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.

Silo in the ocean.Pump the water out.
Put filter in bottom of silo.The ocean will fill
the silo.You know water seeks it’s own level.
But what do I know? [;)
Alfred

In response to Robert Willie, my understanding is that you need a very high pressure high velocity pump to make the system operate effectively. I can’t see a silo doing this. The pump needs to push the saltwater pass the screens at more than ten times the permeate water that exits the membranes. So if did have a silo, you need a much smaller pump to feed it, but a very large high pressure pump is required to work against the osmotic pressure of the process.
The retentate is bled off back into the ocean. The process slows as the recentate increases in salt concentration. Hence the need to feed and bleed.

hmmm….

Clarification – that should have read ‘…Lockheed’s magic membranes to split seawater into freshwater and concentrated brine’ instead of ‘split the salt from freshwater’. Seeing thermodynamics affronted brings out the ranter in me I’m afraid.

Since we are forever being threatened with climate related natural disasters you might like to add another statement to your list:
The best defence against natural disasters is prosperity.

Disko Troop says:
March 18, 2013 at 2:11 am
Where do we put the salt?
———————-
On the steak from the cow that ate the grass that grew in what was once a desert. Progress!

rogerknights says:
rogerknights says:
March 18, 2013 at 3:46 am
“To calculate the real costs of nuclear power, you would have to tip in the loss of production over a large area around Fukushima, and the on-going costs of ‘temporary’ accommodation for the 150,000 people who, two years on, are still displaced.
Such costs don’t apply to nuclear plants that aren’t 1) built along the coast in a region liable to tsunamis and 2) built with their emergency power generators in the basement”
Absolutely correct.
It is hard to comprehend the stupidity of the Japanese Regulator, to a) allow the siting, and b) to leave the emergency generators to be exposed to flooding.
Japan like the former Soviet Union has a culture which discourages challenge from below, hence stupid decisions go unchallenged.
Certainly the UK safety case approach and Regulator interaction would preclude such obviously stupid arrangements to be employed.
Japan like the Soviet Union, has a culture which [discourages]
[Something trimmed or skipped? Mod]

On the issue of water Willis, I agree that energy is the driving force. Probably the same could be said about the production of energy (oil, coal, electricity). However, on some other commodities such as minerals and food I am less sure. Energy is not always the determining factor. I enjoyed your post like always. Waiting for the one where you were captured by pirates 😉
I recall a Canadian company that converted salt water to fresh water using sea wave energy. While the cost of installation was high (relative to the fresh water output) it seemed as though the countries who could use the technology the most (e.g. small islands like Haiti) were also the poorest. This further suggests that your analysis might be limited more to richer countries that can afford the initial infrastructure.

Jon T says:
March 18, 2013 at 4:10 am
“Don’t believe me? Look up Osmotic Power on Wikipedia or wherever. The Norwegians have built a power plant that runs on the salinity difference between freshwater and seawater. So why not just use Lockheed’s magic membranes to split the salt from freshwater and then recombine them to make power, and don’t let the first law of thermodynamics get in your way. ”
They have a demonstration plant as big as a hall that produces enough power to warm a cup of coffee. So by that example, osmotic power is rather low.

****
Climate Ace says:
March 18, 2013 at 2:51 am
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.
****
There are no “costs” of AWG, other than imaginary. The benefits of increased CO2 to plant growth are quantifiable, tho.

Bruce Cobb says:
March 18, 2013 at 5:20 am
Squiddy – are you serious, or are you a troll? Or are you a traditional Liberal-Green fantasist, who knows diddly-squat about the real world?
So yes, Squiddy, we can run out of water, and the result would be a reduction in sanitation resulting in disease, and a reduction in farming resulting in famine. Not to mention the fact that many industrial processes and many fabrics depend on water for production, resulting in layoffs, poverty, and a huge reduction in standard of living.
————————————
The world has plenty of water.
It would take a really lazy, socialist, cowardly and stupid population (see California) to allow a government to act so irresponsibly that there would be “a reduction in sanitation resulting in disease, and a reduction in farming resulting in famine. Not to mention the fact that many industrial processes and many fabrics depend on water for production, resulting in layoffs, poverty, and a huge reduction in standard of living.”
The value of fresh water may go up locally but there will always be enough.
That is unless the government screws up (again – some more – still) and prevents progress.
Is there something I’m missing in the water cycle?
You’re not with the EPA, are you?
cn

Onose. Who let Fanny in?

