America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow
America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow
Unchecked overuse is draining and damaging aquifers nationwide, a data investigation by the New York Times revealed, threatening millions of people and America’s status as a food superpower.
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Fun fact: there will be no tomorrow when the water runs dry
You have thousands of kilometres of coast; if you don't dessalinate it's because you don't want to.
So far, desalination has not been a useful solution to the problem. Companies have been trying to create useful desalination plants for decades. The current process is expensive, inefficient, slow and creates toxic residuals. For these reasons, the current technology does not scale up very well at all.
This a really bad take. Seawater deal with RO is a marvel of efficiency, only 2-3 times above the thermodynamic limit of demixing water from salt. It does not really generate toxic waste like coal fired power plants, but does produce lots of brine with various organics (antiscalants, surfactants etc.) that are not that great. The key issue is water is very cheap from traditional sources (surface water and groundwater) and requires rather crude treatment to be usable, resulting in very low cost. Hence why desal is used in areas where they have no choice. If you don't have surface/ground water source or brackish water source you are doing seawater deal or leave the area....not many choices. At least RO is electrified so it can use renewables but that does not really solve the much higher cost...or issue of brine generation, with zld have a set of it's own issues costs....
Very good to know. Thank you for the updated education.
It does not really generate toxic waste like coal fired power plants
It generates all the waste associated with the electricity it uses, which is often from coal fired power plants...
Considering the area a desalination plant requires, fitting it with wind and solar would not pose a challenge.
By the same argument, replacing the coal fired power plant with wind and solar wouldn't pose a challenge either.
The point is, you've got to compare apples to apples: either coal power vs. desalinization powered by coal, or renewables vs. desalinization powered by renewables. In every case, the pollution produced by the desalinization process (i.e., the brine etc.) is simply added to the pollution produced by whatever means was used to generate the power for it, which means @soEZ's attempt to compare desalinization to power generation doesn't make much sense.
A coal burning plant has a comparisable smaller base of implantation; deactivating the coal plant to have it replaced by a solar or a wind (if even possible) would hardly output the same energy.
By comparison, a desalination plant takes a large area, by the shore, where wind and solar are plentiful, so it can be fitted with such energy source from the start.
The brines can and should be channeled to harvest the salts in it. The salt is raw matter for chemical industry.
It's amazing how quick we are to find problems to a promising solution but the moment extracting water from surface or underground sources becomes impossible or unfeaseable we will resort to those solutions.
No, you’re just clearly too stupid in history and geology to know that when the groundwater runs out, so does tomorrow. /S
Are we resorting to basic insult, now?
The situation is dire - for us - but the planet is not going to spontaneously combust with us on the surface.
sigh
I am fucking fed up with all the fucking doom and gloom every half shit media outlet burps ou, tailored to stirr panic into everyone and their grandmother.
Everybody is a genius but nobody really has an answer to actually fucking solve anything. Everybody is acting on a pin's head trying to discover what is going to happen next and in the meanwhile nobody can be bothered to actually do something proactively to enact change, like perhaps voting!
Like it or not, at some point, even for preservation purposes, we will source more of our water from the oceans because it will be that or death.
My country has already transitioned into a fully sustainable power grid, using hydroeletric, solar and wind, and plans to implement more sustainable energy sources is under way. We are also converting a refinery to produce green hydrogen and we've already phased out coal, with only a couple of fossil gas plants still in operation. Meanwhile, every sane person is trying their best to make their homes more efficient and even trying to be self reliant on energy, through solar and wind.
We are facing constant droughts and dry spells and public pressure is being put on the government, regardless of color, to implement desalination plants regardless of cost so we can maintain our country alive.
I am fed up with everyone spelling doom and gloom left and right but nobody cares to recognize the small things being done now!
Have nice one and piss off!
Missing that sarcasm tag didn’t help you at all my dude. And it was so big!
So does everything else and projected to 2050, we are looking at 40-50% renewable penetration. At least it will leverage those renewables. Other desal plants in saudie literally burn fossils to drive distillation for their deal needs, which far away from thermodynamic limit. RO offers a solution that is efficient and can be ran of renewables if the grid offers that...but it comes at high cost.
