Press Action

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Water on the Brain

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Posted 07/13 |

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Some places have a surplus of water and some have a shortage, but it’s usually all but impossible to ship significant amounts from one to the other.

Arizona has a shortage of water. Atlanta has water rationing. In Cleveland, which sits on the shore of Lake Erie, they’re encouraging people to use MORE water. Cleveland’s steel mills once used hundreds of millions of gallons of water a year, but most have closed. The city has a huge overcapacity now. But there’s no viable way to get the water from Cleveland to Arizona. It’s even harder to ship overseas.

Oil can be shipped overseas, but the cost is high. Oil is selling for $60 a barrel right now. That’s $1.90 a gallon. (31.5 gallons = 1 barrel) Even at a tenth of that price, it wouldn’t be feasible to ship water in useful quantities. Which means that the fine folks in Cleveland are free to water their lawns to their hearts’ content. Even if they stopped, it wouldn’t help the people who are dying of thirst.

Improved desalinization technology seems like the best hope for the future. Israel and the United States are both doing a lot of work in this area. I hope they succeed.

Posted by me from my house on 07/17 at 01:07 AM

<html>The image of the doorman watering a sidewalk paints a nice little picture of something to get angry at, but it serves no practical purpose. As the poster above points out, the main culprit for the water “shortage” is Mother Nature and her capricious ways. I’m willing to bet that a good portion of those 6300 people that die every day from lack of water live in either arid or semi-arid areas, or in the slums of third-world cities that are either unable or unwilling to provide all of their citizens with potable water. Folks in Manhattan water the sidewalks because they can, and to fault them for it creates an imagined conflict that obscures the more important part of the human influence on the distribution of water: If the United States were located in the Saharan region, good, efficient, cheap desalinization technology would have been developed long ago. Since it’s mostly those poor bedeviled third-world folk who are affected, it just doesn’t get the same priority it would otherwise.</html>

Posted by Braz Cubas from The 'Burbs on 07/19 at 10:26 PM

In August, Israel will open the world’s largest (by far) desalinization plant. The Ashkelon plant will produce 110 million cubic meters of drinking water per year. If my math is correct, that’s roughly 29 billion gallons a year. And it’s only one of a series of plants they have under construction. Several others will come online in the next six months. By 2020, the plan is to produce 750 million cubic meters of water per year.

The Ashkelon plant is expected to produce desalinated water at a cost of 53 cents per cubic meter. That’s roughly two tenths of a cent per gallon. (Assuming my math is right.)

Here’s a link to an article describing the plants, which also includes an interesting history of the two guys who developed the reverse osmosis process. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1122171712403

Israel is also building a massive ion exchange system to remove boron from otherwise unusable water. This is a world first. See:
http://www.waterandwastewater.com/www_services/news_center/publish/article_00656.shtml

If Israel can make it work on a massive, industrial scale, the technology will spread to other parts of the world as well. I’m rooting for them!

Posted by me from In the middle on 07/27 at 10:54 PM

Those links didn’t come out right. You have to string these two parts together into one link:

The desalinization plants:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?
pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1122171712403

The boron removal plant:
http://www.waterandwastewater.com/www_services/
news_center/publish/article_00656.shtml

Posted by me from here and there on 07/27 at 11:00 PM