Dodgy Geezer said @ March 18, 2013 at 3:53 am

…discussions about ‘water shortages’ are really discussions about how much infrastructure we are willing to install and pay for. NOT about ‘saving the natural world by using less of a scarce resource’.

FWIW, The roof of the Git’s modest (1500 ft^2) dwelling catches far more rainwater than we use for washing, cooking, drinking, watering a small greenhouse* etc. Storage is approximately 5,000 gallons (Imperial); rainfall averages 32 inches p.a. This summer southern Tasmania’s rainfall has been well below average (and much warmer than average which is wonderful) and we reached a low point of “only” 3,000 gallons in the storage tank.
The cost of supplying our own water is considerably less than what the water authority charges those on their scheme despite their supposed economies of scale. Nor do we have to tolerate summertime water restrictions the authority imposes. Our water is also a lot cleaner than the municipal water supply. Until quite recently, the Hobart City Council prosecuted anyone found to be harvesting the rainwater from their rooftops. But then rationality has never been governments’ strong point.
* We also have a 250,000 gallon runoff dam that supplies water for irrigating the gardens, cattle etc. I have been chastised by greenie-weenies for “wasting” this water when they see the sprinklers running.

ralfellis says:
March 18, 2013 at 10:11 am
You missed the applications for 12 reservoirs that Dodgy Geezer mentioned.
All were rejected and none on environmental grounds, in fact 5 of them had passed environmental impacts and were awaiting final permissions.
No, they were rejected on the grounds that Thames water were wasting too much water through infrastructure leakage.
There will always be leakage on an ageing system and they’re struggling to renew as they’re spending so much time & energy fire-fighting current leakage. I don’t like defending the thieving bastards that are the water companies, but they do have a point.
DaveE.

I think some commenters may be drifting away from the point Willis is trying to make. Even if the thermodynamics are not totally correct, the relationshipo between energy and prosperity remains. To make the point another way….I will use a different technology to accomplish the same effect on prosperity. Thorium molten salt reactors can be used to generate electricity and in the process throw off waste heat. The waste heat can be used to desalinate seawater using multiple effect evaporators instead of filters or membranes. By my back of the envelope calculation, a molten salt reactor of gigawatt size would throw off enough waste heat to create 3.7 TRILLION gallons per year of desalinated seawatwer. Different technology, but the effect would be the same in terms of lifting the poor out of proverty and generating wealth. The real question is: Why is the United States not pursuing at flank speed to perfect the molten salt technology?????

And similarly, when a new computer is said to be “twice as light as the old model”, or a new filter is “500 times thinner” only idiots and grammar nazis think that should mean twice the weight and 500 times the thickness.
Willis,
You may very well classify me as a “grammar nazi” for this, but, “half the thickness” is an unambiguous way of saying “twice as thin.” In fact “twice as thin” can just as easily be understood to mean “twice as thick.” “One five-hundreth” the thickness is likewise unambiguous.
One of the causes of the development of jargons is that ambiguity needs to be reduced in a discipline or practice and meaning made as explicit as possible. As a sailor you are used to using one of the oldest jargons in the world and it is that old because sailing absolutely requires unambiguity. Port and starboard were used commonly because left and right are relative to your view direction while port and starboard are strictly oriented to the vessel. The fellow at the wheel or tiller has to absolutely know which way to turn it when the lookout starts screaming in terror and gesturing. Cowboys have their own jargon too.
My daughter, with a degree in lioguistics, frequently made the argument to me that English is “as we use it” when she was an undergrad, and that English, being a living language, changes, adapts and evolves. I agree whole heartedly, BUT. I say nothing, but smile a lot, because, these days, working on her masters, I note that she is pretty unhappy with the undergrads she has to deal with. They frequently don’t fully understand and can’t accurately use standard English or the common jargon employed in the field of Linguistics, much to her disgust. WIth a knowledge of standard usage you are capable of communicating with anyone who also can cope with standard useage. If you can’t use it accurately or your trying to communicate with someone seriously handicapped by modern educational doctrine, that can be a problem.

