I got on the Rush Limbaugh Show on April 7.
Peace Through Desalinization?
Apr 07, 2019
RUSH: This is Charles up next in McLean, Virginia. Welcome to Open Line Friday, Charles. How are you?
CALLER: Good spirits, Rush, longtime listener, since 1995. First-time caller. An honor to speak to you. I’m here to say that a lot of America’s problems would go away if President Trump made a speech in which he promises to collapse the cost of converting saltwater to freshwater, a process known as water desalination. If he promised to do that in just seven years, say, farming any desert on the planet would become economic. As a result, in time the deserts would turn green and the size of habitable earth would double.
RUSH: Hang on here just a second. This is a fascinating premise, but the desalinization of saltwater, you know, this is now done by nuclear reactor on our nuclear subs.
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: Submarines cannot carry enough bottled water so they have to be able to desalinate the ocean in order to provide drinkable water —
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: — for the sailors.
CALLER: It’s expensive.
RUSH: It is massively expensive.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: The Saudis have couple desalinization centers for the royal family, well, and the citizens, because there’s no rain, there’s no water there. They have to desalinate.
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: But it requires incredible amounts of energy to do it, and it is expensive as hell. Now, your theory is if we could bring the cost down —
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: — you could turn the oceans into a source of freshwater, and therefore there would never be a drought anywhere and you could market the water in the ocean and sell it and create a brand-new economy with it?
CALLER: Correct. And the reason is, well, the cost of desalination is roughly a third energy, a third capital costs, a third maintenance costs. What’s happened, that nobody has noticed in the last 10 years, is that literally a miracle has happened in Israel. They had a drought starting in about 2000. They responded to the drought by collapsing the cost of desalination from $2,000 an acre-foot to $500 an acre-foot. They send the water first to their cities, and then they clean it up a little bit —
RUSH: Right. Look, I’m 20 seconds from running out of time. Since you bring up the Middle East, the problem there is that the Palestinians are not gonna believe it. They’re gonna believe that the Israelis have poisoned it, ’cause the problems there go beyond water. I understand your thinking on this. It would be great if freshwater could solve that problem, but I don’t —
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: If you ever get a chance to taste desalinated water, you’d be surprised how good it is. It tastes just like rainwater, like distilled water. Better than distilled water. I was stunned when I first had a glass of it.
UPDATE:
Perhaps the Trump administration was listening to my conversation with Rush. Probably not. Nevertheless it bears noting that on July 13 2017 the Israelis and Palestinians concluded a water deal facilitated by Trump Envoy Jason Greenblatt. The deal will enable Israel to sell water to the Palestinians to relieve the water crises in Palestinian territories. See the article below.
TRUMP ENVOY GREENBLATT FACILITATES HISTORIC ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN WATER DEAL
While US envoy Jason Greenblatt hailed the agreement, saying that “water is a precious commodity in the Middle East,” he deflected questions about the larger diplomatic process.
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/Israel-PA-agree-on-water-deal-499575
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This is an interview I gave at CPAC Water Policy Interview with KLRN Radio San Antonio Texas.
There are a number of commercials before my segment begins. You’ll want to skip to minute 2.20 for the interview.
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I was at CPAC a couple weeks back and did the rounds with the radio announcers there. Talk show Host Rick Trader graciously gave me the replay of the interview which I’m posting here. https://youtu.be/qF_l5X7Kv8w
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When I was a boy, my folks told stories I thought were passed down to them through the generations about the America their people heard about in the 1700’s before they sailed west from Europe to the new world. It was an America with rivers so rich with fish that you could walk across the water on the backs of fish. They were just that densely packed. You could shoot game for dinner from the front door of your log cabin. The soil was so fertile you needed to jump aside once you planted a seed– or else– the new stalk springing up –would knock you down. These were the stories in the 1700’s that floated back to Europe and caused people to sail west over a strange ocean to a stranger world. Jesus literally called them to cross the waters.
My folks–or their folks– may have read the stories in books. You may have read these stories too. I know I did as well.
However the stories came down, the point was the same. America was a place of unlimited abundant natural resources where –with a bit of pluck –even the meanest soul could prosper.
And so America remained: a world unlimited natural resources even past the end of the frontier in the 1890’s. It was held that way by the exponential improvement of technology to extract resources. In 1830, a canal was installed beside the Juniata River in Central Pennsylvania to connect Pittsburg and Philadelphia. The canal was not far from my Great Great Great Grandfather’s house. Canals are roughly a 4000 year old technology. The earliest examples have been found in Mesopotamia or current Iraq.
In 1849, a railroad was installed not far from the canal that ran by my grandfather’s house. It instantly obsoleted the canal and made local farmers quite prosperous. My great grandfather contributed to the construction of a local Presbyterian church in Port Royal in 1880. His name remains in the stained glass. But after 1920, the railroads in conjunction with the new tractors run by internal combustion engines brought a flood of grain to markets from the Midwest that collapsed the price of grain. Most of my father’s generation were driven off the eastern farms. For decades you could see old dead barns beside the highways along the eastern seaboard. They were all torn down and sold in the 1990’s because their (antique) oak and chestnut fetched 3-5 times the price of new lumber.
Meanwhile the big Midwestern farms have continued their improvements in output. In the 1940’s they introduced nitrogen and phosphorous. In the 1960’s they introduced pesticides & herbicides. In the 1990 they introduced better hybrids and in the 2000’s agriculture went high tech and introduced genetic engineering. NAFTA in 1990’s exposed Mexican farmers to the Midwestern farms. Like my father’s generation of eastern farmers the Mexican farmers were wiped out. These farmers came north.
http://reason.com/archives/2016/09/06/advances-in-agriculture-in-the-us-and-ar
http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-06-09/factory-fresh
As early as 1798, Malthus argued that while technology improved arithmetically (or linearly) population increased exponentially (or geometrically). Here’s how Wikipedia puts it:
Malthus came to prominence for his 1798, essay on population growth. In it, he argued that population multiplies geometrically and food arithmetically; therefore, whenever the food supply increases, population will rapidly grow to eliminate the abundance. Between 1798 and 1826 he published six editions of An Essay on the Principle of Population, updating each edition to incorporate new material, to address criticism, and to convey changes in his own perspectives on the subject. He wrote the original text in reaction to the optimism of his father and his father’s associates (notably Rousseau) regarding the future improvement of society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus
Malthus was proved wrong because successive waves of technology in the 19th and 20th century kept that world of unlimited natural resources alive. Why? Because even as populations exploded exponentially–technology improved exponentially– not linearly as Malthus argued.
That world of actual and perceived abundance in America continued even into the 1960’s.
My dad was stationed in the Presidio, San Francisco and Fort Ord, California in the early 60’s. Those areas were so cheap the middle class could live there. Not just houses but gas was cheap.
The future was even brighter and just around the corner. We were told that nuclear power would make energy too cheap to meter. Large scale space travel was a mere decade or two away. Cheap energy and desalinated water would open up all the world’s deserts to agriculture –starting with the deserts of southern California. Somehow everyone who was a kid from that period remembers the TV show called the Jetsons. That was the future. And it wasn’t that far away.
None of that promised future happened. It was all swept aside in the 1970’s. Nuclear energy development & water desalination research stopped. The era of dam building ended. Space exploration was scaled back. Gas prices exploded in 1973 (because of OPEC). Nuclear power prices exploded (because of Three Mile Island). Most of the international nuclear and desalination business went overseas. The Oroville dam in California that’s currently under stress was built in the 60’s. Like most of the rest of California’s water Infrastructure–no further money was provided for its maintenance. That type of dam only has a shelf life of 50 years.
Because pushing for ever lower energy and water costs is basic to civilizations health–and foundational to the industrial success of the USA in the 19th and 20th centuries –something really basic to American civilization… broke. (The anvil for was the immigration act of 1965 and roe v wade in 1971. The hammer was the Viet Nam war)
After 1970, or so the science fiction view of space travel went from the near future– to the far future –or the far past. The first Star Trek that came out in 1969, took place from 2250-2295. The first Star Wars came out in 1977, was supposed to have taken place “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”.
Science fiction that concerned the near future gave a view of the future turned profoundly dystopian–something alien to American views of the future. 2001 Space Odyssey released in 1968– began in ancient times with starving apes in the desert confronted by an alien obelisk and ended 30 years in the future with a computer gone mad in space and humans turned infantile–in the face of the same alien obelisk. The Mad Max series all took place in a desert with little to no water. As late as 2014, the movie Interstellar begins with the premise of worldwide famine so terrible that the only hope for mankind is another world somewhere in the galaxy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_(film)
This time last year I flew down to Port Canaveral for a cruise to the Western Caribbean. Across the bay is Cape Canaveral. A few days before we set sail. Elon Musk’s SpaceX took off and landed on a barge in the Atlantic. That was something that no aerospace company had been able to do in 50 years. Musk’s feat promises to slash the cost of space travel dramatically–because most of the cost of going into space consists of the cost of getting the first 200 miles off the planet’s surface. It made me dream that maybe –if I could stay healthy — in 20 years the cost of low earth orbit space flight might come down to where the middle class could afford it. I remembered the Jetsons.
From Port Canaveral we sailed across the Caribbean to Cancun. I took a tour of an old Mayan city called Tulum. Tulum had its astronomers too. This city was a walled enclosure with an entrance so tiny that we were forced to walk through single file. Inside were two square towers aligned east-west. Each tower had a square hole in the middle that sunlight would come through perfectly at summer and winter solstice. This marked the time for planting. The Central Americans are so deeply attached to the rising sun that their graves to this day all face due east.
The ability to reveal the summer and winter solstice gave the priest class and aristocracy of the old Mayas so much power — they were supported in everything by the farmers outside the walls.
Sometimes things did not go well. The rains didn’t come for a season or two.
In such instances the aristocracy of Maya thought it an honor to give themselves up for sacrifice. Their hearts were cut out and offered to their gods to bring back the rains. The rains returned.
The system went on for about 600 years from about 200 AD to 800 AD.
Then something happened.
About 800 AD the climate changed. This is the beginning of what has come to be known as the Medieval Warming Period. It went on for about 500 years from 800-1300. In the north the weather got warmer.
The Viking population exploded. They outstripped the ability of their lands to produce food for themselves. So they sailed south to raid, and to establish new colonies in England Ireland France and Russia. They sent outposts to Iceland and what was then Greenland. Their most adventurous explorers even traced the outlines of North America.
The same warming did some very interesting things in North America. It caused the rains to diminish so that the flooding stopped in the most fertile flood plains of the Mississippi River basin in south western
Illinois. Indians–likely ancestors of Choctaw-Chickasaw judging by their origin stories– came down from the high plains and started farming corn on the floodplains and developed the biggest earth pyramids in North America at place known as Cahokia.
As the river rises: Cahokia’s emergence and decline linked to Mississippi River flooding
On my trip to the Yucatan last year I learned that the rains also stopped in Central America. There the rain stopped in 800 AD. Naturally the nobility and priest classes offered themselves up for sacrifice. But the rains didn’t return as usual. So they kept on sacrificing themselves.
