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.
Here’s an article that functionally supports Willis’ story: D. Cohen-Tanugi and J. C. Grossman (2012) Water Desalination across Nanoporous Graphene Nano Letters 12(7), 3602–3608.
The abstract is below. But notice the last line, “water permeability of this material is several orders of magnitude higher than conventional reverse osmosis membranes.” Figure 9 in the paper shows graphene membranes can exhibit 100x better permeability than high-flux reverse osmosis membranes. Nominally, 100x less energy use is at least plausible.
In support of that, the last lines in the paper say, “Overall, the enhanced water permeability of nanoporous graphene could offer important advantages over existing RO technology. For a given water output, such a membrane would enable lower energy requirements due to lower operating pressures. It could also mean smaller and more modular desalination plants thanks to smaller membrane area requirements.” “RO” is reverse osmosis.
Here’s the abstract: “We show that nanometer-scale pores in single-layer freestanding graphene can effectively filter NaCl salt from water. Using classical molecular dynamics, we report the desalination performance of such membranes as a function of pore size, chemical functionalization, and applied pressure. Our results indicate that the membrane’s ability to prevent the salt passage depends critically on pore diameter with adequately sized pores allowing for water flow while blocking ions. Further, an investigation into the role of chemical functional groups bonded to the edges of graphene pores suggests that commonly occurring hydroxyl groups can roughly double the water flux thanks to their hydrophilic character. The increase in water flux comes at the expense of less consistent salt rejection performance, which we attribute to the ability of hydroxyl functional groups to substitute for water molecules in the hydration shell of the ions. Overall, our results indicate that the water permeability of this material is several orders of magnitude higher than conventional reverse osmosis membranes, and that nanoporous graphene may have a valuable role to play for water purification.“
Doug Jones, the thermodynamics of energy usage are predicated on the chemical efficiency of the membrane at separating water from dissolved salts and organics. Improve the membrane and the thermodynamics change. Your Ars Technica report assumes static technology.
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.
The Monster (@SumErgoMonstro) says:
March 18, 2013 at 8:09 am
Yes, that is what it says, “500 times thinner”, and that is what it means. Only you seem to think that 500 times thinner than one micron means 500 microns thick.
And yes, you are 100% correct, it’s not logical at all. Often what something literally and exactly “says” in English is not at all what it means … but because everyone knows that (except you, I guess), it’s not a problem. If I call something a “dog’s breakfast”, it just means a mess, it doesn’t mean a dog would eat it for breakfast.
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.
So … which category would you like us to place you in?
Trying to insist that English a) make logical sense and b) has to follow rules that are not observed in real life is no way to go through life, you’re headed for endless pain and arguments.
English is the way we use it, not the way the rule books claim. Everyone knows that if you say someone looks twice as thin as the last time you saw them, it’s a compliment, you’re not saying they are twice as fat … so what if it’s not logical? ENGLISH IS NOT LOGICAL, and the faster you get up to speed with that idea, the happier you’ll be.
w.
Not to nitpick but …
There are 264.2 gallons in 1 cubic meter of water. So your “300,000,0000, cubic metres” works out to 792,600,000,000 gallons.
Pumping and filters clogging are engineering problems that can be solved. The more efficient the more we can grow. Now if only we could increase atmospheric CO2 🙂
The Israeli plants are seemingly very efficient, almost too much so for a skeptic. I am curious more than anything else but are their plants subsidized? The USA gives Israel $3 billion a year so could some of that be diverted to cover costs thereby keeping the public numbers lower?
I also didn’t see Saudi Arabia on the list. That is a classic case of cheap energy. Hey lets stop burning off this natural gas and use it to build desalination plants! Great idea. Now they are exporting wheat. They have the worlds largest plants. Hard to put a cost on the water when you have virtually free energy isn’t it? What a problem to have.
In any case I love the technology being efficiency angle. A very practical and true explanation.
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?????