The bottom line is this:
Cheaper energy gives people a higher standard of living, and a greater ability to rise out of poverty. Technology is just a mechanism to apply energy to a system and derive the desired result. The control of fire, stands as one of our greatest technological innovations. The development of spoken and written languages, rivals fire control, as the greatest technical innovations of mankind. We have a history of building on past successes, and learning from them.
The internal combustion engine has certainly expanded our use of energy, but it has enriched our lives, enough to create a demand, for the technology and the energy to power it.
Expensive energy, gives energy providers and governments, control over the lives, and decisions of people. Expensive energy means jobs that are not economically viable, and so will never be available. The jobs most at threat are the ones with the thinnest margins. Generally low skilled jobs or manual labor jobs are never created. Frequently these jobs are filled by young workers, or those that will need government assistance, without the job, that sadly, will not be created.
So we can have growth and an expanding level of freedom, or we can have stagnation, and political squabbles over allocating resources, that are supplied at a price, that is not affordable to large segments of the population.
We have the technology to provide energy at much cheaper prices, but do we have the political will to demand, energy supplied at the price, determined by free markets, instead of allocated by corrupt political interests.

Not to muddle the waters any more – bad pun intended. NaCl is in a disassociated state in H2O, however recombination does occur. There is a large k pointing toward Na + Cl and a very small one pointing the other way. The fluctuations due to the recombination are detectable. The recombinations is one of the reasons (apart from physical defects) why NaCl can appear on the other side of a permeable membrane, and the amount matches the small k value closely if there are no defects.
By doping graphene on one side, or making a double layer and doping one layer, it’s possible to make one side hydrophilic and one hydrophobic, done right, it could work like a linac with a positive attactive charge getting acceleration of the molecule toward the mesh, and after transiting the mess, having a repulsive force driving it forward. It might be easier to accelerate the two ions, Na and Cl through different meshes, leaving H2O behind to be transported forward for additional deionization.

OK, here is the Plan. We get energy from fracking and then use that energy to create fresh water to replace the fresh water that his being destroyed in water tables by fracking.

Re: Steven Mosher
build an impossible machine and keep three distinct customers happy.
bad idea from the start
Is it a bad idea to have a single prototype cost and common parts for all branches of the military, or is it better to have each one farm out its own contract, and maintain a unique supply chain?
JSF breaks new ground in military aviation in several areas. EVERY time that has happened in the past, it has caused schedule problems and over-budget programs. That is the nature of government procurement programs, and why they are the least cost-effective way to produce anything, except, things you don’t want to be freely available to your enemies.
That is what is predictable from the start. I suggest if you can do better, there is plenty of money to be made. Whip up a prototype and submit it to the pentagon.

I think you are mostly correct, but here are some comments:
“There is never a shortage of resources. It’s a shortage of cheap enough energy to get the resources economically.”
Indirectly, you equate space and distance here with energy, or more simply, space with energy. (I don’t think this was what Einstein had in mind with E=MC2. Ultimately, energy is related to mass, but not space (?)). E.g. if one requires a certain rare metal to run an industrial process that allows better utilisation of energy, and if that metal only exists on the other side of the world, there is a spatial shortage of the metal that the energy utilisation in the area requires to function. Getting the metal from the other side of the world does require energy, but also time (the old adage ‘time is money’, not ‘energy is money’). Moreover, because of human poiltical boundaries, which have little/nothing to do with energy, one may not be able to secure a supply of such a metal. It’s hard to see how natural variation in spatial distribution, coupled with time and human politics, doesn’t lead to a shortage of resources, independant of ‘cheap’ energy. Abundant amounts of energy does not necassarily equate to porous political boundaries.
“Energy and money are inextricably linked.”
True, but I would possibly say that resources, in all their forms, (which includes energy, as well as social, agricultural, mining, forestry and ecological resources), and money are inextricably linked.
• “Making energy expensive hurts, impoverishes, and even kills the poor.”
The only cavaet I can think off hand to this, would be if there was a monopoly of energy ownership, and energy type, being utilised which distorts the prices of the available energy in that society. Making the type of energy used by the monopoly more expensive could, theoretically, drive out those distorting prices and make energy cheaper for everybody, including the poor, but only if: 1) there were other forms of energy which could effectively and economically compete with that energy without subsidies, and 2) there was a corrupt or inefficient monopoly of energy ownership inflating prices to begin with. (Both of these are linked, and therefore highly dubious if one or the other isn’t present).
“Technology is not bulldozers. It’s getting more production using less energy.”
True. A curious example of this is utilising past energy stored over long time periods which is far larger than any energy currently being produced by nature, eg oil and gas is simply past stored solar energy in the form of carbon bonds; concentrated metaliferous deposits are either past stored heat and pressure within the earth, or in other cases stored chemical decomposition, alteration and mass transfer by weather/weathering (bauxite), and in still other cases stored energy from biogeochemical breakdown/enrichment of minerals by organisms utilising solar or chemical energy over time, but the principle is the same in each case-metal mines utilise nature’s past energy which has concentrated the metals by one of other process over time.