As the decades wore on and the rains still didn’t fall–sections of the leadership of Mayan cities all over Central America were sacrificed–including their children. They were so weakened that in 880 AD– the Toltec’s from Central Mexico invaded the Yucatan.
They had a different sacrificial procedure.
They would raid neighboring cities in order to take prisoners from the warriors and elites and sacrifice them. (The Aztecs learned their sacrificial practices from the Toltec’s.) The Toltec practice spread all over the Mayan cities of Central America.
In an orgy of wars over the next century the Mayans succeeded in killing off all the people in their cities. Leaving only farmers outside the walls to dig out a living.
Still the rains didn’t come. Mel Gibson’s movie Apocolypto gives a good visual of that time–except that Gibson shows a Spanish ship in the end his movie. The problem was that the Spanish arrived in Central America about 1519 or 500 years after the Mayans killed themselves and emptied their cities. 200 years before the Spanish arrived — the medieval warm ended in Europe. The rains returned to central and north America. The jungles grew over the old empty Mayan cities and the Cahokia was flooded out.
Unlike the Mayas in the Yucatan, the Middle East had an immense experience with drought going into prehistory.
The Middle East and North Africa were once a green savanna. About 5000 years ago or 3000 BC the rains stopped. The monsoon rains moved south. Over just 100 years the green savannahs of North Africa turned into the Sahara desert.
Scientists know this because they have taken core samples of the Atlantic floor off North Africa where the winds blow the deserts dust out to sea. They have found its all dust down to a layer about 5000 years ago– or 3000 BC.
Then the sediment lower down becomes full of pollen that normally grows from a savannah. The Sahara desert today is dotted with the bleached bones of hippopotamus, rhino giraffes, gazelles and a dozen other animals normally found further south in well-watered plains.
People of the period drew pictures of these game animals on the walls of caves in what is now the Sahara. From space scientists can see the curved outlines of massive lakes and long rivers all over North Africa.
The famous Sahara desert oasis are like the tips of icebergs–because beneath the Sahara today there are giant freshwater fossil water aquifers. http://news.mit.edu/2016/saharan-dust-monsoons-1123
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130722123014.htm
Fossil water means the water was deposited 1000’s of years ago. Up until 40 years ago these same fossil aquifers underlay Saudi Arabia. But then the Saudis pumped the fossil water out to grow wheat in the desert. Over a period of 20 years they became the world’s fifth largest wheat producer. Then their wells ran dry. The water ran out. They don’t grow wheat anymore.
These droughts in the Middle East were not just a one-time event. They were a repeating problem.
Drought was one (of several) reasons for the collapse of the late bronze age. Between c. 1200 and 1150 BC drought helped destroy dozens of kingdoms in Greece Asia Minor Israel/Syria and Egypt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse#Drought
A thousand years before the collapse of the late Bronze Age kingdoms mentioned above– drought also destroyed the early kingdoms of the 3rd millennium BC. Archeologists have learned to read the writing of the empires of the third millennium BC (2000-3000 BC)–& correlated those with earth core samples from the period and found that the Akkadians of Mesopotamia and the Old Kingdom of Egypt collapsed because of drought about 2150 BC.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2189802/Egyptian-kingdom-died-4-200-years-ago-following-mega-drought-caused-climate-change.html
https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2011/08/drought-caused-collapse-of-egypts-old.html#liwO86DZVa3ivx5h.97
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/24/science/collapse-of-earliest-known-empire-is-linked-to-long-harsh-drought.html?pagewanted=all
Here is a list of civilization destroyed by drought. http://www.marionbrady.com/worldhist/DroughtCivilizCollapse.pdf
The bible picks up this narrative in the drought that starved Israel –but because of Joseph’s planning– not Egypt– in the time of Jacob and Joseph–or about +-1600 BC. By this time recurring and extended droughts had been going on for over a 1000 years.
Egypt had the benefit of the Nile which brought fresh water from the well-watered jungles of the far south. Canaan had no such secure water supply. The Canaanites were acutely aware of the limits of their resources. The land–and technology– could only support so many people. Because they were polytheists –meaning they were self-centered–(rather than God centered) they would have seen their choice as Hobbesian. Either cull their own people or be culled by nature. Why do I suggest this? I have read recent archeology pieces that have talked about how child sacrifice was not just a means to appease the gods of the Canaanites but also a primitive form of birth control. Sometimes but not always the children sacrificed were the children birthed by temple prostitutes.
The archaeological evidence comes from the Carthaginians who were a Phoenician colony. The Phoenicians were a Canaanite people. The gods of the Canaanites in Joshua’s time were the same as the gods of the Carthaginians 1200 years later and 2000 miles west in modern day Tunisia. What the archeologist have found in Carthage is a vast graveyard for baby bones all burned on one side. They date the bones to a 200 year period from roughly 400 AD to 200 BC. They have even been able to correlate their death dates to periods of drought. They have found that the death dates of the babies come in clusters centered on periods of drought and famine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Carthage http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Evils%20in%20America/Abortion%20is%20Murder/sacrifice.htm
http://www.academia.edu/28849418/Canaanite_Child_Sacrifice_Abortion_and_the_Bible
I wanted to be scrupulous about this proof because it puts on a still heavier weight to the faith of Abraham in nature’s God when he stayed his hand with Isaac– even in the face of nature’s coming betrayal. After all, the starving time did come to Abraham’s people in the time of his grandson.
Why is this important?
The foreboding about the future that would have been in the land of limited resources in Canaan in Abraham’s time is also with us today.
It began in the 1970’s when a radical shift in American culture occurred and caused secular Sci Fi movies to turn dystopian about fate of the world in the near future. The US went from a world (and world view) of population growth in the context of unlimited natural resources –that had been in effect since the discovery of the new world–to a world after 1970 — of population control in the context of limited resources.
Not coincidentally the US has shifted in subsequent decades from a Judeo Christian world view to what can best be characterized as a Canaanite world view. This cultural change has coincided in the west with a crumbling in the face of Islam.
What is the connection between a Canaanite world view and weakness in the face of Islam?
As it happens –it’s worth noting one of Winston Churchill’s famous quotes. Back in 1899– after his participation in a war in the Sudan, he said.
Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die: but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science—the science against which it had vainly struggled—the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/12/28/century-donald-trump-churchill-warned-no-stronger-retrograde-force-exists-world-islam/
Islam being monotheistic is inherently stronger than pagan religions–whether those pagan religions are practiced officially in Africa or unofficially in Europe and America.
Ok so there is the weakness in the face of Islam. But what caused the secular cultural shift in the 1970’s, from a Christian world view to the Canaanite world view–in the first place.
The short answer is western civilization having shifted its faith from Christianity to Science (as mentioned by Churchill) — western civilization in the 1970’s lost faith in science to deliver the future–(because of some pseudo-science–as I’ll show).
As a result–there was a civilization wide failure of nerve.
But Unlike the Mayans or the Canaanites there were not famines in the west.
Rather resources became more expensive.
In the 1970’s gas prices exploded (because of OPEC). Nuclear power prices exploded (because of Three Mile Island). That was about it. These things caused loss of wealth and opportunity but not starvation.
So why this great fear of famine.
Something else must have been at work.
The fear of famine didn’t come from the US or Europe. Rather it came from India or Mexico or other parts of what was then known as the 3rd world.
The change in culture did not come so much because of extreme events like drought or famine–or objective events.
Rather they came about because of a change in world view. The USA and Europe internalized the fear and envy of what was then called the 3rd world. How does that happen? Atheists have no protection from envy. What the 1960’s, is famous for is the excellence of western/American science and technology and the passions of nonwestern peoples. America put a man on the moon and the European empires collapsed and American cities burned.
There were two books of the period that rocked the academic world. The first was Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb and the second was the Club of Rome 1972 book called The Limits Of Growth
According to Wikipedia:
The Population Bomb is a best-selling book written by Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich (who was uncredited), in 1968.[1][2] It warned of the mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Fears of a “population explosion” were widespread in the 1950s and 1960s, but the book and its author brought the idea to an even wider audience.[3][4] The book has been criticized since its publishing for its alarmist tone, and in recent decades for its inaccurate predictions. The Ehrlichs stand by the basic ideas in the book, stating in 2009 that “perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future” and believe that it achieved their goals because “it alerted people to the importance of environmental issues and brought human numbers into the debate on the human future.”[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
This picture of population growth is again presented by a conservative Roy Beck in 2015.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OwV-zfbHoY
–and a liberal Hans Rosling in 2010
They both show a steadily declining percentage of western peoples to the rest of the world.
In 1971 the Supreme Court passed Roe V Wade.
As to the second book … The Limits of Growth that came out in 1972–according to Wikipedia:
The original version presented a model based on five variables: world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resources depletion. These variables are considered to grow exponentially, while the ability of technology to increase resources availability is only linear.[5] Two of the scenarios saw “overshoot and collapse” of the global system by the mid to latter part of the 21st century, while a third scenario resulted in a “stabilized world.”[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
The third possibility where there was a “stabilized world” involved population control.
The Limits Of Growth made the same point that Malthus did in 1798. Population grows exponentially while technology grows linearly. While Malthus was ignored in 1798–the Limits of Growth became gospel for secular society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
So why was Malthus ignored and the Club Of Rome’s Limits of Growth turned into gospel?
Because the underlying Christian faith of western civilization had rotted out. (The modern reason for the rot in the public culture of the USA has to do with the work of the Frankfurt School in American Universities. The ultimate reason for the rot in the USA and Europe is because of a mistake that Calvin made.)
Into the void rushed the emotion and imaginations of other cultures.
The Limits of Growth –like computer simulations of weather hundreds of years in the future — was a projection. A bit of imaginative math– a kind of pseudoscience.
As CS Lewis put it — as the basis for action “the battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other”. Emotion and imagination won out in the 1970’s.
http://biblestudyforcatholics.com/c-s-lewis-difference-faith-emotion/
To understand this consider that reason and faith would have dictated that the people best equipped to deal with exponential population growth by exponentially increasing technological improvements would be most likely to keep up high birth rates whereas the people least equipped to exponentially improve technology would be most likely to reduce their birthrates. Instead it has been just the opposite. The west along with every other technologically advanced country now in the world have been no wiser than the Mayans.
What does emotion and imagination do?
The problem stated by the Population Bomb and the Limits Of Growth had its best expression in the terrifying story of Easter Island. A friend of mine was there recently. This is the sort of image that the liberals have imagined around the child bed of their followers. This is a true story but a false analogy.
In 1200 AD Polynesians sailing east across the pacific from Australian waters landed on the south Pacific island we call Easter Island. It was a lush island covered with palm trees.
Over the next 300 years the population grew to about 14000. The settlers cut down the trees to clear lands, make boats and provide rolling logs to move the idols of their ancestors into place. The problem was that they brought rats with them. The rats ate palm seeds so no new palm trees grew. Eventually they stripped the island of all its trees so they could not build boats to get off the island.
They were marooned. Rain stripped the soil. They couldn’t fish.
The island could not support the population. Cannibalism set in. They killed and ate each other for two centuries before the first Europeans arrived in the early 1700’s. By that time the Easter Island population had declined to under 2000. The people sheltered in caves to defend themselves from each other. The idols to their ancestors had been tipped over and lay face down.
