Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I’ve made some statements lately that I’d like to reprise.
• There is never a shortage of resources. It’s a shortage of cheap enough energy to get the resources economically.
• Energy and money are inextricably linked.
• Making energy expensive hurts, impoverishes, and even kills the poor.
• Technology is not bulldozers. It’s getting more production using less energy.
People say, well, what about water? What if there’s a shortage of water? How does that relate to your statements above? You figure out how to manufacture water?
Figure 1. Graphene is a one-molecule-thick form of carbon, arranged in a hexagonal pattern. SOURCE
I’d like to illustrate all four of these statements with a recent news article, from Reuters:
Pentagon weapons-maker finds method for cheap, clean water
(Reuters) – A defense contractor better known for building jet fighters and lethal missiles says it has found a way to slash the amount of energy needed to remove salt from seawater, potentially making it vastly cheaper to produce clean water at a time when scarcity has become a global security issue.
The process, officials and engineers at Lockheed Martin Corp say, would enable filter manufacturers to produce thin carbon membranes with regular holes about a nanometer in size that are large enough to allow water to pass through but small enough to block the molecules of salt in seawater. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.
As you might guess, they make it out of graphene.
“It’s 500 times thinner than the best filter on the market today and a thousand times stronger,” said John Stetson, the engineer who has been working on the idea. “The energy that’s required and the pressure that’s required to filter salt is approximately 100 times less.”
Damn … a factor of a hundred? Two orders of magnitude less energy required? Are you aware what that will do?
Well … without cheap energy, it won’t do much at all, will it? … it takes a large amount of energy to pump the seawater through the reverse osmosis filters, even new graphene filters.
But with cheap energy? It can make the deserts bloom, quite literally. Israel’s doing it now, they are currently desalinating about three hundred million (300,000,000) cubic metres of water per year. That’s seventy-nine billion gallons, (79,000,000,000). And plants are now under construction to more than double that amount.
How much water is that? Well, when the new Israeli plants are at full capacity it will be enough to cover all of Israel’s current agricultural land with about 6″ (15 cm) of water. And they’re already doing it at a reasonable cost, even before the latest development. Right now, it’s about five gallons for one cent ($0.01).
Figure 2. Cost per cubic metre (black) for desalinated water around the world. I have added the cost per 100 US gallons in blue. The four outlined plants are in Israel.
Now, with the new graphene filters, the cost of water should be dropping, perhaps even by a factor of ten, for people from Algeria and Cyprus to Trinidad and Israel. And since this is just a filter and can be made in any shape, it can be made as a pin-to-pin replacement for filters in existing desalination plants. This can only be good news for the poor of the world.
Let me look at all of that discussion of desalination in terms of my statements reprised above:
• Technology is not bulldozers. It’s getting more production using less energy.
This is at the heart of the new development of the graphene filter for the reverse osmosis desalination of seawater.
• Making energy expensive hurts, impoverishes, and even kills the poor.
If a country has to pay twice as much for its energy, it will pay twice as much for its water. This hurts everyone, particularly the poor.
• Energy and money are inextricably linked.
The cost of the water is a function of the cost of energy.
• There is never a shortage of resources. It’s a shortage of cheap enough energy to get the resources economically.
If energy is cheap, then with technology many, many things are possible … including using endless seawater to turn the deserts green. On the other hand, if energy is expensive, resources are no longer economical, water costs more, and people suffer.
That’s all,
w.
Thanks Willis, interesting.
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.
This sounds like the energy requirements are so low you could run it with an old mechanical windmill doing some pumping.
I expected further declines in the cost of desalinating water while the Gleick’s were crying Wolf. Costs were already very affordable with current reverse osmosis.
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.
There, in a nutshell, is the crux of the problem, the old nanny ‘do-gooderism’, the neighborhood busy-bodies who are looking out for your ‘best interests’. You’ll find them in every town infected by left-liberalism here in the USA, eagerly holding ‘sustainability’ fairs and lectures. Unfortunately these nannies now have the power of the State behind them, like our “idiot-savant” Energy Secretary Chu (as Willis so aptly called him), cheering the steady rise of gasoline prices, as if that were somehow good for us.
