A Salty Podcast

a big problem. Now. There's lots of water on planet Earth. I mean the surface of the Earth, it's covered in water, but about more than of that water is saltwater. We can't use it. We can't drink it, we can't use it for agriculture, we can't use it in cooking. I mean, it's just not very useful to us. Um and in fact um in two thousand seven, the World Health Organization estimated that forty percent of the people on Earth are

affected by water scarcity. Right, And so if there were some way to use that salt water, that could go a long way to alleviating some of that water scarcity issue. Right. And the water scarcity manifest in a lot of ways. I mean, in some ways, it's just that people can't get clean drinking water, and that's obviously one of the biggest things, and it's useful for sanitation and all these things too, but it's also crucial in getting the food

we need. I mean, I think the figure is that, um. Yeah, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations UH, seventy percent of the water worldwide is used in agriculture of the consumptive water use. So not only are we having a water scarcity issue, but this could also be a food scarcity issue. I mean, when you've got so much of your water tied up in the production of food sources, then it makes it doubly important

to get that access to fresh water. And then on top of that, uh, you know, water scarcity is is not just regionalized, but it also can be dictated by circumstance. For example, UH, after a a natural disaster like like a massive hurricane hits an area, that can mean that there is a at least temporary shortage of of access to clean water. So this is a one of those problems that is persistent in some areas and sort of an acute problem in other areas in the aftermath of

some sort of of natural disaster or catastrophe. Um. And as a result, it's a good idea to try and find ways of of addressing this, including desalination right which people are working on. The industry has grown about fifteen percent a year recently. They're currently sixteen thousand plants operating today. And uh, that's it's the the entire things expanded something like two d and seventy six percent since two thousand one.

And it's a and encourage number. I mean, the problem is that desalination is uh, it's well, I guess, to use a terrible metaphor, it's a drop in the bucket. Uh yeah, I mean there's the water scarcity issues can can be offset somewhat by desalination, but it's hard to really address the problem head on completely with it. However, before we get into the drawbacks or the the other the you know, the enormity of the problem, maybe it's a good time to actually talk about how we go

about removing salt from salt water. Uh. And this is a practice that is you know, it's it's centuries old. Well, yeah, I mean the simplest one, the one you've already thought of. Is you boil it. Yeah, yeah, the the simple distillation process. Or actually, you don't even have to boil it. You can just leave it out in the sun and reproduce the natural process of evaporation that creates the water cycle on Earth. So as long as you have something to catch it, yeah, you just let let it evaporate and

then it'll drip down into a Yeah. Here, here's a fun science experiment for you to try at home. You get a bowl of saltwater and you get an empty glass. You put the empty glass into the bowl of saltwater. You cover the whole thing up with some plastic wrap, maybe poke a hole in there, put it out in the sun for several hours. You're going to have the water evaporate from the bowl of saltwater. Uh, and it will end up condensing on the plastic wrap and dripping

down into the glass. So the water you get in the glass is drinkable. Everyone should do it. By the way, you should not drink the saltwater, because your cells, in an effort to dilute the massive amount of minerals that are coming into your system, will start to UH to push water out of the cells. And this is a bad thing. In fact, it can eventually result in kidney failure and uh, then you can have something called death, which is what we generally like to avoid. Why you

don't drink saltwater. So we've been boiling water to boiling saltwater to get the fresh water out of it for hundreds of years, but recently we've gotten some much more advanced techniques of this. Right, it's better than distillation. It's it's boiling two point oh. It's a procedure called multi stage flash where they they have different chambers of very rapid heating that that violently boils the water and then reapplies steam to the chambers of new water to uh

to create a rapid and efficient boiling process. Right. Right, so you've got uh, you're you're boiling the water multiple times in order to get as much fresh water out of that saltwater as possible. You're left with fresh water in one container and a very salty brine in the other, which is good for marinating pork chops. Actually it's not good for much of anything. That's one of the the issues about desalination. But again, I guess we can we can wait till we get to the end of the

whole discussion there. So, yeah, I mean that's that's a very uh popular method of getting fresh water out of saltwater. But then there's also the use of reverse osmosis. How does how does that work? Because I mean, you know, osmosis is the basic thing which says that when you've got a membrane between between two liquid solutions, one with more stuff in it and the other with less stuff, the solutions want to even each other out. Right, Yeah,

that's essentially what osmosis is. Well, yeah, but so you get a you get a semi permeable membrane, meaning that it's going to allow some things to go through, but it's going to restrict other things. Yeah, And upon one side of that membrane you put salt water and then you use pressure to push the saltwater through the membrane, and then fresh water comes to the membrane. The salt is restricted. It's essentially filtered out by this membrane. You have to use lots of lots of pumps to do this.