This is the image of the fate of earth that the Limits of Growth and the Population Bomb painted. A planet marooned in space destined to overpopulate and strip itself of resources.
In the end people will resort to cannibalism. There will be a population crash. This happens all the time in nature in predator prey relationships.
http://peplamb.com/predator-prey-simulation-with-grass-sheep-and-wolf/
Why not with people? Certainly it has happened in the past as with Easter Island.
Even Google’s deep mind has found that when it sets two computer factions against each other for limited resources –they will resort to increasingly violent (computer) behavior.
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-deepmind-aggressive-gameplay-2017-2
To prevent this– the logical thing to do according to liberals is to limit population growth and move to development that can be sustained via green energy sources that are renewable over many millennium.
The dangers foreseen by the Limits of Growth and the Population Bomb have not been wrong.
While starvation has not affected the west–Extended drought has not gone away. Up until recently–the desert southwest and California have both been hit by drought since about the year 2000.
Both California and the southwest have been saved by the foresight of the generations of people that lived there from 1900-1970. They built an immense water works system that has not been updated for almost 50 years– even as the population has doubled.
Jerry Brown’s father, Pat Brown, back in the 1960’s– was the last of the governors who planned for the future. The environmentalists after 1970, killed most water works plans.
The same drought that hit the US southwest and California also hit Israel and Syria about the year 2000.
Syria– in the face of drought– rolled over and died. The farmer’s lands all dried up. They were wiped out. They all migrated to Syria’s cities. They then became tinder for the civil war there and the mass migration to Europe.
Something very different happened in Israel. Israel demonstrated that the Club of Rome’s Limits of Growth was wrong –just as Malthus was before them. Israel demonstrated that technology can increase resource availability not linearly –but rather, exponentially.
http://reason.com/archives/2016/09/06/advances-in-agriculture-in-the-us-and-ar
http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-06-09/factory-fresh
I can recall as a boy in the 1960’s being told about the starving Indians in India. (And therefor eat your beets, broccoli or asparagus). The USA and parts of Europe experienced abundance but not much of the rest of the world. The developed world had long lives and small families whereas the underdeveloped world had short lives and large families. Hans Rosling graphs this well in the “greatest graphs ever shown”. It shows that since the 1960’s most of the world has been trending toward longer lives and smaller families. There has been an explosion of wealth around the world including Mexico and India. They are living longer and eat better. To the point that American health and wealth stats today are similar to the rest of the world.
No scenario in the Limits of Growth projected a world in which the technology changes rapidly enough to return the world to say–a pre-1970’s American condition. A world of unlimited natural resources—and therefor a world ripe for unlimited population growth.
I first encountered this possibility on a business trip to San Francisco a couple of years ago. The zeitgeist of the area reminded me of the early 60’s. I recalled as a kid the world seemed like it was on the technological edge beyond which were limitless possibilities. More importantly –there was profound confidence in technology to take us there.
Then in 2014 the Israelis announced that they had become water independent. How to understand this?
In 2006 a group of Israeli desalination plant managers, government officials, and businessmen flew over for a conference in Chrystal city VA with US desalination experts. I attended the conference and peppered the Israelis with numerous recommendations on how best to reduce desalination costs. I reported on that conference in a blog I wrote at the time that was popular with the desalination research community. http://www.rdwaterpower.com/?s=israel&x=0&y=0
In the time since that conference the Israelis have developed a world class water desalination system at the world’s lowest cost. They have achieved a feat of literally biblical proportions. They have freed Israel from drought virtually forever.
Their most recent plants– desalinate their water for about $500@acre foot and send it to their cities. Then they clean the water to brown water standards and send the water to their fields.
There is something more.
By reducing desalination costs to a quarter of current US desalination costs– the Israelis have brought the world within striking distance of a goal I mentioned at RDWaterPower.com 10 years ago.
If water desalination were moved from the business level to the political level. For example, there would, imho, be a political benefit to a joint statement made by the US President and the Prime Minister of Israel to the effect that the two countries planned to work together collapse the cost of water desalination by a factor of 10 in the next 10 years–and thereby make it economically possible to turn the world’s deserts green — and double the size of the habitable planet.
I think that this would have the same effect as Reagan’s Star Wars Speech. That speech changed the future because it changed the bad guy’s expectations about the future.
Former Prime Minister Shimon Peres has been actively pushing for Israel to get involved with nanotechnology as a way to reduce costs for things such as desalination. Senator Domenici of New Mexico has been championing desalination research in the USA. But neither the Kadima Party or the Republican Party leadership currently recognize the profound impact on world affairs that cheap desalinated water would have–and how close that reality is. Someone might want to get leadership up to speed on this.
What would the policy look like today?
The UN has major policy initiatives on both water and CO2. CO2 gets all the headlines. The policy would be to shift the headlines to water.
Specifically, the policy is to kill the cost of American water and energy so desert and even subarctic farming anywhere on earth and mars is profitable–and advance vertical farming. The trump administration has already announced its energy policy is to make America energy independent. Trump also mentioned energy “dominance” last year in his North Dakota speech last year. So what I’m talking about is in line with his already stated vision—because the cost of energy is 30-50% of the cost of water.
Here is one of many specific example of an initiatives that I would advance.
Trump is such a PT Barnum that he could go to the United Nations and with the sound track of 2001 Space Odyssey playing –announce a worldwide contest. A prize of $100 million dollars would be awarded to the first company that could make 10 products profitably from seawater on three continents—excluding salt and water. The first group to desalinate seawater for $400@acre foot on three oceans would get 1 billion dollars and an obelisk on earth and mars deserts with their name on it plus the name of the sponsor who put up the 1 billion dollars prize. When that goal is achieved, then the first group to desalinate seawater for $300@acre foot on three oceans would get 1 billion dollars with their name on it plus the name of the sponsor who put up the 1 billion dollars on the same obelisk on earth and mars deserts. Rinse repeat for $200@acre foot and $100@acre foot. Prize contributors and contestant winners would get obelisks on earth and Mars deserts with their names on them. All the Obelisks would have the cross of Christ on them.
Trump could probably get a couple billionaires to kick in the prize money if they were promised that their names would be on a small obelisk on Mars.
(There is method to setting up contests as they generally produce 10 times more research than just allocating the resource. So a billion dollar prize would generate 10 billion worth of R&D. Also the big prize might entice Elon Musk into the game because he’ll need desalination technology for his Mars program slated to reach mars in 2024)
(But really funding for desalination and energy research could be structured many different ways.)
Another idea is to reclassify nuclear technology to that of a renewable energy so as to make it eligible for already allocated DOD energy related funding.
I have dozens more ideas like this.
Here’s thing.
The technology to double –even triple the size of habitable earth is only about 10 years off. It’s going to happen anyway. Water desalination cheap enough for desert farming is going to happen anyway.
What’s more, there is an agricultural revolution being born today called vertical farming.
http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-aerofarms-worlds-largest-vertical-farm-2016-8
This technology uses water so efficiently that even today’s expensive desalinated water is profitable for farming.
Vertical farming is as profound as the Neolithic revolution that started farming in the first place 10,000 years ago. Vertical farming reduces the chances of world starvation to virtually zero for… hundreds of years even when the population of earth is 10 times the size of today’s population. That’s long enough to provide the time needed to acquire the technology to launch people to the stars.
(As to going to the stars–the chances of earth being marooned are starting to abate. –At his wedding in January my rocket scientist nephew informed that the recently NASA announced eM drive –is, in fact, a warp drive.)
If what I’m talking is going to happen anyway–what’s the point of bringing it to the attention of the Trump administration?
Creating a vision actually organizes and reshapes the world because it changes people’s assumptions about the future and organizes work so as to make that future happen expeditiously. For example the democrat’s green energy vision has collapsed the cost of wind and solar to a fraction of what they were a decade ago.
Further a green earth policy undermines the reason for abortion and the Canaanite world view.
As well, as I mentioned the Trump administration by promulgating this Green Earth vision over on top of the democrats green energy vision–advances the republican agenda while scrambling the democrat party on many levels.
Then of course there is the geopolitical calculations I mentioned before. North Africa and Mexico –instead of being conduits for refugees – become buffer states. China’s habitable size nearly doubles.
The real question is one of who gets the credit for returning the world to a state of unlimited natural resources and thereby killing the raison d’être for limiting birth rate because of limited resources–this the Canaanite world view … that the west has lived under since the 1970’s.
Leftist blogs are already talking about how technology’s exponential growth may keep up with population growth. But they do not have a grand vision as yet. A grand vision would look like a Green Earth policy for the republicans where the goal would be to create and implement the technology to double or triple the size of habitable earth.
This policy is much more expansionist and offensive than the liberal’s defensive Green Energy policy. I don’t think we would be met with unwilling administration ears on this.
Peter Thiel, Trump’s Liaison to Silicon Valley — made a speech at the republican convention last year in which he described the whole of America of the early 60’s in similar terms as I did of just the San Francisco California when I was a boy. Thiel said:
Where I work in Silicon Valley, it’s hard to see where America has gone wrong. My industry has made a lot of progress in computers and in software, and, of course, it’s made a lot of money. But Silicon Valley is a small place. Drive out to Sacramento, or even just across the bridge to Oakland, and you won’t see the same prosperity. That’s just how small it is.
Back when my parents came to America looking for that dream, they found it right here in Cleveland. They brought me here as a one-year-old and this is where I became an American. Opportunity was everywhere. My dad studied engineering at Case Western Reserve University, just down the road from where we are now. Because in 1968, the world’s high tech capital wasn’t just one city: all of America was high tech.
It’s hard to remember this, but our government was once high tech, too. When I moved to Cleveland, defense research was laying the foundations for the internet. The Apollo program was just about to put a man on the moon–and it was Neil Armstrong, from right here in Ohio. The future felt limitless.
http://time.com/4417679/republican-convention-peter-thiel-transcript/
Finally Trump himself in his inauguration speech said:
Finally, we must think big and dream even bigger. In America, we understand that a nation is only living as long as it is striving.
We stand at the birth of a new millennium ready to unlock the histories of space, to free the earth from the miseries of disease and to harness the energies, industries, and technologies of tomorrow. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/full-text-president-donald-trumps-inauguration-speech/story?id=44915821
But there is more. A grand vision to turn the earth green would provide the opportunity to take credit for the Judeo/Christian tradition and more specifically Christ. Getting the Judeo/Christian tradition and Christ credit for restoring hope to the world–rather than just technology–will provide faith and strength to the world when the current technological wave weakens and slows–as it will in time–(but no time soon)
We’re talking about putting Christ on an Obelisk on Earth and Mars for starters. A small Obelisk might be something Musk would carry with him to Mars in 2024. Trump could set the deadline for developing the energy and desalination technology to coincide with the SpaceX manned Mars mission.
(There is also prudent reasoning here as well. What was it that Armstrong said when he put his first foot on the moon? “One small step for man. One giant step for Mankind.” American imagination and courage failed within years of this exploit. What they called “future shock” set in. In order to avoid that –the burden and credit for great exploits needs to placed on Jesus.)