Dodgy Geezer says: March 18, 2013 at 3:53 am
“………
1 – water is a commodity which is never ‘used’ it circulates through us as part of a cycle
2 – it can never, therefore be ‘short’. There are, and will remain, cubic kilometers of water for every person on the planet.
3 – when ‘water shortages’ are mentioned, what is really meant is that there is a shortage of water abstraction and storage capability. In a word, water infrastructure. The raw material can never be short.
4 – so discussions about ‘water shortages’ are really discussions about how much infrastructure we are willing to install and pay for. NOT about ‘saving the natural world by using less of a scarce resource’.
….[…..]….. Energy, water and many other commodities essential to life are NOT to be allowed to be cheap. Otherwise we would use ‘too much’ of them. It is this attitude, based on green activism in government, which needs to be addressed.
Dodgy … you make a really important point here – ‘shortage’ is always about the intertwined forces of economics and politics.
Do you mind if I use your 4 points elsewhere?
I like to attribute sources (“Dodgy Geezer; 18 Mar 2013 3.5AM” WUWT ? )

sfitz
Thanks for accepting the basic concept of the need to look at both sides of the balance sheet when evaluting the true cost/benefits of energy and the next step which is to price energy at fair value.
But do individuals actually do apply this comprehensive approach on a routine basis? There would be several thousand posts on WUWT where ‘cheap’ energy is used as if it is axiomatic that the market operates efficiently and effectively with respect to internalizing all aspects of energy costs in the energy price.
While ever individuals use the term ‘cheap’ while refusing to internalize all the costs, they are missing their own point in a most fundamental way. As a corollary, while individuals use the term ‘expensive’ while refusing to internalize all the benefits, they are also mising their own point in a most fundamental way.
I was especially taken with your use of specified time periods for your discussions. We all know that the markets often operate in a different time frame from the externalities associated with energy use. (I offer as an example, the market value of TEPCO since Fukushima. The externalities arrived long after the short-term benefits to both shareholders and consumers).
Inter alia, this is a structural fault in market operation is exposing us to the early consequences of, and future consequences of AGW, long after humankind has consumed the short-term benefits of falsely-named ‘cheap’ energy.

Climate Ace says:
March 18, 2013 at 8:18 pm
Thanks for accepting the basic concept of the need to look at both sides of the balance sheet when evaluting the true cost/benefits of energy and the next step which is to price energy at fair value.
‘Fair value’ is Leftistspeak for what some special interest wants the price to be.
Having said that I don’t have a problem with charging for the use of the commons, and the atmosphere is the ultimate commons. And charging for use of the commons is the proper function of government, as the commons belongs to all of us, and such charges been going on a very long time (charges for use of public spaces, mining royalties, etc). And if use of the commons negatively impacted the wider population, then charges for use of the commons should reflect the costs of those impacts.
But I have to agree with Willis that the supposed costs imposed on the wider population via use of the commons (atmosphere) from fossil fuel use are extremely dubious, ie Stern etc. I’ve done plenty of costs/benefit analyses, and could easily do one that shows a trillion dollar benefit from fossil fuel use by factoring in increased agricultural yields, increased precipitation, opening up of NE and NW passages, decreased illness and deaths from domestic burning of biofuels, etc.