Ultimately this whole debate over ‘global warming’ and other alarms comes down to a basic split in the West, between the freful and fearful Nannies, who would have us cowering in our little apartments and tending our communal kitchen gardens, on the one side; and the fans of Progress, who like V-8s and rocket ships and want to see more of them, on the other . We really should call the latter ‘Progressives’, but unfortunately the Nannies have appropriated the term and turned it on its head: ‘Sustainability’ is the opposite of Progress. Paradoxically the advocates of Progress are now the ‘Conservatives’. We need a new label: how about ‘Frontiersmen’? The essence of progress is pushing the Frontiers of knowledge and technology to create abundance and the ascendency of mankind over all obstacles.
At this point the Nannies seem to be winning the battle against the Frontiersmen. It’s time to turn that around.
/Mr Lynn
@ralfellis:
March 18, 2013 at 5:32 am
Have you ever wondered why there is no megapolis in the center of the Sahara Desert or the middle of Australia? Cities need fresh water, which is why Syria and Iraq were so upset when Turkey built the Euphrates dam. Hey, even the perennially wet London ran out of water in the noughties (2000 – 2010), because there is insufficient water storage in the SE of England. We had the wonderful spectacle of the Mayor of London telling its residents not to flush their toilets so often – and this in a 21st century Western capital city. Disgraceful.
So yes, Squiddy, we can run out of water,…
Ralfellis, you are deeply wrong here. We can NEVER run out of water, for the simple reason that we do not destroy it. It passes through our bodies in a cycle and returns again. You have fallen into a trap which is set by left-wing activists. They like to equate water failing to come out of a tap with a fundamental shortage of the resource itself, and thence they move to enforcing rationing. But what is really short here is not water – it is the infrastructure necessary to process and store it that is in short supply. You don’t seem to understand, as Squiddy does, that running out of water and running out of water storage are two quite different things.
When London ‘ran out of water’ a little while ago (as it has a habit of doing every time there is a spell of fine weather) the problem was NOT lack of water. It was lack of reservoirs – a direct result of government refusal to build infrastructure that the water companies had stated were needed. The reason we do not build large cities in the middle of the Sahara (there are actually some there, look up Tamanrasset, Ubari, Arlit or Murzuq) is that it would cost too much to provide the water infrastructure. But if we were to do such a thing, not one drop of that water would be ‘wasted’, no matter how much was lost to evaporation by the time it got there. We might have wasted billions on building thousands of miles of pumped canals, but we wouldn’t have wasted any water.
Water CANNOT be wasted, and WILL NEVER run out. If we are told not to flush our toilets, this is a failure of government to invest and provide the necessary infrastructure, NOT a shortage of some limited natural resource…
@Bruce Cobb
March 18, 2013 at 5:20 am
Laugh Of the Day, from Climate Ace above:
As for cheap energy, who could possibly argue against cheap energy? It is a no brainer…
I can’t see the joke. Could you explain it a little, please?
****
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.
The marvelous part of Climate Ace’s argument and that of the other greens is the total disregard of the costs of THEIR programs, both direct costs, and specifically ignored, the indirect costs.
With “Green Energy”, not only do the direct costs of the energy rise (including subsidies as a direct cost) the indirect costs are large as well, their components consume energy to produce far and away more than they generate. The components from which they are made remove scarce resources in demand from the market, thus increasing the costs of other products which the market is seeking. They reduce the available resources for production of other energy by diverting capital from where it would be more efficiently utilized. By making capital scarcer, they raise the costs on what would be even cheaper energy. At the same time, scarce capital makes development of products in other areas, either more expensive, or eliminates the possibility.