Nor do I think that we would be met with unwilling ears in the Trump administration which is already moving to scale back federal support for abortion. The new CIA director is not Moslem. He is Christian.
Mike Pompeo. an evangelical Christian, has been quoted as saying “Jesus Christ Is the Only Solution for Our World”.
https://hellochristian.com/5583-trumps-new-cia-director-jesus-christ-is-the-only-solution-for-our-world
I did this 7 minute video last year to inspire entrepreneurs and to create a new earth based on the new Green Earth Policy. Without going into details on technology or theology–it shows how the vision works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRYPRsXbYbgn
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The healthy growth of mankind depends on continuously decreasing the cost and increasing the availability of water and energy everywhere.
Nice thought. Why mention it?
Its a mission statement.
For who?
Microsoft founder Bill Gates and through him America’s billionaires.
Why Bill Gates?
His passion; According to a recent interview
Understanding science and pushing the boundaries of science is what makes me immensely satisfied. What I’m doing now involves understanding maths, risk-taking. The first half of my life was good preparation for the second half.’
Now in the context of the interview he was talking about the development of a vaccine to cure a disease like malaria but its clear that energy is part of that picture too.
In 2010 at the annual Ted conference he said his greatest wish–greater even than the efforts of the Bill Gates foundation–was that a new energy source be invented that delivered power for less than half the cost of coal.
If you gave me only one wish for the next 50 years… I could pick who’s president…. I could pick a vaccine —- which is something I love— or I could pick this thing that’s half the cost [of coal based electrical production] with no CO2 — gets invented — this is the wish I would pick. This the one with the greatest impact.
This year at his annual corporate executives conference–he included energy research as a core technology research investment goal.
What about water?
Mr Gates is half way to recognizing the importance of water. Over the last several years, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given over $1.7 billion to support food security worldwide. At several conferences in the last year he has talked about the importance of grants to help poverty stricken small farmers in South Asia and Africa to grow more food. But at the same time he has emphasized the need for tech innovation.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that Gates offers “a glimpse into his thinking and his hopes for the future. ‘Despite the tough economy, I am still very optimistic about the progress we can make in the years ahead,’ he writes. ‘A combination of scientific innovations and great leaders who are working on behalf of the world’s poorest people will continue to improve the human condition'”
What innovation is foundational to the next great green revolution?
Water.
That is delivering water in massive volumes–cheap enough for farming –1000 miles from any seacoast.
Water is foundational to civilization. It always has been. Always will be. In this article 20 former world leaders talk about the looming global water crises. You can already read Wall St Journal articles about the return of 1970’s style ideas from scholars like Paul Ehrlich (Population Bomb) or the Club of Rome’s “Limits of Growth” (read by a million boomers as students in high school, college & graduate school. As it happened, these 70’s books coincided with the peak and initial decline in US (cheap) oil production as well as the end or the era of US dam building.)
Today, many large players through out the world including sovereign wealth funds are buying up agricultural land.
They are anticipating a world wide shortage of food supplies. But these food shortages have not been in rural Africa or Asia where many current poverty programs are targeted. Rather the shortages/high prices have been in big cities. There have been major food riots already. What has not been widely reported about the crises in Egypt this year is that it has been sparked by money –not politics. There were big increases in the cost of grain.
Mr Gates concluded the 2010 Ted conference speech by saying
If we don’t get this wish [for cheaper energy]the division between those who think short term and long term will be terrible between the us and china between poor countries and rich and most of all the lives of those two billion will be far worse
Why get other billionaires involved?
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are looking to get billionaires in the USA and the rest of the world to
give away at least half of their wealth.
Gates & Buffet have left it up to billionaires to decide what to give their money to. Many are agreeable to the idea. But all would love for their money to have a real impact. They want the same thing as Bill Gates. They want to make a difference. However, they don’t know what would have the greatest impact.
What difference does cheap water and cheap energy make?
Consider; If you collapsed the cost of water desalination and transport so as to make desert farming profitable 1000 miles from any seacoast, you could turn the world’s deserts green. That would increase the habitable size of the USA & China each by 1/3, double the habitable size of Africa, triple the habitable size of Mexico, increase by 10 fold or more the habitable size of Australia– and double the size of the habitable earth.
So there’s your vision thing.
Turn the world’s deserts green and double the size of the habitable planet.
Technologically and financially, this is much much simpler and doable than, for example, colonizing the moon. Turning the deserts green just involves lowering the cost of energy and water. (Lower the cost of water and power and market forces and governments will take over to do the rest.)How do you collapse the costs of water and power? I think Mr Gates understands the issues involved with energy. In order, to collapse the cost of delivered desalinized water–just two technologies need to be improved–membranes and pipelines.(Delivering water cheaply over great distances by pushing water uphill will require cheaper energy–as well as better/faster/smarter pipelines. Membranes are currently expensive and require a lot of energy to desalinate water. Their cost/efficiency/longevity is falling by half about once a decade or so. Already, the elements are in place to significantly accelerate that decline in price.) (There are subsidiary issues like finding ways to profitably turn Na+ Cl- and dozens of trace elements–into products. I talk about this in more detail here.)
Wouldn’t you think that this might be a proper thing for the very flowers of healthy growth –America’s billionaires — to devote their seed to? That is. isn’t this goal both worthy and doable? Wouldn’t this have a big impact?
Doesn’t this gives an organic role in civilization for America’s billionaires? (as opposed to say the inorganic role played by billionaires like Soros in promoting — one world government…)
What about the US federal government? Isn’t there a United States program for water desalination? Doesn’t this nation spend money on water R&D? Yes, about 50 million scattered through a dozen agencies. (This compares to 1.5 billion annually in today’s dollars spent on desalination research from roughly 1955-1975 –which research developed the semi permeable membrane that filters much of the installed desalination industry today.) US Corporate desalination R&D contributes another 50 million annually.
Isn’t energy research something that the Department of Energy does?
Yes– but just as with water–the feds are not doing nearly enough. According to Bill Gates in this interview:
Interviewer:You are a member of the American Energy Innovation Council, the AEIC, which calls for a national energy policy that would increase U.S. investment in energy research every year from $5 billion to $16 billion.
Gates:Right.
Interviewer:I was stunned that the U.S. government invests so little.
Gates: Yeah, particularly when you look at the DOE budget, and it looks so big–but the biggest part of that by far is dealing with the legacy of nuclear weapons production at various sites around the country. I was stunned myself. You know, the National Institutes of Health invest a bit more than $30 billion.
For a moment, lets discuss the Bill Gates Foundation because I think that Mr Gates– by way of his thoughts on global health and its relation to wealth– is already backing into the idea that I’m proposing.
The Gates Foundation funds medical research in diseases that are not common in wealthy countries. (Generally, the Gates foundation serves grant seekers seeking to bring innovations in health, development, and learning to the global community. This includes education scholarships to low income families.)
The Gates Foundation is in that health area, and when we pick a disease to work on, we pick a disease where for some reason the market is not working. Like malaria: rich people don’t need a malaria vaccine. They are rarely in malarial areas, and when they are, they can take prophylactic drugs and not worry about it.
Mr Gates reasons that there is a relationship between health and wealth. According to this article
WASHINGTON, DC, January 18, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) –
Attributing the decline in the number of children who die before their fifth birthday from 20 million in 1960 to 8.5 million today to infant vaccination, Gates told the audience of more than 2,000 at the conference, “About one-third [of that improvement] is by increasing income. The majority has been through vaccines. Vaccines will be the key.
1/3 might be a little low for the influence of wealth on health. Certainly it could be reasonably argued that 1/2 might be more like it.
Its easy to show, for example, that there is a correlation between health and wealth. Consider this utube from from global health specialist Hans Rosling.
What you’ll see is that the west made huge gains in health and wealth before 1900 without ubiquitous vaccinations. From 1900 to 1960 the west continued to make huge gains in health and wealth –with vaccination–while the rest of the world wealth gains remained stagnant. But after 1960–the health and wealth of much of the rest of the world moved in lock step upward. There is no initial lag of either health or wealth which would suggest that either health or wealth was preponderantly causal.
(Now I am not advocating that the Gates Foundation do anything other than what it is doing currently. Vaccines save lives. Rather I’m suggesting that if America’s other billionaires became involved in research to collapse the cost of water and power–their work–because it increases the wealth of the world (which in turn funds health advances)– would be a proper adjunct to the work of the Gates Foundation.)
Even though Gates is more interested in charity with regards to poor countries–for several years he has recognized the importance of the energy to not only poor people — but also people all over the world.
Gates in the –energy ventures article — has said that
“I guess in a vague sense we can say that we want energy that costs, say, a quarter of what coal or electricity does. Why? Because that’s what it will take to raise the poorest of the poor in world to reasonable living standards. But it will also raise the living standards of the rest of the world.”
Energy costs directly effect productivity. The more productive people are the wealthier they are. The wealthier they are–the more they can afford things like health care. This is true for everyone.
Gates is doing some work along those lines –separately from his foundation work. Several years ago he invested in Sapphire Energy — an algae based biofuel company. As well he has invested in a unique nuclear reactor that has been developed by a company called TerraPower.
More recently reports are that he has invested in a software company called NEOS GeoSolutions which promises to take much of the guesswork out of onshore oil and gas exploration.
Just last month he invested in Liquid Metal Battery — a company that promises to store and release electricity in volume from intermittent sources like solar and wind.
While the cost of energy affects topline wealth–the cost of water reflects bottom line wealth. (For example, the cost of food represents maybe 8% of Americans home costs–however, food represents 40% of costs for say, people in Egypt.)
All the greatest advances in power and water in the 20th century were top down advances incubated mostly in the US and then moved to the rest of the world. This is true for oil-gas/internal combustion engine and hydro electric power, nuclear electric power/electric motors. The Hoover Dam in the USA provided the template for dams worldwide. According to T Boone Pickens this will likely be the case with fracking natural gas (and still more recently fracking oil). Because of new technologies the US now has the equivalent of three times the reserves of the Saudis. As happened with earlier water power technologies, hydraulic fracking will likely go overseas too after it has done its work here in the USA. However, except for natural gas temporarily this energy will not come in at anywhere near at the price points equivalent to 1/4-1/2 the cost of electricity from coal. That is oil & natural gas in the USA seem poised to become plentiful again but not cheap. Even Mr Pickens says that fracking natural gas (and oil) is a temporary solution.
According to Gates if the USA does not lead in research –it doesn’t happen elsewhere.
But unfortunately, when the U.S. doesn’t step up on basic research, the world at large doesn’t tend to step up and fill the gap. I wish they would, but they don’t.
So its not disingenuous or cute to say that charity begins at home.
Gates writes another article here in which he maintains that the key to energy success is distributed innovation.
To achieve the kinds of innovations that will be required I think a distributed system of R&D with economic rewards for innovators and strong government encouragement is the key. There just isn’t enough work going on today to get us to where we need to go
I think that Donald Rumsfeld used an intellectual construct that can be applied to this distributed approach to research.