Osmotic power is limited by what would be the energy of mixing freshwater and seawater, which apparently is 0.81 kWh per m^3 of seawater (wikipedia: osmotic power). So, for instance, if one had a desalination plant within around a factor of 2 of theoretical max efficiency, it would presumably be around 1.6 kWh/m^3 or less.
Present desalination plants reportedly use up to 4 to 8 kWh/m^3 after all inefficiencies.
Electricity costs to industrial-scale users are around half or less of residential electricity prices. Industrial electricity prices can be around $0.05/kWh and in some areas less. Thermal power can be multiple times cheaper still than electrical power, and, if getting unusually creative in integration, a nuclear reactor located at the same site might relatively directly elevate water pressure without as many stages of energy conversion and transmission first.
But, for the sake of illustration, merely suppose $0.05/kWh, even though less is conceivable.
Then the energy cost of desalination becomes:
<= $0.08 / m^3 if under a factor of 2 inefficiency (likely aided by graphene filters if capital costs low enough)
<= $0.20 to $0.40 / m^3 for current desalination plants
Even the latter figure is much different from the total cost of desalination seen in figure 2 of this article ($0.50+/m^3), which would suggest that energy costs are somewhat over-hyped compared to other expenses (such as amortized capital costs).
But, conservatively and fairly reasonably, let's just guess that desalination with future technology does not cost more than $0.10 to $0.50 per m^3. After all, at the top end, that corresponds to what is already obtained.
Each cubic meter is 264.2 gallons.
That means $1 of desalinated water amounts to 530 to 2600 gallons.
The cost is $0.0004 to $0.002 per gallon of desalinated water. The cost of U.S. municipal tap water today, without desalination, is $0.002 to $0.006 per gallon (typically $24 to $73 per month, depending on the city, for a family using 400 gallons per day and using about 12170 gallons a month).
The latter includes some distribution, chlorination, and other expenses applying in any event, but desalination would add very little extra at most. In fact, being already purified by reverse osmosis, not having as many complications and variation in supply, there is not even necessarily any net cost for desalination, depending on the locality.
Average total water usage per individual American is 62600 gallons a month,* of which near 3000 gallons a month are residential usage while the vast majority is agricultural and industrial usage.
(* Based on: “in the USA the average water footprint is 2842 m^3/yr per capita.” from http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/WaterFootprintsNations )
That “water footprint” metric might be an overestimate. I’d have to check details of its definition, as the corresponding 2.3 acre-feet per person per year is suspiciously about double the figures in http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/arithmetic.html . But it certainly isn’t an underestimate. And even producing 100% of it by desalination would only add up to $1 to $5 per month per person to residential water bills, while being up to $290 to $1400 annually per capita in total (mostly embedded in agricultural costs). Those figures are actually far more pessimistic than would ever occur, because:
(1) Rainfall, rivers, and freshwater would not magically all disappear, so never would a full 100% from desalination be needed
(2) Most of the water usage is in irrigation of conventional agriculture which could be made more water efficient on average if water prices thus rose somewhat
Incidentally, what looking at these figures also illustrates is how much the supposed need for water-saving toilets is vastly over-hyped. Even I hadn’t realized quite how minor residential water usage is overall compared to agricultural water usage.
In summary, though, desalination can be plenty cheap enough.
And the article is quite right overall.
If I was going to nitpick, I’d rephrase the fourth bullet point in the article as: Technology is about getting more results for less labor.
Using more energy in the process is often done, like driving a 2000-kilogram car to transport one’s body instead of only bicycling, or air conditioning a house instead of sprinkling water on oneself while shirtless. Civilization today uses vastly more energy per person than pre-fire primitive hominids, and that is of overall huge benefit. As technology advances, human energy usage should further increase, to third world countries reaching first-world levels, to a civilization expanding into space. Energy use is only universally and intrinsically bad under the (untrue) energy religion, the assumption of many of similar politics to the CAGW movement that the several TW-average used by civilization today are fundamentally an excessive energy waste in an universe with 200000 TW of sunlight hitting Earth, trillions of tons of thorium & uranium in the terrestrial crust, and a Sun wasting 400,000,000,000,000 terawatts into empty space.
Output relative to human labor, how much someone can get done per hour of work done or time spent, is a fundamental metric of whether in poverty or prosperity.