The bigger issue is we need to look at where and how we use water. Much of how and where we use drinking water and irrigation water does not make much sense. California uses 20% of it's energy to move water around...and that's primarily because of agg. Why are we doing agg in a desert environment, why do we waste most of our water irregating grass, etc.
Desalination is really bad alternative to water reuse as well due to simple thermodynamics (dasalting seawater is just energetically expensive relatively to treating secondary effluent with low tds.) but we are too afraid to do direct or indirect reuse even though we drink recycled water.. Guess where your drinking water comes from...from river upstream that was drank by extracted by drinking water plant, treated, drank, sent to sewage, treated by waster plant and dumbed back into the river....anyway. End rant...
With enough demand, enough money for R&D will show up to improve the technology.
But regardless the current costs, that did not stop Israel to source all their water from the sea from very early, as well as other countries have for regions where there isn't enough drinking water available.
In my country, it's used to supply our islands territories and even by some hotels for pool water.
And the problem with the brine has me scratching my head, as I've read sources where the process required chemical treatment of the water and others where it's stated the process is entirely physical.
and how much fossil fuel does Israel use to achieve this?
I think they went nuclear on their power grifld.
that's better than coal for sure
No argument on that
Thanks, ChatGPT
I am not using any form of AI or other assistance. I am just old and have a lot of experience writing. Have a look at my post history to see the consistency in my writing style, even when I'm ripping a conservative apart.
I realize I copy/pasted my last line to the beginning instead of cut/paste, so it looks absurd now that I look at it again. I will fix that now.
Okay fair, just flagged my brain for the repeated phrase at the beginning and end
When I re-read it after your comment, I could see why you thought that!
Would actually be kinda cool if the prevalence of chatgpt forced everyone to write in a more varied and interesting style to dodge the accusations :)
America does desalinate in it's coastal regions. Increasing desalination is prohibitively expensive. Shipping water inland is preposterously expensive. Even if you spend the money, scaling up takes years or even decades.
There are reasons America, like nearly all other nations, gets a relatively small amount of it's fresh water from desalination.
[...] Increasing desalination is prohibitively expensive. Shipping water inland is preposterously expensive. Even if you spend the money, scaling up takes years or even decades.
Just like oil and natural gas?
There are reasons America, like nearly all other nations, gets a relatively small amount of it's fresh water from desalination.
The way desertification is advancing in California (there must be other places facing the same problem) there will be a tipping point where mass scale desalination will be implemented.
Just like oil and natural gas?
Yes, which both cost many orders of magnitude more than water right now. If water was dollars per gallon like fuel is, we'd be in an extremely bad spot for livability.
Orrr... a tipping point where the human population becomes wholly unsustainable and starts to tear itself apart in "The Water Wars", as they'll be called.
https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/10/desalination-plants-california/
They are building them.
Thank you!
America actually does do desalination in several locations along the California coast and is expanding.
A good start.
Like everything in life, it's not that simple.
One thing that is simple, however, is googling the answer to this question before making an uninformed response.
There is a limit for how much water consumption can be reduced, how much water can be reused and how much preserved untouched.
It is actually a subject I actually find interesting. All the criticism put towards the technology could be as easily applied to the internal combustion engine: its inefficient, produces larges amounts of residues and is expensive to run.
There are several large scale operations already in place (Israel sources its water from the sea, as well as several other nations where drinking water is scarce) and even hotels use it to source water for swimming pools.
There is, of course, the problem of distribution but we've already invented pipelines, haven't we? And a water pipeline bursting could cause floods but no great concern lasting environmental damage, unlike oil or liquified natural gas.
so you agree with me? it's not simple. it's not just because "you don't want to". desalinization is extremely technically challenging.
All the criticism put towards the technology could be as easily applied to the internal combustion engine: its inefficient, produces larges amounts of residues and is expensive to run.
This was an attempt at being sarcastic.