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
Known knowns are things we know we know. This would represent direct investment in companies and research that furthers the goal of cheaper water and energy. This is what Bill Gates and many other investors are currently doing. They find a tech that looks promising and invest in it.
Known unknowns: that is things we know we don’t know. Wouldn’t it be nice to say “Ok we have this problem and we will pay this much for a solution. A number of web sites have grown up in the last couple years that bring together Research organizations and problem solvers like InnoCentive, YourEncore, & NineSigma. There’s a lot of seriously interesting ways this can be used to accelerate energy and water research. Consider this article by Wired Magazine.
Unknown unknowns. The problem with any directed research is that its directed. Many times solutions can come from unknown directions. What’s the best way to harvest this?
With prizes.
Newt Gingrich in 2001 fleshed out this idea by saying.
Historically, prizes have been used to stimulate breakthrough technology. Prizes are particularly effective motivators of entrepreneurs, who use investment capital to test their ideas and generally invest four times the value of a prize to win the competition. The X-Prize Foundation was recently established to manage such prizes as the $10 million Ansari X Prize for Suborbital Spaceflight, the $10 million Archon X-Prize for Genomics, and the $20 million Google X-Prize to land and successfully operate an unmanned rover vehicle on the Moon. Such prizes must be big, even huge, to produce meaningful discoveries on a grand scale. Perhaps a prize of $1 billion could be the impetus for a 500-miles-per-gallon car. Robust incentives and prizes might produce a hydrogen-based economy much faster than would conventional R&D.
Gingrich was low in his calculations as to how much research the X-Prize actually produced. According to this ingenious article by Tim Hartford called called Cash For Answers–When the competition was completed:
The X Prize foundation claims that the Ansari X Prize directly stimulated $100m of spending on research and development, 10 times the value of the prize itself. That is clever, and for a handful of sexy challenges it is likely to be a trick that can be repeated.
So what do I suggest? What’s the best fastest way to produce energy & water miracles.
I would suggest doing all three.
1.)Continue to invest in start ups with promising energy and water technology.
2.)Put out bids online for anyone to solve specific energy and water problems
3.)Run high stakes water and energy contests. These contests would be as well publicized as American idol. So that the contest winners get get fame as well as fortune. But also contest contributors are honored.
I would suggest desalination contests: for desalination plants, pipelines and semi permiable membranes.
For energy, Mr Gates would have a better idea as to how to target prizes for energy. He mentioned three at the 2010 Ted conference: molten salt (thorium)reactors, TerraPower, portable nuclear reactors. More recently he has mentioned others.
The only thing I would add to this list is…. research funding and a prize should be given for the first internal combustion engine based on conversion of sodium ion (Na+) to sodium (Na) in water H20. This wouldn’t be used to power a car. Rather this could be used to power water pumps for pumping rivers of water inland. (For more info on this email me at ckilmer at gmail dot com.) As well Mr. Gates mentions here that the key to materials research (by which get to energy and water innovations)is to accelerate the power of computer modeling. I have found a way to do this. Its pretty obvious so likely there already other players working on it. But if not again see me at ckilmer at you know gmail dot com)
More generally Mr Gates has put the benchmark goal of producing energy at 1/2- 1/4 the cost of coal based electricity. So prizes might be given to walk down the cost.
DARPA has been a good at running prize programs so they might be consulted for running the program. The WateReuse association is well embedded in the desalination community so they would be good to publicizing efforts to the desalination community. Dancing with the stars might be consulted to somehow make the whole show sexy. The media production of the show should be world wide.
Now I began this article with the mission statement:
The healthy growth of mankind depends on continuously decreasing the cost and increasing the availability of water and energy everywhere.
However, I only talked about the next great leap forward.
This is a problem.
Likely in only ten years (but no more than 20 years) the basic science and technology for collapsing the cost of transported fresh water and energy will be developed. Mr Gates — and all the billionaires who follow his lead– who start out with the intent to do good –will wind up doing well.
What then?
Well then the idea would be to use the profits to fund a foundation whose mission statement is:
The healthy growth of mankind depends on continuously decreasing the cost and increasing the availability of water and energy everywhere.
This foundation would fund the R&D that makes for cheap water and energy on the moon and mars and in space.
How would you institutionalize Mr Gates passion?
“Understanding science and pushing the boundaries of science”
To handle known knowns You might have a bicameral research funding agency. Where one branch was based off of DARPA and the other was based off of crowdsourcing scientific research. To handle known unknowns you might farm out specific problems to be solved on the internet. For unknown unknowns third group would organize well publicized competitions
Does this sound like science fiction? Very well. Thank you Mr Assimov for your inspiration. And yeah. Thank you Mr Gates for your passion & vision.
This is what I was talking about as far as funding being proportional to visions & how federal officials will just wait for stuff to come to them. Further, it looks like there’s a consensus building around federal funding for a new power grid to link remote power stations to the network. From Washington Post 12/23/08
Senior aides in the new administration and the congressional leadership privately predict that they will be able to please both camps [spend infrastructure now vs spend green slowly]but suggest that there have been delays in identifying enough of the environmentally friendly projects to reach a dollar level that will truly jump-start the economy.
Why the delay? Its not clear. My guess is that not enough green power projects pencil for private capital due to current tax laws and grid infrastructure constraints. Also there is this. Remember back in June the BLM put a two year freeze on solar development pending environmental review? Someone needs to have a heart to heart with those folk and maybe mention something about it to DOI secretary designate Salalazar.
Rep. James L. Oberstar (D-Minn.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has circulated a 41-page memo seeking $85 billion worth of projects over the next two years. The largest chunk of that money, more than $30.2 billion, would go toward highway funds, while $12 billion would go to local public transportation funds. An additional $14.3 billion would go toward “environmental infrastructure,” with most going to a clean-water fund.
Its not clear as yet what that clean water fund will consist of.
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who supports both medical technology and wind farm projects, said it may take longer to pump the money into those projects, but said that is why Obama set out a two-year plan. In that time span, Nelson said, a “smart grid” could be funded that would connect wind farms and solar power hot spots around the country, delivering power in a cleaner fashion.
There is increasing talk of this grid funded by the government. So going forward– I would categorize this project as…likely.
The battle has Democratic negotiators on Capitol Hill trying to decide how to spend the money — and whom to please. Said Peppard: “One minute they want to spend it quickly, the next minute they want to spend it well.”
Curiously Geothermal energy development is taking off on BLM lands without much ado. Remember how Hawaii is harnessing 50 degree differentials between deep and surface ocean temperatures with heat exchangers off the Big Island? Same thing is happening with geothermal. Luke hot water (150 degrees)is being harvested with the help of heat exchangers– where it couldn’t be harvested before. They are financing the projects with private capital and using available infrastructure to get the electricity to market. I’ve copied and pasted the article below. It make for interesting reading because it shows you what is already in motion. How will this relate to water development –especially in the west? I’m not sure. But I know this. Water and power go hand in hand. With power due to come out of every hill, hollow and plain out West and some parts of the East -interesting possibilities for desalination seem more available. Might be a good idea to map over best solar, wind and geothermal resources — onto deep briny aquifers. Also, drop in the location of coal power plants. Oh and, as well, for fun, throw in the locations of gypsum in deep wide flat deposits near the surface of desert valleys. Then overlay BLM lands on that.
Anyhow, check out what’s happening with geothermal.
Utah startup hits geothermal jackpot
Wed Dec 24, 2008 11:52 AM EST
geothermal, rush, business
Paul Foy, AP Business Writer
PROVO — Within six months of discovering a massive geothermal field, a small Utah company had erected and fired up a power plant — just one example of the speed with which companies are capitalizing on state mandates for alternative energy.
Anticipation of new energy policies has sparked a rush on land leases as companies like Raser Technologies Inc., based in Provo, lock up property that hold geothermal fields and potentially huge profits.
Raser’s find, about 155 miles southwest of Provo, could eventually power 200,000 homes.
The company said it will begin routing electricity to Anaheim, Calif. within weeks.
Earlier this month, California adopted the nation’s most sweeping plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
“We made a pleasant discovery, let’s put it that way,” said Brent M. Cook, the company’s chief executive.
The number of government land leases and drilling permits have risen quickly, said Kermit Witherbee, who heads up the leasing program for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, with more than two dozen companies now trying to make a score like Raser.
Two years ago, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management approved 18 geothermal drilling permits. That number more than doubled in 2007 and has nearly quadrupled this year.
The government leased a staggering 244,000 acres for geothermal development in the past 18 months. Another 146,339 acres went up for bid Friday in Utah, Oregon and Idaho.
All of it was claimed.
Raser’s find “has the potential to become one of the more important geothermal energy developments of the last quarter century,” said Greg Nash, a professor of geothermal exploration at the University of Utah.
The company quickly redrew its business plan, bumping up its planned development of 10 megawatts of power to 230 megawatts. That is in line with the field’s power potential according to calculations by GeothermEX Inc., a consulting firm.
By comparison, the largest group of geothermal plants in the world are The Geysers, about 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. The Geysers geothermal basin produces about 900 megawatts of energy, enough to power the city, said Ann Robertson-Tait, a senior geologist and vice president of business development for GeothermEX.
Geothermal technology creates energy using heat that is stored in the earth. But geothermal still generates less than 1 percent of the world’s energy, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency.
“The outlook for geothermal is great,” said Brian Yerger, an energy analyst for New York-based Jesup & Lamont.
Geothermal companies are relatively small players in the energy market and have had to scramble to lock up financing, particularly during a recession.
Merrill Lynch & Co. has pledged to fund Raser’s first 100 megawatts of projects and says it is staying in the game.
“We’ve done a lot with Raser,” said Merrill Lynch spokeswoman Danielle Robinson. “We’re very committed to the company.”
Cook said his company can raise additional money from joint ventures and stock sales. “This is where the money flows, to alternative energy projects that pencil out,” he said. The company made its first major stock sale Nov. 14 to Fletcher Asset Management of New York.
“We are enthusiastic about our investment,” said Kell Benson, Fletcher’s vice chairman. The firm bought $10 million in stock at $5 a share, with an option to double the stake.
Raser and its supplier, UTC Power, plan to build another seven geothermal energy plants across the western United States by the end of 2009 and 10 plants a year for the next decade.
The push for geothermal power has been accelerated by state mandates like those in California, which this month said utilities must obtain a third of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020.
Raser, which specializes in low-boil geothermal sites, started buying leases five years ago on hundreds of thousands of acres that had been passed over because of their lower heat potential.
New technology, however, has made low-boil water useable for geothermal power. Raser buys 250-kilowatt power units from UTC Power, a subsidiary of United Technologies Corp.
Geothermal is also being used on a smaller scale.
“These things are slot machines. They make money,” said Bernie Karl, owner of Chena Hot Springs Resort, off the grid 60 miles northeast of Fairbanks, Alaska. On geothermal energy from early UTC prototypes, Karl powers light bulbs, heats lodges and rooms for 210 guests, warms a greenhouse that grows food and spices, keeps an ice house frozen and makes hydrogen for resort vehicles.
Raser hit hot water at a few thousand feet below the surface circulating inside a zone of porous limestone a mile deep. The underground “lake” cycles hot water endlessly under the power of the Earth’s internal heat like a steam engine, throwing up loops of hot water intersected by wells that return it to the system.