EMSmith
I note your negative comment on cost/benefit and note that so-called ‘cheap’ energy, and its consequences, makes an implicit judgement about cost/benefit.
‘But “most cities are not in the desert”? Who you kidding! Never hear of Phoenix? Los Angeles? (Water shipped in from N. California) Heck, most of California is a technical desert. Then there are all those resorts in Baja. And El Paso. Don’t forget El Paso… Or a large part of Chile. The reality is that folks love to live in a ‘Mediterranean Climate’ and those happen where cold water off the coast causes a desert environment just inland. So we load those places up to the limit of imported / mined water. Start having water in “desert coastal” areas, you will find another Los Angeles or Phoenix worth of people paying good money to build and move in. ‘
I was thinking globally. No european cities are in deserts. Most Russian cities are not in deserts. No Scandinavian cities are in deserts. The majority of chinese cities are not in deserts, although the deserts are heading for Beijing. No south-east asian cities are in deserts. No central american cities are in deserts. No south american cities east of the Andes are in deserts. Most south asian cities are in the great floodplains of the Ganges and the Indus. Of Australian cities, most are not in deserts. The middle east and central asian area might be worth a look for the balance of cities in and out of deserts, but many middle eastern cities are in the better-watered fertile crescent and the great flood plains of the Euphratres and the Tigris. Irrigation using waters sourced from distant areas has changed the patter for some cities. Oil has altered that pattern somewhat in oil producing countries. Tourism has done the same. Most African cities are not in deserts. Even central asian cities, possibly the class which is closest to deserts, often has the cities located in rangelands rather than deserts per se.
But, even if you limited the discussion to the US, most US cities are not in deserts. My definition of desert is a less than 10″ of rainfall per annum. It therefore explicitly excludes most of the planet’s rangelands. We could argue the term ‘deserts’ but there is not much point.
My original point about deserts and where people live (cities, mostly) holds. Globally, deserts are generally were people aren’t. People aren’t generally where deserts are. Human settlement pattern history is replete with the drivers.
Extremely cheap water would certainly change the future of the world.

Willis,
Re. the earlier discussion, many thanks to Henry Clark for digging out the relevant figures.
Current desalination energy requirement: 4-8 kWh/m3
Reduce it by factor 100 using graphene : 0.04-0.08 kWh/m3
Take our freshwater made using graphene and remix with seawater. We will get back 0.81 KWh/m3 for our 0.08 kWh/m3 input.
Hence a perpetual motion machine, and a pretty good one at that.
In fact the energy we get back could be greater because we could mix the freshwater with the concentrated reject brine from the RO process. The higher the salnity difference the more energy (though volume effects might balance it).
I’m not concerned with the digression into $ values for the process, the issue was simply with that ‘100 times less energy’ headline claim.
In any case, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so the onus to provide detailed figures should really be those making the original claim

E.M. Smith
“(It is already happening on some country who’s name escapes me at the moment that started to subsidize propane cooking fuel).”
It’s the Dominican Republic. You can see the contrast between it and it’s neighbor Haiti, just by looking at satellite imagery.

Last I heard, you can’t measure thinness, so yes, it’s not only imprecise but incorrect to say 500 times as thin.
It’s an awful term and should be banned from anything remotely scientific!
DaveE.

Googling “99% fat free” gives 1,940,000 hits while “1% fat” generates 29,000,000 hits. There’s hope for us “grammar nazis” yet! 😉

Willis Eschenbach, it is up to you, but you might consider adding the following graph to the article, for in a single concise plot it implicitly sums up very much about desalination, what the future was already trending towards even before graphene filter innovation may accelerate the trend, and what it means for water supply:
http://s18.postimage.org/oqfj2d53d/desalination_summary.jpg
(The above is from http://www.worldwaterweek.org/documents/WWW_PDF/2009/tuesday/K11/Koussai_Quteishat_Stockholm_Water_Week.pdf ).