Actually uses quite a bit of energy. It uses less than boiling the water does, but yeah, it's still it's still energy hungry, so you are pumping water, essentially pushing the fresh water through this membrane and retaining the salt. Also, uh, the water that you get on the other side of the membrane may not be um perfectly salt free. You know, some salt particles can get through, depending upon the type

of membrane you're using. Uh. And also there are other issues with this, but it's it's um a way to process a lot of water in a relatively short amount of time. So it's uh, there are a lot of desalination plants that use this approach to It does also mean that you've got a lot of moving parts, so things like the pumps or even the membranes themselves have

to be maintained and replaced on a regular basis. So there's an ongoing cost of manufacturing and maintaining these pieces in order to keep the the plant in working order. So yeah, that's another method. There's a method that's essentially uses gravity. Now this is a very small scale desalination technique. It's you know, the when you're talking about a desalination plant, you're talking about on the level of millions of gallons

of water. But for the gravity method, it's really more for something like a community, you know, you think of a small community, not like a major city. And UH essentially is a series of filters that are vertically stacked, and you pour the salt water at the top and gravity pulls it downward and as it passes through the filters, it filters filter out all the salt until you get fresh water at the bottom. So it's like using the potential energy of gravity in place of the pumps you'd

use in a reverse house moss plant. Right. And again it's a much smaller scale. We're not you know, we're not talking about something that's gonna be producing millions of gallons of fresh water. Right. Well, some of these plants are pretty impressive. That I was reading about the Carl's Bad desalination project and that that's um a plant that's

under construction now in the San Diego area. UM and San Diego is one of these places that's that's good for a desalination project because it's dry, but it's on the coast, so it has access to water, but not as much fresh water. UM and this plant, what they're claiming is that they will be able to supply fifty million gallons per day that's fresh water. That would that would be an enormous offset. Obviously, that would be fantastic.

And of course there are other communities that have even or you know, even large cities that have even less access to fresh water than someplace like San Diego does. A lot of places in the Middle East use desalination. Sure, Saudi Arabia, I think is currently the largest producer of desalination plants. Also, what's interesting to me is that culturally, in some of these areas, especially in the Middle East, desalinated water is thought of as being inferior to water

that was just fresh to begin with. Like it's yeah, there's actually a cultural perception that the water tastes UH differently and that it has h an unhealthy effect on one. UH tests have not borne that out, but the perception is there. And of course if the perception is there, that can really you know, that can really shape people's behavior and adoption of these sort of technology. So some of the some of the obstacles to desalination are culturally based,

not even technologically based. So we've looked at these couple of techniques UM and so they can both be very effective for producing water in a dry area that borders the ocean, but they're still pretty energy hungry. Reverse osmosis is better, but can we do any better than this? Well, that's a good question. That is the question of the day. I think. Yeah. I mean, if you've got these methods of removing salt from salt water to get fresh water,

but they require huge amounts of energy. Really you're talking about an energy problem, not just a water problem. I mean, where where does this energy come from? And that's a big question to ask. I mean it's it seems, you know, simple on the face of it, but when you really start to think about it, if you have to burn fossil fuels in order to generate fresh water, really your problems are kind of shifting. You know. It's even if you get enough fresh water, you are still having the

problem of having to depend upon fossil fuels. You also have the problem of pollution. So how do you get around that. One method might be to try and harness solar power to generate the energy needed to run these desalination plants. Um that would be a very clean way, relatively speaking. I mean you have to take in the account what it what it takes to build a solar panel. But yeah, there and and there's rare earth minerals and things of that nature that you have taken. Everything is

a big picture when you ultimately look at it. But but the generation of the power itself would be clean using solar energy. Uh. The only issue there really is being able to generate enough solar energy to provide what

is necessary for running a plant. Luckily, I guess you could say for a lot of these areas where a desalination plant is is most needed, they also tend to get a lot of sunlight, So you could if you were able to build an efficient enough solar panel and then build a rays of these solar panels entire solar farms, you could generate the energy needed to run a desalination plant, which in turn would generate the fresh water you need.

You still have to find a way to dispose of the brine in a way that's that's uh responsible, because the brine itself is very dense. It's got a lot of salt content. Remember, I mean, that's where all that salt was before. You know, when you got all the saltwater exactly most of the time it ends up is runoff in a freshwater river. Which of course is not

good for the natural wildlife. Yeah, and you're talking about even if you just dumped millions of gallons back in the ocean, that can't be good for the local wildlife because because this stuff sinks down and then it immediately starts to uh to really impact the oxygen producing elements in the ocean. So you start to really make a severe impact on the local area and uh and of course that ends up being kind of a domino effect and you get this whole uh Ian Malcolm chaos theory

problem that ultimately results in dinosaurs eating somebody. But of course he would say that life uh finds. But sorry, go ahead. Well, I wanted to ask another question. Why can't we just manufacture water? Now? Think about it here. Water is two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. Yes, we know exactly what's in it and how to make it. And these are some of the most abundant elements in the universe. So why is it that we can't just make water? Well, we could, I mean we would need

a lot of energy. Yeah. Well, also, Joe, we need we need to get that that hydrogen. That's the problems. See hydrogen hydrogen, Yes, extremely plentiful in fact, the most plentiful element in all of the universe. However, or at least our galaxy. However, hydrogen on Earth does not really have It doesn't doesn't really occur unbonded very free. Yeah, there's there's a little bit of free hydrogen on Earth, but really, you know, percentage wise, it's a very small amount.