The company holds rights to 78 square miles of land in the area and believes it has barely tapped the full potential.
In my last post, I mentioned a number of popular ideas to advance alternative energy development. But I didn’t attribute them because nothing had been written of incoming administration officials as yet. A couple of days later several major newspapers mentioned ideas of incoming administration officials which included ideas I talked about. So I inserted these in my last post. If you went to my last post early check back. (Just skim down and check the writing in block quotes.) This week’s post includes a piece from the Wall St Journal which mentions another popular idea I mentioned in my last post.
How about renewable energy? Dr. Chu already had a taste of Washington power-brokering, in a briefing with current Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. He pitched them on the idea of an interstate electricity transmission system to be paid for by ratepayers. That would solve one of the biggest hurdles to wide-spread adoption of clean energy like wind and solar power.
This is interesting because Dr. Chu is the president elect’s choice to lead the DOE.
The president elect’s choice for the Dept of Energy is Dr. Chu. Dr. Chu’s marquee work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is the Helios Project. That’s an effort to tackle what Dr. Chu sees as the biggest energy challenge facing the U.S. transportation. That’s because it’s a huge drain on U.S. coffers and an environmental albatross, Dr. Chu says. Helios has focused largely on biofuels—but not the bog-standard kind made from corn and sugar. The Energy Biosciences Institute, a joint effort funded by BP, is looking to make second-generation biofuels more viable. Among the approaches? Researching new ways to break down stubborn cellulosic feedstocks to improve the economics of next-generation biofuels, and finding new kinds of yeast to boost fermentation and make biofuels more plentiful while reducing their environmental impact.
Include algae to fuel in that mix. David Chu does not like coal.
Big Coal won’t be very happy if Dr. Chu gets confirmed as head of the DOE—he’s really, really not a big fan. “Coal is my worst nightmare,” he said repeatedly in a speech earlier this year outlining his lab’s alternative-energy approaches.
Ken Salazar is the president’s pick to head up the Dept of the Interior. How will he affect water policy? Likely he will be very innovative.
He was raised on a ranch in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado, and became an attorney with an expertise in water law. “In rural areas,” Salazar said in an interview this summer, “they understand water as their lifeblood.”
How will Salazar be on energy? He’ll be tough on oil interests.
Earlier this year, Salazar criticized the department for decisions to open Colorado’s picturesque Roan Plateau for drilling. Salazar said the regulations to begin opening land for oil shale development would “sell Colorado short.”
He’s a fan of alternative energy.
The senator campaigned vigorously for Obama in Colorado, a swing state, barnstorming rural areas in a recreational vehicle while preaching alternative-energy development and its potential to revitalize rural economies. After the election, Salazar publicly urged Obama to build his planned economic stimulus package around investments in energy infrastructure.
It might be a good idea to invite Ken Salazar to the national salinity summit. So that he can see some slides that show the best places for solar and wind overlapped with the deepest briny aquifers. He’ll already know Senator Pete Domenici’s saying that you need water to make power and vice versa. He’ll also know that the hoover dam produces both power and water; that too, the hoover dam is the foundation for the economies of the southwest–and its profitable. He may see that the best way to get brackish water desalination plants is to site and budget them with solar and windmill power plants. Then it would be his job to sell the idea to DOE elect Dr. Chu.
“It’s time for a new kind of leadership in Washington that’s committed to using our lands in a responsible way to benefit all our families,” Obama said
Come to think of it, it might be a good idea to invite a bunch of solar wind and desal executives to the National Salinity Conference.
imho Senator Salazar will be interested in accelerated funding for all forms of desalination R&D from Proifera plus a dozen other cutting edge membrane companies to left handed ideas like low temperature cooking water out of gypsum. As well, I would think for experimental reasons both men would be interested in siting at least one solar/desal plant near a coal plant so as to pump the coal plant’s waste CO2 into algae geenhouses. I’ve mentioned this in posts here & here. Texas might be the best place for this because they have CO2 emitting industrial plants there,sunlight and briny aquifers. There are others.
I think that both Senator Salazar and Dr Chu should be urged to fund research into cheap smart energy efficient water pipelines mentioned here, here and here. I mentioned an initial slant well experiment in the Santa Barbara channel with a Profiera membrane here. Further they should be appraised that the ultimate goal in +-7 years of nanotube and pipeline research are pipes with one end in the salty pacific through which only fresh water flows inland to points all over the desert southwest. Toward this end, I could easily see several lines of solar power plants in the empty deserts there that point to Arizona. These might double as pumping stations in the future for water pipelines that push water eastward.
Finally it might be helpful to do a little more detailed ranking for best places to site desal/solarwind plants. Ranking might include:
1.)distance from electric AND water grids
2.) ease of getting federal state & local permissions.
3.) time to project ground breaking.
If the DOI was onboard, likely the quickest places to break ground would be BLM lands.
Herbert Hoover as Commerce Secretary signed the initial enabling legislation for the Hoover Dam on November 24, 1922. Ground was not broken on the Hoover Dam until 10 years later in 1932.
That’s a very leisurely pace to ground breaking. Things won’t be nearly so leisurely this time.
Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury Secretary who will head Obama’s National Economic Council, has said a fiscal stimulus will have to be “speedy, substantial and sustained.” Congressional leaders have indicated that spending could even be as large as the $700 billion bailout, but details of how and where the money will be distributed are unknown.
So be forewarned. In the next year or two — guys will come into your office blue in the face with tension. Help them along their way. Why? Because the very best investment the government can make is in water and energy. Why? Because water and energy provide the basis for growth in the economy and the government’s future tax base.
said Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google Inc. and an Obama economic adviser, in an interview. “You would want to invest in something that would not just physically build a bridge, but would help build businesses that would create more wealth.”
That would be water and energy. Why is this important politically? The reason is–this is not a settled issue. The talk is now for +-50 billion to allocate for green projects. But it could be more or less depending on the projects presented –and the vision thing.
Even so, the Obama team remains split over how much money to devote to green and high-tech projects, and how much to focus on traditional infrastructure.
In purely economic terms, a traditional infrastructure building spree might provide the biggest bang, Mr. Zandi said. But, he added, “there’s something to be said for an infrastructure program that captures the imagination, because confidence is just shot.”
The way to settle this in favor of green energy and water desalination projects is to present projects that can be implemented quickly. Oh and one more thing. The size of the investment will depend on the size of the vision.
A National Salinity Summit that can conclude with best sites for solar/wind/desal plants can give solar/wind/desal players legs. Even this is a step behind. Nor is it the big vision I’ve talked about for a couple years.
As it is the big cities already have their make work projects lined up.
I registered recently for the National Salinity Summit in Las Vegas in January. Its pretty convenient for me this time as I have an internet marketing conference to attend that week. All I have to do is hop from one hotel to another because the conferences come one right after the other.
I noticed that a theme of the desalination conference is water and energy projects combined. Before I get started on this post I think it should be mentioned that now is a very good time for financing public or private energy/water projects. On the private side– over a trillion dollars have come out of the stock market. People are really fried by their losses. Dull returns obtained by financing water projects can look pretty good to these folk now. All ya gotta do is create the investment vehicles, draw up the blueprints, get all the state federal and local permissions and show that the state or someone will buy the water. So investors can say this is a great way to preserve capital plus make a few points — plus do something green.
It also looks very much like the federal government is gearing up to spend several hundred billion dollars on public works and/or energy projects. Funding will not come slowly: According to the NY Times
Mr. Obama promised to set new rules to govern spending, such as a “use it or lose it” requirement that states act quickly
Democrats hope the new Congress that takes office in early January could pass such a measure in time for Mr. Obama to sign almost instantly after taking office Jan. 20.
These public works projects include solar and wind farms. According to the “>Washington Post.
President-elect Barack Obama is developing a plan to create or preserve 2.5 million jobs over the next two years by spending billions of dollars to rebuild roads and bridges, modernize public schools, and construct wind farms and other alternative sources of energy.
Obama said his plan would launch “a two-year nationwide effort to jump-start job creation in America and lay the foundation for a strong and growing economy. We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels,” as well as producing fuel-efficient cars.
President-elect Obama’s alternative energy plan, called New Energy for America, could have a significant impact on the U.S. solar industry. The plan’s provisions include:
* A federal renewable portfolio standard (RPS) that requires 10 percent of electricity consumed in the U.S. to come from renewable sources by 2012.
* A $150 billion investment over 10 years in research, technology demonstration, and commercial deployment of clean energy technology.
* Extension of production tax credits for five years to encourage renewable energy production.
* A cap-and-trade system of carbon credits to provide an incentive for businesses to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
A well designed package — that is not experimental–will attract public money. Someone, or some group with a really creative financing ability imho could just leverage public & private financing off each other across a variety of power projects. A model could be built that could be replicated. Really, this is one seriously opportune moment for this kind of thing. Is there an ambitious consulting agency in the house? Really. How do you do this? I don’t know. Invite some people from wall st to the conference. Fund a couple of different sharp consultants and or agencies. Pair them up with various federal and state officials. Really, this is one seriously opportune moment for this kind of thing. The kicker is to scale it. That is you know. Once you get a model you replicate it.
For example last year we were shown a very interesting slide –which I can’t find now. The slide shows the best places for solar and wind power projects. You can generally figure that the best places for solar are in the southwest and the best places for wind are in the midwest. Well, a great presentation would be to map over best places for energy and wind power plants onto deepest/widest brackish aquifers. Choose the 10-20 best places for both power and water generation. In terms of cost rank them by proximity to the grid and/or end users.
These places are usually far from the power grid. So you might get the federal government to pay for the utility lines to the grid–maybe even water pipelines–but not maintenance. (Certainly that would be cheaper than piping water down from Alaska or Canada.) Heck the government might be interested in funding the solar or wind farms outright. Certainly there are certain tax advantages that coal plants enjoy because the cost of their coal can be deducted whereas the wind and the sun cannot be deducted from taxes. Set these tax advantages aside. That is, don’t raise taxes on the coal plants but rather give solar power plants comparable tax advantages. Some of this is already in the works. According to the WSJ.
Green-technology advocates, for their part, want to include such elements as a multiyear extension of a tax credit for investment in wind power, plus another credit for solar-power makers. All told, they estimate the green component could be $50 billion, or 10% of the overall package.
Get the federal state & local governments to provide the permissions and right of ways. (And uh, someone will need to have a little heart to heart with the BLM.) A cheap energy source cuts into energy costs for desalination plants. Brackish water desalinizes relatively cheaply. Guarantee a buyer. Shouldn’t be too hard in the southwest. Might even be easy for the upper midwest. With that in place bring in the private investors fo fund the water desal plants (and whatever portion of the power plants the feds won’t do. (Maybe this could be funded/profited all publicly or all privately. I’m just throwing out one model.) Some of this is already in planning.
Some of the stimulus plan’s targets may be so complicated that the Obama team will need subsequent legislation to make it work, Mr. Schmidt said. The economic plan might set aside money for renewable-energy projects, and in subsequent legislation, mandate that utilities use electricity generated by sources such as wind and solar projects.
