where solar and geothermal electricity are abundant enough to make this work, it would be far easier to condense water straight from the air by refrigeration.
I think you’re underestimating how much less efficient that is.
It worked for Uncle Owen
Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest
#105Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest
#106A solution is there if we had the will to implement it: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/963122
Take excess water from SE floods and pump it west opportunistically using excess renewables. Bonus because you can use the pumped water as gravity storage.
Yes, it is not cheap, energetically, to pump water. Yes, you have to cross a big mountain range(which increases opportunities for gravity storage).
For some reason, this suggestion always gets a lot of comments from folks living around the great lakes who think we're going to 'steal' 'their' water(just like they 'steal' CA grown produce, I guess?).
Anyway, a national water grid is needed for national food security and can mitigate flooding damage in the SE(probably more important b/c of AGW).
Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
There should definitely be a plan for the brine. I'm optimistic we could: * Build ocean pipelines that disperse brine over much larger volumes of water to minimize impact on wildlife * Dump the brine water in engineered desert fields where it will evaporate and deposit salt reserves. In general, we should be aware of the whole lifecycle of a solution, and optimistically believe we can solve each problem with more wor…
> Dump the brine water in engineered desert fields where it will evaporate and deposit salt reserves. Honestly, the Salton Sea would be a great place to dump the brine. It would keep the water levels up and reduce the respiratory issues caused by drying, and any ecosystem to be destroyed has been thoroughly destroyed for decades. Nix the "turn the manmade salt lake to a manmade fresh lake" plan, and use the created f…
Huh, I guess I was mistaken that restoration on the Salton Sea was already in progress. I've seen large flocks of birds in and around it and assumed there was food for them in it. But it sounds like no, it's still horrible.
Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
He addresses brine, but not the waste products that come from brine, and only addresses it in one sentence: > The resulting depleted brine is piped back to the ocean where it is thoroughly mixed with sea water and discharged. This is not nearly as easy as this sentence implies.
Brine is just concentrated seawater. What waste products?
The waste product is brine. It's an extremely salty sludge that's toxic to marine life. In the same way that fresh water is "just" diluted seawater, but pumping millions of gallons of it into a coastal ecosystem would wipe it out.
Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest
#109Wow, what a fantastic post! The author, who holds a PhD from Caltech, proposes taking advantage of the decreasing cost of solar power to enable a new age of clean water abundance in California, sustainably, with the potential for massive revenues and profits at all steps in the value chain. Even if the author's calculations are off by a factor of two, the proposal looks like it could work. At a minimum, it merits ser…
It's a very interesting idea - but practically speaking, the kind of water volumes needed for drinking and bathing water for a city like Las Vegas are dwarfed by the volumes needed for the farming of sugar beets, alfalfa for dairy, golf course grass maintenance, etc. If current trends in the American Southwest continue, extreme water conservation will have to become the norm (the other alternative being depopulation…
Yeah we can't realistically get better water outcomes by only changing out supply. We have to change our usage too. Farms should be converting to crops that have lower water usage, and food manufacturers should be converting to foods that make use of those crops.
Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest
#110I know he inputs some numbers, but I am just supremely skeptical of them. If solar + batteries + RO plants could produce water at a price that made agriculture economically viable, then I just don't see how it wouldn't already be happening. Or at the very least be being proposed more broadly than some random guys blog. If I understand correctly, it is his plan for extracting value from the brine which represents the…
> If solar + batteries + RO plants could produce water at a price that made agriculture economically viable, then I just don't see how it wouldn't already be happening.
The costs of solar and batteries have been dropping for decades. It's 100% believable that this type of thing has been considered, repeatedly, and discarded as economically infeasible, leading to the major players in the field choosing to ignore it for a while—but that the costs have now dropped enough that the economics work out.