They’ve now stopped research on nuclear reactions of all types, at least in the western world. This means that the currently existing reactors won’t be replaced, and that new ones, should they be deployed, would cost significantly more, thus raising the price for that energy as well. Another problem is, where nuclear reaction research is currently being done, the record of caring about human life, is less than exemplary. Chernobyl didn’t happen really by accident, it was the result of a direct view of the value of human life. Of course, a number of the greens have expressed the desire to severely reduce the population of the planet, so the lack of safety systems may work well.
Given the safety record of the Chinese railroads, I’m not all that sanguine about the safety systems on their reactors – they’re not thorium reactors for the most part. We clearly know the Japanese regulators haven’t taken a serious look at reactor design, although we’re told that the rest of them are better designs, but I digress…
Cheap energy is available, just not in the fantasy world inhabited by the greens. With low cost energy the cost of pollution avoidance and remediation also drops, making it more readily available to the poor – they’re the ones washing their clothes in the open sewers in the developing world. Like Willis said, they need clean water, they can only get that from cheap energy.
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
If I may suggest a slight alteration for an expansion:
• Energy, time and money are inextricably linked.
• Making energy expensive hurts, impoverishes, and even kills the poor.
• Technology is not bulldozers. It’s getting more or better production using less energy or time.
Time is Money. Money is Time.
In much the same way a battery stores electricity and transformers can alter its voltage,
Money is a way to store labor and concentrate that labor for greater power in use.
ralfellis says:
March 18, 2013 at 5:14 am
All things in due time.
The next step is to let the Jordan river flow freely.
Just to remind you – we are still supplying water to Jordan state too.
What the hell does “It’s 500 times thinner” even mean?
If I have a filter that’s a micron thick, and someone offers one “500 times thinner”, then it would have to be 500 microns thinner, or -499 microns thick. And a negative thickness is absurd.
Perhaps what is meant is “1/500th as thick”, but that isn’t what it says.
Onose. Who let Fanny in?
Bernd Felsche says:
March 17, 2013 at 11:50 pm
F-35. Late. Over-budget. Doesn’t meet performance criteria. “Made” by LockMart.
Very low on the credibility scale at the moment.
####
Stop reading so much Marxist propaganda. Don’t you know that the lefties have been attacking Lockheed Martin along with every other conservatively ran Defense Contractor for 30 years or more. Its amazing that they still exist. Many others were driven out of business. Government regulations, if followed, will ALWAYS result in late and over-budget. But if your company donates handsomely to the Democrats and supports all the latest leftie causes then you can get away with everything including selling secrets to China!
Not sure how much thermodynamics has to do with this. The filter is thinner than the actual ions, more of a straight filtration. Commercialization of a product one molecule thick, now that will be something new. 1000 times stronger than steel! Next thing you know they will use it to make the elevator to space…
Kevin Hilde’s 11:25 pm suggestion of a silo got me thinking of a different configuration. (Alfred Alexander and jlawson sketched a similar ideas) Consider the carbon-dioxide removal fountains of Lake Nyos in Cameroon. Once you start the water flow, the less dense degassing water in the riser keeps water flowing up and out the riser as a fountain and bottom water flowing in the bottom. No power is needed. Can we make the differences in freshwater and sea water densities power the desalinator?
Take an offshore drilling riser.
Attach to its bottom a filter assembly (graphene will do, but any reverse osmosis filter ought to apply).
Make thousands of pleats in the filter to increase its surface area. The design has flow from outside the filter into the riser. Perhaps key to it’s working is that the Filter, resembling an oil filter, exposes the filter to the riser on the inside (A), and has a sealed outer jacket(B) with ports at the top(C) and bottom (D). C and D will be separated by good distance, maybe 1/2 the length of the riser system.
Find a place of deep water. Lower the riser string, filter first into the ocean.
Hydrostatic pressure will first push sea water through D to fill the outer shell of the filter.
Hydrostatic pressure will force water through the filter with fresher water in the empty riser core. (The Flaw in here)
As the riser descends, port C enters the water.