Doug Jones says:
March 18, 2013 at 10:30 am
Never trust internet claims. From your own link:
You claimed an absolute maximum of double the current efficiency … they say we are using three to four times the minimal energy use. Not only that, but there’s a two to one ratio just between the Israeli plants and the regular plants, as I showed in Figure 2. So the older, less efficient plants will get an even larger boost than the efficient plants.
I had tried to allow for the usual press release hype, in my head post I guessed that the new filter might reduce costs by a factor of ten. It looks like I was optimistic, perhaps it will be only by a factor of two, or even 1.5 … so what?
My point still stands. Technology is about getting more results for less energy.
w.
Pat Frank says:
March 18, 2013 at 10:52 am
Thanks, Pat. While the amount of the improvement doesn’t affect my argument, I’m glad to see that the question is still open in some sense.
w.
Thanks, Willis,
You probably know some of the best beer in the world is produced with desalinated water.
This seems like very good news.
TRM says:
March 18, 2013 at 11:30 am
Thanks, TRM. Actually, it’s 79,260,000,000 gallons, you’ve misplaced a decimal point, but you are right that I’ve made an error, and I’ve fixed the head post.
My theory is, perfect is good enough …
w.
David A. Evans says: March 18, 2013 at 10:59 am
You missed the applications for 12 reservoirs that Dodgy Geezer mentioned…. they were rejected on the grounds that Thames water were wasting too much water through infrastructure leakage.
_________________________________
No, they were rejected due to local opposition.
You forget the politics of all of this. Inner London (all recent arrivals and Labour supporters) is running out of water. The ‘solution’ is to build massive reservoirs and desecrate the idyllic lands in the Tory shires. Which the local Tories are hugely opposed to. And we have a Tory government. Do you think anyone has a hope in hell of getting such ill-thought proposals through government?
http://www.planningportal.gov.uk/general/news/stories/2011/mar11/10mar11/100311_4
And why should the Tory shires help with this problem? It was Socialist New Labour who doubled London’s population with millions of new Socialist Labour supporters, and then they want the Tory shires to shoulder the burden that Labour created?? Not on your life, they won’t.
London will have to live with toilets that do not flush, and if they wonder why typhoid is becoming endemic, they can blame Red Ken. There is a price to pay for social mis-management, and its about time that Labour supporters learned their lesson.
.
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.
Willis:
If the materials give a 25% decrease in RO energy, SUPER…
50%, INCREDIBLE!
100% (I.e., taking 1/2 as much energy as before…) STUNNING. Does not have to be a 10:1 advantage over the current to be worthwhile.
Only question is production cost, and that looks “doable”.
Max
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.
“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.
##################
ill conceived aircraft from the very beginning. Ask me when design on this started?
( see the JSF) Whenever you see a program go over budget you should always go
back to the requirements. The requirements for the original JSF were a joke, essentially
build an impossible machine and keep three distinct customers happy.
bad idea from the start
Duster says:
March 18, 2013 at 12:28 pm
For everyone (apparently except you), “twice as thin” is totally and absolutely unambiguous.
Nobody (except perhaps you) thinks it could be mistaken for “twice as thick”.
So yes, you are totally being a grammar nazi.
And when the authors said “500 times thinner”, are you seriously claiming that people found that ambiguous? Your claim is that some people thought “I wonder if they really mean 500 times fatter”, that the meaning was not explicit? Really?
You’re not only a grammar nazi … you’re a ridiculous grammar nazi. Please practice that trade elsewhere, it doesn’t fare well with me.
I’m of the opinion that the English language should obey the rules it actually obeys, rather than the rules people are always shoving at me. We use “twice as light” just as easily as we use “twice as heavy”, for example, and I suppose you would object to that as well. But neither one of those is ambiguous. Nor do the constructions make any sense logically … that’s English, get used to it.
So before you start busting folks for breaking your imaginary rules, you should look, NOT AT THE LOGIC, and you should look, NOT AT THE RULES, but at how English is actually used and how it is actually understood. It is neither logical nor rule-bound. English is a language of contradictory exceptions from beginning to end.
