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A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest

caseyhandmer.wordpress.com

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Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest

#151

Post by zbrozek »

solardev wrote: post #48
zbrozek wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a way to know how much to care? We do all sorts of things that displace species, so having some way of contextualizing and weighting the harm against the benefit would be helpful.

This is necessarily a value judgment, isn't it? There are tools like lifecycle analyses and environmental impact reports and threatened species lists that can help estimate/enumerate impacts. But ultimately how much to care is a personal question, and people are going to disagree over whether some small fish or rare owl or fluffy panda is worth more or less than someone's job or a local industry or just some other ch…

I would start by wanting to know about the impact and benefit relative to other activities which we already do. Like how's it compare to various flavors of farming?

Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest

#152

Post by solardev »

zbrozek wrote: post #151
solardev wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is necessarily a value judgment, isn't it? There are tools like lifecycle analyses and environmental impact reports and threatened species lists that can help estimate/enumerate impacts. But ultimately how much to care is a personal question, and people are going to disagree over whether some small fish or rare owl or fluffy panda is worth more or less than someone's job or a local industry or just some other ch…

I would start by wanting to know about the impact and benefit relative to other activities which we already do. Like how's it compare to various flavors of farming?

There's a database for California Environmental Quality Act reports, I think (Environmental Impact Reports? Statements? One is federal and the other is state, can't remember which is which). That probably have similar solar farms you can look at. Not sure about huge desal projects. Maybe overseas?

I'll try to find some analyses this weekend if I can.

Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest

#153

Post by sapling-ginger »

MostlyStable wrote: post #68
shermantanktop wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with the skepticism, and furthermore if this were such a killer moneymaker you'd expect multiple commercial efforts in this space already. But this is California - there may be reasons that are not economic or technical that have prevented anyone from trying to develop or pursue such an idea. The concentrated salt-brine discharge, for example, may be impossible to get environmental approval for at these volumes…

Israel is, I believe, the place in the world that has the most desal, and is actually already using it for ag. I'm not familiar with domestic/development policy in Israel, but I have trouble believing it's as restrictive as the CA. So not only has CA not already done it, but neither has Israel, who, at the very least must have different roadblocks. The point is, it's not only California (which I agree is pretty anti-…

Are we using that definition of "world" that somehow excludes any other country outside the western alliance? Saudi Arabia and six other countries have more seawater desalination capacity than Israel.

Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest

#154

Post by pas »

b112 wrote: post #27
nickparker wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RO desal splits the incoming ~3% salinity stream into two halves, one fresh and one ~6% salinity. This concentrated brine is fed to adjacent brine processing facilities (ideally in both countries) that exploit the region’s abundant solar and geothermal energy to extract potentially millions of tonnes of lithium, sodium, magnesium, chloride, and other metals found in sea water. The resulting depleted brine is piped…

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/08/02/a-chemical-hunger-p... This guy claims that Lithium may be partially responsible for some weight gain in our population, but also, that desalination plants cause extra lithium as well. If it was mined out, that would be viable, but if not...

It's probably not lithium.

And despite the initially valid-seeming high hopes for their amazing scholarship, currently it looks that they are too crackpot-y :/

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get...

Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest

#155

Post by pas »

pas wrote: post #154
b112 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/08/02/a-chemical-hunger-p... This guy claims that Lithium may be partially responsible for some weight gain in our population, but also, that desalination plants cause extra lithium as well. If it was mined out, that would be viable, but if not...

It's probably not lithium. And despite the initially valid-seeming high hopes for their amazing scholarship, currently it looks that they are too crackpot-y :/ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba... https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get...

Out of the edit window, but this seems like a nice summary of the current understanding of the hypothesis: https://manifold.markets/LarsDoucet/will-the-contaminant-hyp...

Will the contaminant hypothesis of modern obesity be judged true by expert consensus before 2032? 8% yes 92% no

Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest

#156

Post by MostlyStable »

sapling-ginger wrote: post #153
MostlyStable wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Israel is, I believe, the place in the world that has the most desal, and is actually already using it for ag. I'm not familiar with domestic/development policy in Israel, but I have trouble believing it's as restrictive as the CA. So not only has CA not already done it, but neither has Israel, who, at the very least must have different roadblocks. The point is, it's not only California (which I agree is pretty anti-…

Are we using that definition of "world" that somehow excludes any other country outside the western alliance? Saudi Arabia and six other countries have more seawater desalination capacity than Israel.

I put "believe" specifically because I knew I didn't know much on the topic and they were a country I knew used a lot. I was very intentionally signalling my lack of certainty about that sentence. A simple correction rather than an assumption of....whatever the hell it is you are vaguely accusing me of would have been much more helpful.

That being said, thanks for the heads up! However, it really just strengthens my point that even more countries are using desal and not mining the brine.

Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest

#157

Post by margalabargala »

Accujack wrote: post #129
margalabargala wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The Salton sea is the home of a huge lithium deposit, and it's unlikely that anything but geothermal and lithium mining will happen there in the near future. Certainly not "restoration" to what it was when it was accidentally created.

My understanding is that the lithium in the salton sea is relatively less accessible than other nearby lithium deposits, such as the new mine starting up in northern Nevada. Sort of nearby I suppose.

Between that and the increasing availability of sodium ion batteries it may never actually be economical to mine the Salton Sea, especially considering people actually live nearby and would be affected by the mine; unlike the mines in northern Nevada.

Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest

#158

Post by VintageCool »

MostlyStable wrote: post #51

I 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…

The cost of solar dropped by 90% between 2010 and 2020, and the cost of panels fell by 14% last year. Batteries were just straight up not a thing until 2019: California's grid-scale battery storage capacity has been doubling every year since then.

Putting together the solar panels, the battery, the desalination plant, and the brine plant, he's proposing a $42 billion dollar project that has only been economically feasible for a year or two now. I'm not surprised that it hasn't been built yet.

Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest

#159

Post by tuatoru »

hnmullany wrote: post #143
tuatoru wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is. We do it with urban wastewater in thousands of locations around the world. This is not a hard problem, nor is it expensive.

Waste brine is substantially more dense than regular seawater, so it tends to form a coherent layer that doesn't mix easily: it's why waste brine sinks to the sea-bed and spreads out in a layer.

Diffusers are a thing. Fairly well understood.

Re: A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest

#160

Post by thehappypm »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #147
thehappypm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, I think you could take the Brine and just put it somewhere else. Like, into mine shafts, or into evaporation pools for mining purposes.

Considering that the brine output of a single large-ish plant might be 150,000m³ per day[1], that's a hell of a mine shaft to take it continuously. The rock with the same volume as a day's brine would weigh a million tons. The entire Aberfan spoil tips were only 2 weeks worth of that much volume (2 million cubic metres). The gigantic Hambach open-pit mine grows by 0.3km³ a year, so that could take it (but it can't ta…

The brine has value too though, and possibly even more than the fresh water, if you extract the salts from it post-evaporation.

Or, just be the world’s biggest producer of pickles

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