At this point, we should have Fresh Water level inside the riser A below sea level, the sea water outside the filter between C and D within B will be of higher salt concentration than sea water (because it has lost water through the filter to A). The fluid between C and D within B is now more dense that the sea water outside B. C and D are open. A circulation should start to flow from C to D within B, bringing in fresh sea water naturally.
We continue the lowering of the riser as deep as we need. For argument’s sake, let’s say 1000 m.
We reach target depth. Sea water is continuing to flow from C to D within B and denser water exits D. Fresher water flows into A via Reverse Osmosis. Does the water level in A rise to sea level? (No. See the flaw.)
The water density within A is 2.5% than the sea water outside the system. At 1000 m, the sea water hydrostatic will be 100.2 atm. So the hydrostatic pressure within a freshwater full riser at the base of the filter is 97.5 atm, giving a constant 2.5 atm across the filter.
The flaw in the argument is that the osmotic pressure between sea water and fresh water is 27 atm = 410 psi. You need 27 atm on the sea water side just to keep the fresh water from trying to dilute the sea water. So even if everything stayed constant, you would need to find a place 11,000 meters deep for the filter assembly to get any chance of sea water to fresh water flow.
I wonder what the osmotic pressure between freshwater and CO2-rich sea water would be? I can just imagine one of Willis’s Pacific Atolls with a fresh-water/soda-water fountain from a pipeline to a graphene filter in a nearby trench. Completely impractical, uneconomic, but curious.
Dodgy Geezer says: March 18, 2013 at 6:45 am
Ralfellis, you are deeply wrong here. We can NEVER run out of water, for the simple reason that we do not destroy it. It passes through our bodies in a cycle and returns again. But what is really short here is not water – it is the infrastructure necessary to process and store it that is in short supply. You don’t seem to understand, as Squiddy does, that running out of water and running out of water storage are two quite different things.
.
Chuck Nolan says: March 18, 2013 at 7:16 am
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 shortage.
__________________________________
Are you both simply being obtuse for the sake of it? Sure, the UK is surrounded by water, I think we all know that, but have you ever tried to drink it, or farm with it? Doesn’t quite work, does it? So why make such stupid statements?
As to infrastructure, just where do you put water storage resevoirs, in the most crowded (and almost the flatest) part of Europe? Have you seen the land costs in England’s southeast? Have you seen the environmental opposition to even a small road, let alone a resevoir many miles in circumference? Have you seen the number of towns and dwellings we have, in even the smallest of valleys? Have you seen the political opposition to moving even a few houses, let alone several towns and villages?
More infrastructure will solve the problem? – you really are in la-la land.
And that is before we come onto more barren areas, like North Africa and the Near East. Why do you think that the Romans built a 120 km aquaduct down into Carthage (Tunis) – because they liked building aqueducts?? And of course the situation is now much worse in these countries, because populations have greatly expanded and water usage per person has also risen, while rainfall levels remains static.
If you cannot understand the problems of greatly increasing demand, while the supply remains the same, I am surprised you can understand a site like WUWT. I suspect you are from these (religious?) groups who think we can expand the human population ad-infinitum, without encountering any raw material supply problems whatsoever.
.
A fan of *MORE* discourse says:
March 18, 2013 at 2:06 am
I neither believe nor disbelieve it. I post it as an example of what people are capable of. Well, at least what people who try to move things forwards, unlike yourself, are capable of … you, your sole contribution to the world seems to be to try to move things backwards or drag them down into the muck with you. Your lexicon doesn’t seem to contain the idea of moving a conversation “upwards” or “forwards”.
To paraphrase a friend of mine, if an anonymous engineer on slashdot issued a press release claiming to build a perpetual-motion machine, would you believe it? Neither should you believe slashdot’s desalination claims. I would remind you that plenty of scientists claiming that things “can’t be done” have been wrong in the past.
