Energy, Resources, Money, and Technology

Sorry Mark, that is incorrect.
Shortages also exist where consumption (market size) exceeds supply (production). This can be temporary (due to distortions eg hoarding) or permanent (due to commodity rarity like the supply of passenger pigeons). In the later case, no possible increase in price will increase the supply.

The primary resources needed by civilization are water, energy, metals, hydrogen + carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen.
Water is illustrated well in this article.
On energy, there is all from the surge in natural gas reserves by fracking now to what even Wikipedia notes on thorium: “Even common granite rock with 13 PPM thorium concentration (just twice the crustal average, along with 4 ppm uranium) contains potential nuclear energy equivalent to 50 times the entire rock’s mass in coal,[82] although there is no incentive to resort to such very low-grade deposits so long as much higher-grade deposits remain available and cheaper to extract.[83]”
13% of even the average rock, amongst quadrillions of tons in Earth’s crust, is comprised of the metals used most: iron and aluminum.
Hydrogen and carbon are abundant, from methane hydrates to H2O+CO2 to other available sources. Those plus an energy source allow Fischer-Tropsch synthesis of plastics if needed.
Nitrogen (such as for Haber process fertilizer) is nearly 4/5ths of air, with the rest mostly oxygen.
As even part of Wikipedia notes, under criticisms of peak element claims:
“As some illustrations, tin, copper, iron, lead, and zinc all had both production from 1950 to 2000 and reserves in 2000 much exceed world reserves in 1950, which would be impossible except for how “proved reserves are like an inventory of cars to an auto dealer” at a time, having little relationship to the actual total affordable to extract in the future.[58] In the example of ‘peak phosphorus,’ additional concentrations exist intermediate between 71,000 MT of identified reserves (USGS)[59] and the approximately 30,000,000,000 MT of other phosphorus in Earth’s crust, with the average rock being 0.1% phosphorus, so showing decline in human phosphorus production will occur soon would require far more than comparing the former figure to the 190 MT/yr of phosphorus extracted in mines (2011 figure).[58][59][60][61]
Anti-industry ideologues speak in terms of vague “resources,” but, if looking at specifics accurately, the BS in their claims is exposed.

They also mention the new filter as being much stronger than current filters which means fewer replacements and longer lifespans resulting in lower labour costs.

Kevin Hilde says:
March 17, 2013 at 11:55 pm
I guess my question is ….
Assuming water level inside the silo is kept below filter level ….. is the energy required to pump the fresh water to the surface equal to the energy that would otherwise be required to desalinate at the surface?
Depends partly on geography.
Potentially if you had a coastline reasonably close to a depression lower than sea level, for example, the dead sea, you could construct a series of tunnels that would gravity feed, and you could potentially generate energy by using turbines in the tunnels.
The up side is, you get clean water, power, and it is a passive design.
It would work for example in california where the “salton sea” is shrinking from lack of water.
It was a large rift valley, below sea level,mostly barren desert.
The Salton Sea was made accidentally when a flood overwhelmed sluice gates on the Colorado river ,and for 3 years the entire flow flooded what was previously a desert.
For a while, towns sprang up along the edges , but with the river flow corrected, evaporation began shrinking the sea.

The idea behind making energy expensive is the same idea that led to Bretton Woods. The whole point IS to keep the poor poor!! This is how socialism is maintained and propagated. It’s not difficult to see. The World Bank and IMF lend money to even the most undemocratic bananarepublic, in exchange for ‘austerity measures’, in order to make sure the poor stay poor. Poor people vote for the socialist candidate and for further control by the state. The money from the IMF and World bank never goes to the population, only ever to governments. When money goes from one government to another it can only ever lead to the expansion of government. The climate change myth is just another tool in their arsenal to make sure socialism will continue. The fact that the World Bank is a huge driving force in propagating the climate change myth is not coincidental. Perhaps you think this is another conspiracy theory, but do your own research and you’ll see what I’m saying here is supported by facts.

Willis, if a Lockheed-Martin press release claimed to build a perpetual-motion machine, would you believe it? Neither should you believe Lockheed-Martin’s desalination press release.
The engineers who post on SlashDot have established that the gains in energy efficiency claimed in the Lockheed-Martin press release are thermodynamically bogus.
Please try to be less credulous and more critical in your scientific reading, Willis!
Perhaps cheap carbon energy has downsides too? A good starting-point is Michael Ross’s
The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations.

Where do we put the salt?

Kevin
There are lots of ways to fine tune desalination. Two parts of the process are 1) remove the salt concentrate away from the filtration system entry and 2) pre-clean the source water. There are lots of little creatures in sea water and they block up filters. Easy access to the filters is a must.

Bravo to the scientists and the engineers. I have long had my fingers crossed that technology devleopments would catch up with the rising human population so that people no longer have to go hungry.
Cheaper desalination by way of improved filters is, therefore, excellent news. It would reduce the amount of CO2 pollution emitted into the atmosphere just so people can drink clean water. It would reduce the amount of energy required for irrigation cropping. It might reduce the draw-down on freshwater systems where biodiversity loss in many areas is reaching catastrophic proportions. It would reduce or possibly even eliminate the global drawdown on fossil waters that underpins food production for so very much of the world’s population. It would almost certainly increase food supply to such an extent that global food commodity prices will decrease, with hunger becoming a small-scale, accidental occurrence rather than the large scale chronic issue it is right now.
As for cheap energy, who could possibly argue against cheap energy? It is a no brainer.
I heartily support cheap energy. Of course, to figure out the real costs of energy, the full costs of energy need to be included. Otherwise, you might not have cheap energy. You might have expensive energy for which you pay some of the costs now and some of the costs later.
One example would be Fukushima. To calculate the real costs of nuclear power, you would have to tip in the loss of production over a lare area around Fukushima, and the on-going costs of ‘temporary’ accommodation for the 150,000 people who, two years on, are still displaced.
Similarly, where cheap energy depends on emitting CO2, then the full costs of the energy would need to include either the costs of preventing AGW or the costs consequent to AGW, whichever choice humankind makes.
In relation to cheaper water by way of reduced energy use, the trick in the first instance will be to produce the graphene filters at a scale and a cost that is actually cheaper than current filters… something that has yet to be achieved. Large amounts of research funding are obviously going into potential applications for graphene, and into scaling graphene production up, so we should be seeing rapid developments.