If we're running a technology by all means obsolete (internal combustion engine) and do it overlooking its drawbacks running current technology for dessalination can very well follow the same reasoning.
I read a good deal of criticism towards dessalination regarding the disposal of the brine. That is a fair point but those brines could very well be reprocessed for minerals harvesting including lithium, which has great demand. Even by just harvesting the salt, we'd be getting an important resource.
There is, of course, the problem of distribution but we've already invented pipelines, haven't we?
This is true and we already do it. Fresh water is distributed over huge distances using high pressure and volume. The infrastructure already exists.
And a water pipeline bursting could cause floods but no great concern lasting environmental damage, unlike oil or liquified natural gas.
I've lived where this happened once and it was not pretty. A low point of high density residencial area got flooded. Water reached somewhere around 80cm high. Damage to cars and ground stories, water distribution interrupted for 3 days. But no lasting damage.
And what do we do with all the salt?
Put it on fried potato
I'm going to be dense as I have no knowledge in this area, but can you just put it back in the ocean? I assume with sea levels rising the ocean is getting less salty so it wouldn't be harmful as long as we spread it out/did it slowly?
Yes, but how it's done is hard and expensive. If you just pump it into one spot you kill everything around with high salt concentrations. You can pump it far out to sea and disperse it over a large area, but that requires pipes going out to sea. The pipes would probably be made of metal, which salt water and metal don't mix well, not to mention the brine in the pipe. You also need pumping stations along the pipe because it can't perpetually slope down, and if it goes below sea level it needs to be pumped out.
Basically, it's complicated and expensive and not as easy as just dumping it into the ocean.
Reprocess it for minerals harvesting, like lithium, or just evaporate it and keep the salt, which by itself is a resource for chemical industry.
If it were that easy then it wouldn't be an issue.
I made that same observation some time back and the answer I got was: money.
Why spend the money to develop a technology to harvest a mineral from the sea with probably minimal to no impact to the environment when you can simply use already existing tech and just open a hole in the ground?
Desalination produces a massive pull on using more fossil fuels. It’s an emergency procedure. Not an end goal. Read a book.
Well, put me in a red dress and pony tails and call me Shirley..
Haven't we discovered other ways to harvest energy besides fossil fuels? Perhaps wind a solar might be an answer to that problem?
My own country is in the process of converting a former refinery into a green hydrogen plant and part of the conversion goes into installing a few gigawatts of power in solar and wind.
Couldn't this same solution be used for desalination?
Wait till you learn about the water cycle.
It takes hundreds of years for groundwater to replenish. We are experiencing problems right now.
Sure, I never said anything about that, only commenting against the hyperbole that there will be “no tomorrow” when places run out.
There will still be tomorrows, people will just move elsewhere like they’ve done for thousands of years.
Problem is, there will be less and less elsewheres where people can still live within a hundred years or so.
Yes, I commented on that. They will go elsewhere, and they will have tomorrow. It’s weird y’all are downvoting this like it’s personal to you.
Thousands of years ago didn’t have desalination nor electricity.. there’s a reason why they moved to fresh water inland.and before you jump there: desalination requires a fuck load of electricity that impacts with other issues.
Read a book.
What does this have to do with tomorrow stopping permanently because places lose ground water, though?
...says the guy who clearly doesn't understand the geologic water cycle.
Would you point me in the direction of a book or research paper that describes how places losing ground water will cause all tomorrow to stop?
You guys are being extremely broad while I’m only arguing against hyperbole.
Sir?
I see you posting and I’m still waiting for your proof or reasoning behind thinking there will be no tomorrow when some places lose ground water.
You guys are all smug af with your downvotes, but got absolutely nothing for facts beyond your provocative hyperbole.
Keep in mind I never said losing ground water wouldn’t suck and/or be catastrophic, only looking for some proof it will be “the end of tomorrow” as the upvoted dude with his provocative words stated so definitively.
I keep getting told to read a book or that I know nothing of history or geology, yet all of human history proves me fucking right so far, so I’ma need literally any scrap of evidence from fucking anyone who has something better than a shitty opinion alongside some clicks of a down arrow.