Technology Review writes about the Sorek plant in Israel (link), which produces a week of water for one person for less than 58 cents. This may not be sufficiently cheap for competitive agriculture, but it would seem to contradict the prophets of aquatic doomsday (e.g., see “The Coming Water Wars: The next big wars will be fought over water.” from U.S. News).
What do readers think? If I can get some Chinese solar cells to charge up my Tesla, drive to the water factory, also powered by those solar cells, and fill up my travel mug, why would I go to war? (And of course, as my friend Rob says when offered bottled water: “Wouldn’t it be great if there were a pipe going to every building. Then we would not to have haul water around by truck.”)
You have to be able to eat and not just drink. It takes something like 2,400 liters of water to produce 1 hamburger according to US News. So just the water cost of one hamburger would be around $1.50. A rich country such as Israel might be able to afford this, but if you are say Libya, it might be cheaper just to invade your neighbor and steal his water.
The whole bottle water thing is utterly stupid. I have a good sized carbon filter (not the ridiculous tiny thing built into the fridge) in line with my fridge dispenser and the chilled water that comes out is as good as bottled (or at least good enough for me). Lots of commercial bottled water is just filtered tap water. The quality of local tap water in the US varies (it’s always safe but it doesn’t always taste good) but there are a variety of treatment solutions available, including home sized Reverse Osmosis units. These don’t even need solar power – they operate off of the pressure in your water pipes. Their only downside is that they waste a lot of water – for every gallon of filtered water, 4 gallons go down the drain. But you don’t drink that many gallons of water anyway.
According to this page: http://ca.water.usgs.gov/water_use/2010-california-water-use.html internal domestic water use accounts for about 0.5% of water used in California. Drinking water would account for under 2% of that.
Lets do some math:
Water consumption of California for Irrigation
http://ca.water.usgs.gov/water_use/2010-california-water-use.html
23056 Mgal/day
87000 ML/day
Sorek plant 0.58 cents / 1000 L (or 264 gallons)
Cost per day for Irrigation ~$50.5 million / day, approx ~ $18.5 billion / year
Or another $475 per person
On energy, desalination plants require around 15,000 kW hours for every million gallons of fresh water.
So 15,000 kW hours * 23056 Mgal/day/(24hours/day)
= 14410 Mega Watts hours
Or approximately 19 nuclear reactors at 750 Mega Watts hours / reactor
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-05-01/energy-makes-up-half-of-desalination-plant-costs-study
Cost of electricity in California 15.2 cents / kWh
Cost of water for irrigation $19.2 billion / year
Looks like the numbers come close from both sources, anybody see any errors?
If not, looks like California is going to have to build 19 nuclear reactors just so it can make enough water for irrigation 🙂
The main problem with water shortages is not only having water to drink, but a lot more water is required to grow food. The average person in the US probably thinks food comes from your local Walmart.
And on the Tesla, there are 183 million personal vehicles in the US.
Each Tesla at 85 kWh (10 kWh requires 1 kg of lithium), so 8.5 kg of lithium per Tesla.
Replace the entire US vehicle fleet with Teslas would require 1.555 billion kg of Lithium.
Total world Lithium resources 9.9 x 10^9 kg of Lithium,
So we would use up 15% of the TOTAL worlds Lithium supply.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/
I guess everybody in China and India can go back to the bicycle.
I especially liked your friend’s wish for a pipe to every building. I plan to use the phrase soon.
“Energy intensity at the moment is so high that to have one cubic metre per day of desalinated water, it would take you 50 square metres or more of solar panels, he said, explaining that this means a commercial-scale plant will have huge requirements for space.”
The quote from UAE news report on “reducing energy footprint of water desalination is a priority”.
Also:
“Abu Dhabi produces more than 90 per cent of its water in combined-cycle electricity and water plants powered by natural gas, which are responsible for nearly a third of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.”