Most of hydrogen on Earth is bonded to something else, and in order to get at that hydrogen, you have to expend energy to free the hydrogen from whatever it is it's bonded to. For example, um salt water, I mean ocean water. There, You've got lots of hydrogen. You know, I've got all that hydrogen right there in the ocean. That's really probably the biggest and most accessible, uh source of hydrogen that I can think of. So I guess if you ran electricity through ocean water, we just need

to process this ocean water somehow. If only there were a a to process ocean water so that you pull the hydrogen out and the oxen out and then combined it to make fresh water. I mean, you could just boil the stuff, that's what you could do. But I mean, why not run electricity through it? So that you could use electrolysis to free that button. Yeah. No, that's the problem is that you go right back to that energy issue is without a source of hydrogen, you really can't

manufacture water in any way that makes sense. There's just especially when when there are other ways of getting at the water that are less energy intensive than you're playing a losing game. So that's why there are there are new new processes that are coming out. One of the

newer ones is called an ion concentration polarization. And this this basically just a runs an ion current through a nonporous membrane, and salt and larger particles like bacteria and viruses, stuff that you don't really want your water anyway, are are pushed away from the membrane and clean water flows

through it. Wow, that sounds so like Star Wars E the wait, the membrane repels it and any any kind of charged anything, it's going to deflect right away from the membrane, and so so the brian kind of goes up away and the and the fresh water flows directly through it. Um and this a keeps the membrane clean, so you don't have to get at all dirty and gunky and clean it or replace it all the time. Um. And and I bet those and the other plants get

pretty grimy. Yeah, oh yeah, I'm sure. Uh and and yeah, and it unfortunately only really works on a very small scale. Again, this is a this is a personal community kind of thing. They're using in a lot of rescue operations. I think during Katrina they hurt some ground units for something. And and this sort of stuff is great for those those

acute problems we were talking about. For a persistent issue where you have to deliver a significant amount of fresh water to a large population on a continual basis, obviously that would not be the ideal solution. Uh. The good news is that there are a lot of companies working on this. Like like you said, Lauren, I mean, this is an industry that has grown, you know, considerably over

the last several years. And uh and I've I've personally spoken with an engineer over at a General Electric that was all about designing desalination plants and finding new ways to make the more efficient so that it is less of an energy investment to uh, to to create fresh water from saltwater. And this is a problem that's not going to go away anytime soon. I mean, obviously this is something that we're going to have to really concentrate on, uh,

in order to support our communities. Uh. Some of us, you know, are very fortunate that we live in places where access to fresh water isn't such a an issue. But uh, for other people, I mean, this is this is a fact of life. It's just an ongoing thing that they're going that they have to solve. So I'm really optimistic about the future in general, and I think technology is going to play a large role in making

in howlping us get access to fresh water. But Joe, I think you would agree with me that technology is only going to play one part and that i'll significantly large part of this is going to have to require some some behavioral changes. Oh right, I mean you cannot. As far as we know that, there's no quick, easy technological solution to this. Like we said, we've got this energy barrier. There's always a huge amount of energy that you would need in order to get fresh, clean water

to the people who need it. And so one of the easiest solutions, one of the most viable solutions, is just to use less, conserve better, and and manage more efficiently. Right, it's a little bit outrageous that we hear in America use fresh water fresh drinking water in our toilets and and that kind of thing is just incredibly wasteful and there's no really good infrastructure way to get around that

right now. But yeah, it is one of those things where during the whole design process us for it, I don't think anyone was thinking, hey, you know, maybe we should find some way of using gray water in order in these systems, in order to conserve the fresh water, because it's just, you know, why worry about it. You've got plenty of access to freshwater all the times everywhere. Yeah, but it's it's definitely one of those things that we

have to think about. And uh and Joe, you know, in in the video episode of Forward Thinking, I think you you really nailed it. You said changes are coming, and they have to because without them, we're going to really, especially depending on on where in the world we live, we're going to be facing some really tough, tough problems

in the in the foreseeable future. So you know, we we have to take responsibility and accountability and make these changes so that, uh, so that future generations don't suffer for it. Thank you for agreeing with the point that you made the video series. I appreciate that. Joe. I was afraid you were going to leave me out there. I was like, He's like, you know, changed changed my mind. Turn on all the faucets please, Okay, okay, Well, I'm glad that we got that out all the way. All right, guys,

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