But in any case, the point is not whether this particular theoretical advance will play out. The point is that some process will always play out, that technology will eventually find some way around the roadblock. And in fact, as Israel shows, WE’RE ALREADY THERE even without this latest development, so your pissy little complaints mean nothing.
Please try to be less of an unpleasant, nit-picking, dickish jerkwagon, Fan!
My point is valid regardless of whether the new system is ten or a hundred times more efficient. My point is valid if the new system never makes it off of the drawing board. If you’d first try to figure out what the point of a post is, you wouldn’t go so wrong in your pathetic efforts to make some other point.
Been there, read that … what’s your point, other than trying to play the “I’ve read more books than you” game and failing?
w.
Dodgy Geezer said @ur momisugly March 18, 2013 at 3:53 am
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.
Never trust press release hype. Existing reverse osmosis filters achieve around 50% of ideal thermodynamic efficiency, it’s not possible to do any better than to double current J/kg figures. The press release is simply lying, else you could create a perpetual motion machine.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2011/08/desalinization-is-this-as-good-as-it-gets/
http://urila.tripod.com/
http://urila.tripod.com/Seawater.htm
Climate Ace says:
March 18, 2013 at 2:51 am
So … are you planning to include the billions and billions of dollars of benefits from the increased CO2 fertilization of the plants all over the planet? So far, we’ve seen no costs of CO2, just benefits, and yet here you are yammering about costs?
I gotta admit … you guys that only want to monetize the COSTS of CO2, but conveniently forget about monetizing the BENEFITS of CO2, are always good for a laugh. I figured one of you fools would show up sooner or later.
Next time, do your damn homework before uncapping your electronic pen, and think your brilliant plan through to the end, there’s a good fellow … or not, I can always use another belly laugh.
w.
Dodgy Geezer says:
March 18, 2013 at 3:53 am
Can’t remember where I nicked it from but…
“We don’t buy water, we rent it!”
The comment about cheap energy was funny because of the source of the original comment.
DaveE.
Dodgy Geezer says:
March 18, 2013 at 6:47 am
@Bruce Cobb
March 18, 2013 at 5:20 am
Laugh Of the Day, from Climate Ace above:
As for cheap energy, who could possibly argue against cheap energy? It is a no brainer…
I can’t see the joke. Could you explain it a little, please?
You have to consider the source. It would be like Kim Jong-un saying “who could possibly argue against democracy? It is a no-brainer. I heartily support democracy”.
Jon T says:
March 18, 2013 at 4:10 am
Are the claims “thermodynamic nonsense”? Neither you nor anyone has shown that. I followed the discussion on Slashdot and read the relevant paper, and I don’t see the support for their claims or yours.
Neither you nor the engineers involved have provided anything but your own incredulity that a graphene filter might use 100X less energy to filter something than a standard filter. You might be right … but your incredulity is not enough to establish it. You have provided NOTHING to back up that claim. So until you come up with numbers about pressure to run fluids through graphene filters, you are just substituting bluster … impressive, but not all that convincing.
There’re more problems. For example, one of the Slashdot folks claimed that the underlying paper says we can never improve reverse osmosis by more than 25% … but the paper itself says (emphasis mine):
Gosh, now a “membrane with tailored surface properties” could “substantially reduce the energy consumption” … what happened to the previous claim that thermodynamics limits us to a 25% increase? Now we suddenly see that an improved membrane could lead to substantial energy savings.
Next, whether this particular technological advance works or not is immaterial to my point. Development is about getting more production for less energy. If this one doesn’t work, another one will.
Finally, perhaps you are in the habit of believing scientists when they tell you things can’t be done … me, not so much. I follow Arthur Clarke’s laws:
Let me know when you’ve come up with the figures on how much energy it takes to push a liquid through a filter one molecule thick, and can discuss its effects on pretreatment stage of reverse osmosis plants, and we’ll continue the discussion. Because until then, we can’t know if the claims are correct or not.
w.