It’s like busting folks for saying “I could care less” vs. “I couldn’t care less.” Grammar nazis think that logic insists that one is right and the other is not. The key, of course, is the invisible [sarc] tag when you say “Yeah, well I could care less if you do, ya jerk” … so in fact both make sense. And even if they didn’t, both are very well established usage. Railing against that usage is like railing against the tide, and even King Canute knew that didn’t work …
At least King Canute could show his nobles that he didn’t have the power they claimed, by demonstrating that even a King can’t slow the tide.
Well, a King can’t stop people from saying “500 times thinner” either, but I can’t demonstrate that like King Canute did. As a result, people are still claiming that a bit more paternalistic correction is all that is necessary to stop the rising tide of English doing what it wants to do … which is why grammar nazis are so irritating, you’d think they’d get the message after while.
w.
PS—The phrase “times thinner” gets 137,000 hits on google … and “times fatter” gets about 35,000. That train has already left the station, Duster, and you getting all grammarian and bitching about it won’t change a thing.
Willis
‘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.’
Wooo… the cowboy poet has found a burr under his saddle. I heartily endorse full cost benefit analysis of energy, and the cheaper the better after both sides of the balance sheet are taken into account. That was my point. In fact, I provided both sides of the balance sheet with rather more examples of the postive side than the negative side.
By way of contrast, I notice that you never, ever include negative side of the balance sheet of the real costs of energy use. I guess, in your own terminology, mirror meet laughable fool. In my terminology, it makes you a hypocrite as well.
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.
Willis, take a look at these folks:
http://www.seawatergreenhouse.com/
Not a hypothetical, they have production farms operating in places like the Australian Desert and Arab deserts.
Simple technique, really. Puts a greenhouse inside a solar still and uses sea water to keep it at the right temperature. Just a lot of plastic and posts, really, with a couple of fans and pumps.
There is no shortage of water for food production. Not any more.
Oh, and it makes surplus water, so you can water some area outside the facility as well (which also means you could pipe it to houses…)
Doesn’t work where it isn’t sunny? So what? Most deserts are, by definition, sunny…
And we have no shortage of materials nor plastics either.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
Climate Ace says:
March 18, 2013 at 2:52 pm
Damn right I have a burr under my saddle, I’m allergic to bullshit. Here’s what you actually said in the post I responded to about costs of energy.
I don’t see one single thing in there about the benefits of energy in a cost/benefit analysis.
Do you really think I don’t read what you say, every dumb word, before responding? You haven’t said ONE DAMN THING about a cost/benefit analysis, and in fact, your most recent post is the FIRST TIME YOU MENTIONED BENEFITS AT ALL. Not one mention of benefits up to now, it’s been 100% costs to this point, and suddenly you’re the cost/benefit guy?
Hogwash.
Don’t bother trying to tell porkies about what’s written on the page, Ace … I’m very likely to call you on it every single time.
w.
E.M.Smith says:
March 18, 2013 at 3:37 pm
Looks good to me, Chiefio. The only shortage that I’ve ever noticed is imagination, and as my beloved Dad used to say, “Imagination is free!”.
w
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.
@ur momisugly Climate A**; Regarding your so-called “balance sheet”, and needing to include a cost of C02 emissions, either in reducing them or paying for their “effects”, you are simply inventing a cost where none exists. No real connection has ever been made between manmade C02 and climate. That is because whatever small effect it has is inconsequential. The “need” to prevent C02 emissions is simply a fairy tale told by scoundrels and believed by idiots.
The theoretical energy improvement for a nearly perfect reverse osmosis membrane (a membrane with no internal viscous energy losses, so that only osmotic pressure must be overcome) is about a factor of 3 compared to current reverse osmosis systems. That is substantial, and could be very important in making reverse osmosis economically viable where it currently is not viable, but it is very far from a claim of 100 fold (or even 10 fold) improvement. Another big factor with reverse osmosis is high capital cost; the economics would improve if capital costs were significantly lower.