Desalination and engineering optimism
Posted on | February 20, 2013 | 1 Comment
Nearly every time I give a talk on water (which seems to happen frequently lately – wonder if I’ll be less popular as a speaker once the drought ends) I get asked about desalination. It is, as Bettina Boxall noted in a recent LA Times story, the stuff of dreamers: “an inexhaustible, drought-proof reservoir in the state’s backyard”.
Or not. Using the Poseidon project in Southern California, Boxall does a nice job of demonstrating why, despite many proposals and much engineering enthusiasm, we’re not seeing much desal in practice:
The reasons boil down to money and energy. It takes a lot of both to turn ocean water into drinking water, driving the average price of desalinated supplies well above most other sources.
Desal, it seems, is one of those ten-dollar bills on the sidewalk that economists like to joke about.
Related posts:
- Inland Desalination
- Water Heater Math
- Desal economics – a question
- Desal and the broken windows fallacy
- Energy Research at the Weapons Labs?
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Comments
One Response to “Desalination and engineering optimism”
Leave a Reply
February 25th, 2013 @ 7:37 am
[...] 2013/02/20: JFleck: Desalination and engineering optimism [...]