Now I’m ready to talk about the ocean. The deep ocean.
In my last post, I mentioned that membranes may be so efficient that maybe five years from now you could drill a slant well out a couple hundred feet into the Santa Barbara Channel, attach an efficient membrane on the end and let fresh water flow downhill toward shore. Current membrane technology would require that you place the membranes at about 1700 feet–but in the future perhaps you would need only go down 100-200 feet.
Nice idea.
Interestingly, today there is a big business for deep desalinated water that comes from off the shore of the Big Island in Hawaii. Its expensive bottled water. The Japanese love the stuff.
The drop off from the big island is so steep that they don’t have to go far from shore to reach 1700 feet. However, the salt water is not desalinated at 1700 feet.
The state pumps the water using two pipes that go down 2,000 feet and then transports it to the companies, which do the desalination, filtering, bottling and packaging. The state will soon complete construction of a new 55-inch pipe that goes 3,000 feet deep.
That was written in 2004. There are now two pipelines that run up from the deep off the Big Island.
We’re talking bottled water here. The Japanese think the desalinated deep sea water is something special. That may well be the case. Why? A lot of sea creatures thrive on the mineral content provided by the deep water.There is a commercial experimental station on the Big Island with one very big idea. Deep water can be used for many commercial purposes. A great field trip for American water officials would be a visit to that Big Island Experimental facility. Why? Because discussions with businesses there will help water officials to think of brackish or seawater water salts and minerals not as waste but as a resource.
It looks like they’ll be adding energy production to that process.
Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle Tuesday announced a new energy partnership to develop a 10 megawatt ocean thermal energy conversion pilot plant in Hawaii. Electricity will be generated from the difference in temperature between the ocean’s warm surface and its colder depths.
Now before I go to the article, notice how they will be combining water and power production together. But notice something further. Power and water production are the basis for a food chain. An ecosystem. That’s what the business experimental station on the Big Island shows. That’s what the Hoover Dam provides. It provides the basis of an ecosystem food chain. The Cadillac Desert. How? By providing both power and water. Same would go for solar/wind desal projects. They would become the basis for new ecosystem food chains.
Remember this language that I’m using. Ecosystem. Food chain. This language is the language that people in the incoming administration use when describing their online systems. Consider this discussion of Google strategy.
I am very impressed lately by Google’s commitment to open source. Specifically, I love their strategy of what I call the ‘Catch and Release’ strategy for developing their ecosystem of developers and partners.
They are certainly doing a lot of land grabbing, but they are releasing their innovations and improvements as open source. This strategy for ecosystem development is much different than Microsoft’s old model (closed ecosystem embrace and extend). Google is earning credibility in a new way by enabling key technology and then by releasing code for open for open collaboration and development – Catch and Release.
Now listen to Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google Inc–an Obama economic adviser, discuss the incoming administrations spending strategy,
“America’s unique excellence is innovation, and it’s easy to understand businesses that innovate are the ones that have the longest and largest kinds of impact,” said Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google Inc. and an Obama economic adviser, in an interview. “You would want to invest in something that would not just physically build a bridge, but would help build businesses that would create more wealth.”
Here Mr Schmidt is talking the language of real estate developers. You buy a piece of property on the outskirts of the city in the path of development, upgrade the land by putting in water and power (Sewage too, depending on how much time and money you have. And then rezone the land.)
While its clear that water and energy go together. They are basis of any food chain. Why is this important politically?
Even so, the Obama team remains split over how much money to devote to green and high-tech projects, and how much to focus on traditional infrastructure.
In purely economic terms, a traditional infrastructure building spree might provide the biggest bang, Mr. Zandi said. But, he added, “there’s something to be said for an infrastructure program that captures the imagination, because confidence is just shot.”
In terms of sales pitches — the Hoover Dam was emblematic of the New Deal. Solar/Wind/desal projects could be emblematic of the new Admin. There are others–like the Hawiian project below. The point is always the same. Water and energy projects go together, they create wealth and they capture the imagination.
Anyhow, here is the article. (Oh and notice how the DOE, the state of Hawaii, Taiwan Industrial Technology Research Institute, and Lockheed Martin work together. For future purposes substitute any American Laboratory for the TTRI.)
Hawaii Governor Signs Ocean Thermal Energy Deal
TAIPEI, Taiwan, November 20, 2008 (ENS) – Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle Tuesday announced a new energy partnership to develop a 10 megawatt ocean thermal energy conversion pilot plant in Hawaii. Electricity will be generated from the difference in temperature between the ocean’s warm surface and its colder depths.
Governor Lingle made the announcement from Taiwan, where she is meeting with officials to promote tourism and business partnerships as part of her ongoing 11 day trip to Asia.
During the Governor’s official state visit to Taiwan, she came to an agreement with the Taiwan Industrial Technology Research Institute and the Lockheed Martin Corporation to build the initial pilot plant in Hawaii.
OTEC systems work by converting solar radiation to electric power. As long as the temperature between the warm surface water and the cold deep water differs by about 36°F, an OTEC system can produce a significant amount of power, turning the oceans a vast renewable resource, with the potential to produce billions of watts of electric power.
“As island economies in the Pacific, Taiwan and the State of Hawaii share very similar challenges of overdependence on imported petroleum for their energy needs,” Governor Lingle said. “Taiwan and Hawaii also share a common vision and plan to increase renewable and clean energy generation based on indigenous energy resources.”
The current economics of energy production have delayed the financing of a permanent, continuously operating ocean thermal energy conversion plant. But OTEC technology is viewed as promising for tropical island communities that rely heavily on imported fuel.
Hawaii currently relies on imported fossil fuel for about 94 percent of its primary energy – the balance is from renewable resources such as wind, solar and geothermal power.
Ocean thermal energy conversion plants could provide islanders with much-needed power, as well as desalinated water.
Taiwan is even more dependent on imported fuels than Hawaii, with less than one percent of its primary supply derived from indigenous renewable sources.
The Bureau of Energy of Taiwan is working to increase conservation and energy efficiency, and to develop renewable energy so that it accounts for 12 percent of Taiwan’s total installed capacity by 2020.
The ocean temperatures and the subsea terrain make the waters surrounding both Taiwan and Hawaii superior locations for this technology.
This latest agreement with Taiwan complements the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative, a partnership between the State of Hawaii and the U.S. Department of Energy which will move the state away from its dependence on fossil fuels and toward a clean energy economy that is intended to be a model for other states and regions.
Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin Corporation has developed and studied ocean thermal energy conversion technology for over 30 years. Its plans for a 10 megawatt OTEC pilot plant in Hawaii are already underway.
Most OTEC research and development in recent decades has been performed at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority, or NELHA, located at Keahole Point, Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii. It has become the world’s foremost laboratory and test facility for OTEC technologies.
Huge pipelines bringing cold, deep ocean water to the surface have enabled the demonstration of a variety of ocean thermal energy conversion components and pilot plants.
The first closed-cycle, at-sea OTEC plant to generate net electricity, was deployed in the waters off the NELHA lab in 1979. It was dubbed Mini-OTEC.
Lockheed Missiles and Space Company was a partner in that effort as well as subsequent research at NELHA.
In May 1993, an open-cycle OTEC plant at NELHA, produced 50,000 watts of electricity during a net power-producing experiment. This broke the record of 40,000 watts set by a Japanese system in 1982.
Today, scientists are developing new, cost-effective, state-of-the-art turbines for open-cycle OTEC systems, yet currently there is no facility in Hawaii producing electricity using OTEC technology.
In January 2008, Governor Lingle announced the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative, an unprecedented partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy that aims to have at least 70 percent of Hawaii’s power come from clean energy within one generation – by 2030.
Lingle says that as Hawaii is the world’s most isolated archipelago and is also the most oil-dependent state in America, a clean energy future for Hawaii isn’t simply a desire – it’s a necessity. in
Wow. This is downright fun to report. Looks like the first generation (alpha)carbon nanotube membranes will come online within a year or two. Last time I posted a couple weeks back, I mentioned that the NanoTech Institute of the University of Texas at Dallas had learned to produce carbon nanotubes in industrial quantities. Then I opined — wouldn’t it be nice if someone could adapt that carbon nanotube production method to the carbon nanotube desalination membranes that the LLNL team is working on
Well guess what?
Yep. Yeppers. Yup. Someone did. Now the press release below does not mention the industrial production method that they are using. But it does say that an LLNL spinoff called Porifera is going to be making carbon nanotube membranes for water purification. The first benefit that is touted is the anti fouling aspects of the membrane
The tubes are packed closely together and the water flows through them like it flows through straws. Chirality doesn’t matter, said company representatives I spoke to at the California Clean Tech Open, which held its award gala in San Francisco tonight. The opening of the tubes is so small (a few nanometers wide) that bacteria, biological material and other impurities get cleaned out of the water because they can’t fit where water molecules can. The filter will also likely be useful for desalinating seawater, although purifying waste water will likely be the first application.
Another added bonus: because the impurities get stuck outside of the tubes, membrane fouling is less of a problem. It is difficult to clean traditional membranes because material can be caught inside the membrane. If bacteria or salts accumulate on the outside [of the carbon nanotubes], they can just be swirled away with water.
Curiously the article only mentions the desalination abilities of the membrane as a secondary property. Its not clear why. Consider that they make this astounding proposition:
Overall, Porifera’s array could cut the cost of desalination by 25 percent or more. In traditional purification and desalination systems, large amounts of energy are required to pressurize water and force it through a membrane. Here, gravity does a lot of the work.
Read that? Gravity does “a lot” of the work. Its not clear here how much “a lot” is. Current membrane technology requires pressures that are the equivalent of about 1700 feet of ocean water. Its too expensive to site desal at those depths. But what would happen to costs if you could site desal membranes in 100 feet of water a couple hundred feet offshore? Here, look at this animate graphic of an undersea power & water producing unit using wave energy. Notice the desalting unit onshore. Just place the membrane on the ocean floor near the pumps. You let ocean pressures press the water through the carbon nanotube membranes and let the wave action pumps force the fresh water ashore. (Hmm well some bright desal consultant would have to tease out the relative costs of onshore concentrate disposal/onshore membrane pumps vs offshore installation/offshore maintenance to figure out at what depth/pressure the nanotube membrane becomes more cost effective than onshore desal. Might help if all the metal parts were coated these new nano scale coating products so as to kill maintenance costs. As well, it would probably be helpful to coat all the underwater machinery with thin layer of cation-exchange groups. These cause electrostatic repulsion of organic molecules. That said, it might be best to just chuck the whole underwater electrical generation stuff, set the desal membranes offshore and pull the desalinated water onshore with onshore pumps powered by current generation solar cells that make solar electrical production as cheap as coal. In the next couple years those solar cell electrical generation costs will drop much further. Do enough solar electrical generation to use the grid as a battery. Another idea would be to have a California water official with seriously good social skills talk to The City of Carpinteria near Santa Barbara negotiating with Venoco over their proposed Paredon Project. The Paredon Project skirts the offshore drilling problem by siting the oil rigs onshore and then drilling down and sideways for a couple miles out into the Santa Barbara straights. California water guys might ask The City of Carpinteria to require of Venoco that they drill and maintain for four years (or the life of the oil wells–which ever is longer) a slant well for water desalination. This would be an experimental project. Whereas the oil wells go out several miles–the slant water well would go down and out only a couple hundred feet/yards. There would be a carbon nanotube membrane on the end of the pipe in the ocean. The state’s costs for the experiment would be to design nanotubes membrane fitting on the end of the well out in the ocean. From the membrane well head –fresh water would flow downhill toward the shore. Seperately, The Paredon Project will create a lot of waste salt water mixed with hydrocarbons and sulfer that needs to be treated. Clean up for this is already built into project costs. I would think If the carbon nanotube membranes can make that water fresh and clean for lower costs–then that might even make up for the costs of the experimental slant water well. )
Sorry about the tangent.
What else?
It would probably be a good idea for someone to mention the problem that evolving membrane technology creates for desal plant designers like Posiden. I mentioned this a couple blogs ago. They’ll need to be able to design new desal plant in such a way that they have has the ability to change over cheaply to future generations of membranes that don’t need pre treatment. For example, if you figure on the outside that these carbon nanotube membranes come out of alpha in 2 years and beta in 5 years…any desal plant coming onstream in the next five years is going to be outdated for much of its productive life.)
Oh and don’t forget to patronize Porifera
Anyhow here is the article:
Michael Kanellos
Single walled carbon nanotubes are the child prodigy of the material science world.
The tubes-which are spools of carbon atoms that resemble rolls of chicken wire–are stronger than steel and conduct electricity better than metals. They are also incredibly thin, only a few nanometers wide, which gives them an ability to transport other particles with very little energy.
Unfortunately, they also tend to be somewhat tempermental and difficult to control. Manufacturing them in large batches in a uniform manner has proved extremely difficult. The chirality, or how the carbon atoms are arranged in relation to one another in the wall, varies from tube to tube, which changes their properties in many applications. It’s one of the big reason that carbon nanotube semiconductors keep getting pushed further and further into the future. Other applications, such as tennis rackets, can get by with the less spectacular cousin, the multi-walled nanotubes.
Porifera, a spin out of Lawrence Livermore National Labs, has come up with a way to skirt the manufacturing problem and devise a product that leverages the unique thinness of single walled nanotubes. It has made a water filter of single walled carbon nanotubes. The tubes are packed closely together and the water flows through them like it flows through straws. Chirality doesn’t matter, said company representatives I spoke to at the California Clean Tech Open, which held its award gala in San Francisco tonight. The opening of the tubes is so small (a few nanometers wide) that bacteria, biological material and other impurities get cleaned out of the water because they can’t fit where water molecules can. The filter will also likely be useful for desalinating seawater, although purifying wastewater will likely be the first application.
Another added bonus: because the impurities get stuck outside of the tubes, membrane fouling is less of a problem. It is difficult to clean traditional membranes because material can be caught inside the membrane. If bacteria or salts accumulate on the outside, they can just be swirled away with water.
Overall, Porifera’s array could cut the cost of desalination by 25 percent or more. In traditional purification and desalination systems, large amounts of energy are required to pressurize water and force it through a membrane. Here, gravity does a lot of the work.
A nanotube membrane also has the advantage of simplicity. Some companies, such as Denmark’s Aquaporin, are working on molecular filters that rely on a synthetic version of a natural protein called an aquaporin. Although scientists have struggled with making reasonably uniform carbon nanotubes,they are farther along than trying to make synthetic aquaporin. (General Electric, which has been snapping up water companies in the past few years, is working on similar molecular straw membranes.)
Porifera by the way were the runner-up the air, water and waste award at the Clean Tech Open. The winner was Over the Moon Diapers, which is working on environmentally friendly diapers. The prize for Over the Moon came with a $100,000 value and attracts attention from VCs.
Now we’re cooking with gas. This article in physorg.com entitled Breakthrough for carbon nanotube materials lays out how
NanoTech Institute of the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) – CSIRO has achieved a major breakthrough in the development of a commercially-viable manufacturing process for a range of materials made from carbon nanotubes.
The article gives their bonafides:
As reported in today’s edition of the prestigious international scientific journal, Science – the UTD/CSIRO team recently demonstrated that synthetically made carbon nanotubes can be commercially manufactured into transparent sheets that are stronger than steel sheets of the same weight.
How is it done? More importantly, what’s their production rate?
Starting from chemically grown, self-assembled structures in which nanotubes are aligned like trees in a forest, the sheets are produced at up to seven meters per minute. Unlike previous sheet fabrication methods – using dispersions of nanotubes in liquids – this dry-state process produces materials made from the ultra-long nanotubes required to optimise their unique set of properties.
How long will it be before this process is available for commercialization?
“Rarely is a processing advance so elegantly simple that rapid commercialisation seems possible, and rarely does such an advance so quickly enable diverse application demonstrations”, says Dr Ray H. Baughman of the NanoTech Institute.
Please someone make sure that funding is available to synch this manufacturing work with the carbon nanotube work being done at LLNL. My wag is that we’re talking about funding $.2 million- $2 million to adapt this process for carbon nanotube membranes. One guy on the ball is all it takes.
A while back I asked a member of the LLNL team what the best investment of dollars would be for research in this field. He said that the best investment currently would be “in coming up with scalable (economical) processes for producing membranes that use nanotubes or other useful nanomaterials for desalination.”
Now that we have the “scalable (economical) processes” –the next job is to adapt it to desalination membranes.
……………..
In what looks like a first for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill–a team there has produced some experimental results for the way water behaves inside carbon nanotubes.
The team of scientists, led by Yue Wu, Ph.D., professor of physics in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences, examined carbon nanotubes measuring just 1.4 nanometers in diameter (one nanometer is a billionth of a meter). The seamless cylinders were made from rolled up graphene sheets, the exfoliated layer of graphite.
“Normally, graphene is hydrophobic, or ‘water hating’ – it repels water in the same way that drops of dew will roll off a lotus leaf,” said Wu. “But we found that in the extremely limited space inside these tubes, the structure of water changes, and that it’s possible to change the relationship between the graphene and the liquid to hydrophilic or ‘water-liking’.”
The UNC team did this by making the tubes colder. Using nuclear magnetic resonance – similar to the technology used in advanced medical MRI scanners – they found that at about room temperature (22 degrees centigrade), the interiors of carbon nanotubes take in water only reluctantly.
However, when the tubes were cooled to 8 degrees, water easily went inside. Wu said this shows that it is possible for water in nano-confined regions – either human-made or natural – to take on different structures and properties depending on the size of the confined region and the temperature.
How is this applicable to semipermiable membranes?
In terms of potential practical applications, Wu suggested further research along these lines could impact the design of high-tech devices (for example, nano-fluidic chips that act as microscopic laboratories), microporous sorbent materials such as activated carbon used in water filters, gas masks, and permeable membranes.
“It may be that by exploiting this hydrophobic-hydrophilic transition, it might be possible to use changes in temperature as a kind of ‘on-off’ switch, changing the stickiness of water through nano-channels, and controlling fluid flow.”
I would think too that the next experiment would be in which you varied the pressure on the carbon nanotube. Subsequently, you’d want to build a simulation that modeled for variations of temperature and pressure across a carbon nanotube membrane.
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I posted on this story back in June about how reseachers at LLNL were working at the 1.6 nanometer level. Their work confirmed simulations that showed salt would be rejected at these levels–and that the primary rejection driver would be charge.
What to do next? Well do a simulation.
This time simulations were done at the 1.0 nanometer level:
Professor N.R. Aluru at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Sony Joseph, who defended his Ph.D. thesis recently, have used computer simulations to explore a method by which water transport through smaller carbon nanotubes could be further enhanced.
Why?
“Until now,” Sony Joseph tells PhysOrg.com, “previous simulations had shown that single file water movement in short carbon nanotubes have net transport in both directions. But if you could get the water to orient in one direction, in a long tube, you could have net transport along that direction.
A second press release from the University of Illinois on the subject dated September 16, 2008 elaborates:
“Extraordinarily fast transport of water in carbon nanotubes has generally been attributed to the smoothness of the nanotube walls and their hydrophobic, or water-hating surfaces,” said Narayana R. Aluru, a Willett Faculty Scholar and a professor of mechanical science and engineering at the U. of I.
“We can now show that the fast transport can be enhanced by orienting water molecules in a nanotube,” Aluru said. “Orientation can give rise to a coupling between the water molecules’ rotational and translational motions, resulting in a helical, screw-type motion through the nanotube,” Aluru said.
Using molecular dynamics simulations, Aluru and graduate student Sony Joseph examined the physical mechanism behind orientation-driven rapid transport. For the simulations, the system consisted of water molecules in a 9.83 nanometer long nanotube, connected to a bath at each end. Nanotubes of two diameters (0.78 nanometers and 1.25 nanometers) were used. Aluru and Joseph reported their findings in the journal Physical Review Letters.
For very small nanotubes, water molecules fill the nanotube in single-file fashion, and orient in one direction as a result of confinement effects. This orientation produces water transport in one direction. However, the water molecules can flip their orientations collectively at intervals, reversing the flow and resulting in no net transport.
In bigger nanotubes, water molecules are not oriented in any particular direction, again resulting in no transport.
Water is a polar molecule consisting of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Although its net charge is zero, the molecule has a positive side (hydrogen) and a negative side (oxygen). This polarity causes the molecule to orient in a particular direction when in the presence of an electric field.
Creating and maintaining that orientation, either by directly applying an electric field or by attaching chemical functional groups at the ends of the nanotubes, produces rapid transport, the researchers report.
“The molecular mechanism governing the relationship between orientation and flow had not been known,” Aluru said. “The coupling occurs between the rotation of one molecule and the translation of its neighboring molecules. This coupling moves water through the nanotube in a helical, screw-like fashion.”
In addition to explaining recent experimental results obtained by other groups, the researchers’ findings also describe a physical mechanism that could be used to pump water through nanotube membranes in next-generation nanofluidic devices.
I would think that first generation carbon nanotube desalination membranes –in order to keep the flow in one direction–could obtain the charge by “directly applying an electric field”. Then later generation membranes membranes could obtain charge by “attaching chemical functional groups”.
Why is this important?
Joseph and Aluru, are especially interested in using this technology for water purification and nanofiltration. “We are trying to show how this would aid the process of reverse osmosis,” Aluru says.
Joseph and Aluru emphasize that, right now, this work is largely based on computer simulations with theoretical models. Joseph explains that right now water transport through nanotube membranes of two nanometers have been achieved, but that scientists are working toward pumping water through membranes that are less than one nanometer.
“We’ve shown that it is theoretically possible to get this sort of water transport,” Joseph points out. “The next step is getting to the point where this could be tested.”
This looks like it builds on the work of Jason Holt mentioned in my last post on LLNL work.
However, if manufacturers are already able to get commercial production volumes for the longer nanotubes–it may not be so important to do further work with the shorter nanotubes.
Anyhow, the simulation articles are here:
Orienting Flow in Carbon Nanotubes
Simulations help explain fast water transport in nanotubes
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