Why Is Desalination So Difficult?

He looks like he used lavender essential oils

Not sure if it is actually viable, but does anyone know if solar evaporation set ups are used large scale? What i mean is using mirrors to redirect sunlight onto a tank painted black as a method of heating. This might, at minimum mitigate some of the energy cost needed for industrial scale evaporation based desalination.

Same reason why the middle east has some of the largest kidney recipients ✌️

I'm curious to see how a higher gpm 12v pump would work in place of the low gpm pressure washer.

When salt water freezes, the salt is driven out of the matrix. Freezing is a way to desalinate water. Why couldn't you just put a desalination facility up in the mountains where you allow saltwater to freeze? The freezing would be free due to the ambient temperature. Still have to pay to pump the ocean water up there though. Still, could that be more cost effective than paying to heat the water?

Someone must have really hated Carl if they named a place Carlsbad

I find it funny how much easier it is to get the salt out of the water if your intention is to get the salt not the water.

Edit: Question about dealing with the Brine. Why don't they just boil the water out of it and keep the salt? You can sell the salt to offset the operation cost and it deals with the environmental issues as well.

I'm not sure where your terminology comes from but in the industry the three water types relating to reverse osmosis are typically termed "feedwater, permeate, and reject". The problem is the term "brine" can be used for the high TDS Supply feed water which in fact is a brine. These three terms - feedwater permeate and reject - are used just to eliminate the ambiguity, and possible mistakes, that would come from the use of the word brine.

Why can’t they build a desalination plant next to refinery or power plant and use the combustible gases or waste heat that would otherwise be just burned off and released to the atmosphere to heat up seawater. Hot seawater can then be pumped to high pressure is a spray tower to flash evaporate the seawater to vapor and salt. Do a cascading flash evaporation through several flash towers with a counterflow of cold seawater to improve heat recovery. Your product is fresh water and salt crystals

I have to seriously disagree with the private sector praising. Public utilities should be in the hands of the people and we should be able to vote on resources we need for survival. Puerto Rico and Texas are perfect example of why private utilities are not the way to go.

The goal of private companies is make profit, not provide clean drinking water. A major “cost saving factor” will be when they decide the water is “clean enough” to pocket more cash. There’s inelastic demand towards water

Send the brine to the snow belt. And in return the snow belt can ship back snow 😂

Very informative video. I never have put much effort into founding out why they weren't de-salting salt water in africa altho it always bogeled me. Glad to stumble upon this well made piece :)

Im only commenting cause I have the same striped shirt. Great story I know.

Two points here. One could have completely changed the video content and the other jsut on a piece that detracts form the quality:
1) You completely missed the new method of desalination by CO2 injection. This will become the dominant method for desalination in the middle east in the next decade or two. Many plants are already operating or are under construction.
2) comparing desalination to nuclear power generation, when talking about complexity or cost is an invalid comparison. Why not compare complex industrial fruit selection and packing technology with medical life suppport systems. Nonsensical.

Giving to privates the management of a resource as precious as water is a very very VERY bad idea.

Too many mid-roll ads. Sorry, but bye.

I wonder if you could use the waste heat from a nuclear power plant to distill water. just heat the inside of a large funnel with the steam on the tail end of a turbine. run water down the walls of the funnel and have the steam go out the top to a condenser. ideally you'd run enough water so that about half of it evaporates and the other half is the brine. you'll definitely have the energy needs covered, but i can see issues during reactor maintenance.

I kinda feel like you punted or side stepped the cost issue you raised in the beginning when it comes to larger facilities. You even bring up the minimum energy needed to pull salt out of the water but don't talk about what that is, you just go into a 3-minute ad. Desalination is great and all but beyond the technical aspects what are the costs passed on to consumers? A fully private system would be extremely expensive. The last time I heard about the cost difference between pumping water from the ground and a desalination plant it was about 1000x more expensive to run a plant than pump it out of the ground.

Why not change it to salt
Brine pools 😅

Sell the salt

Saudi Arabia

Difficult? No
Power intensive? Yes

it’s the universe telling us no. that’s why it’s hard. we need minerals from the fresh water.

It's not difficult. The scumbags make it seem like difficult so the price will be kept high.

Iunno my boy musk says it’s simple and not an issue

Wouldn’t a cheaper alternative be to set up hundreds or thousands of reservoirs that would catch rain water and send them to the local water district? I’m not talking about the typical drains we see on the streets that collect water and send them back to the sea, but actual large collection area where the water dying storms are collected and along with regular household sewer system goes back to recycling the water.

Desalination is not just expensive. It is like 100 times more expensive than I would have estimated.

Welp. Now I'm down the rabbit hole. I had heard of seawater greenhouses before, but I really need to learn more now.

Salt flats were once massive brine pools. RO and pumping the brine onto large desert lake beds adds to the evap cycle. Salt deposits can be broken up and stored away.

Also thinking about MITs recent answer to desalination which uses ion concentration polarization omitting the need for pumps or filters and can run off a $50 solar panel, it's less than 22 lbs, simple to operate and about the size of a small suitcase.

Interesting fact about Reverse Osmosis: many maple syrup makers run the sap through an RO first to get out a large amount of water before boiling.

I dont understand why they say it is so Difficult and expensive, when I've done it with a bed of red hot coals, 2 glass bottles, some sand and some Salt water. It takes a little bit, but it works just fine and makes perfectly drinkable water

So if you where to use a fire to distill the salt water there would be no kwh.

I’m curious about the idea to do this under a PPP model more widely. Over here anyway, these sorts of projects end up costing the tax payer so so much more

Was with you until you suggested privatization.....

There is actually nothing "hard" about it. It just isn't as profitable as harvesting absolutely free natural resources and reselling them as luxury bottled water at 1000X the value of the labor and infrastructure investment.

Also, there's a much easier way to get the pressure required for RO. Gravity. You just fill your reservoir and run the water down a few meters. You equalize the pressure by maintaining a specific volume of salt water in the reservoir. And you can pump water up into the tank using an air bubbler extremely efficiently from any source. Even just a pipe hanging off a ship in the Ocean.

This can also be done in places like Phoenix where there is extreme rains during the summer. Some of that water can be collected in raised reservoirs and used to offset the demand during summer months. These can scale from single family units to any tower downtown or even a unit the size of that useless Arizona football stadium.

Gravity is a hell of a force at scale. What needs to be overcome is the scale of mind rot caused by the front facing success of the new global religion, Economics.

Despite its price and complexity its still worth every dime

I have to ask..
What filter / housing did you use for the demo? Also,
How did the pressure washer hold up to the saltwater and continuous duty cycle?

The real reason why it’s so difficult is because the government and the elites haven’t found a cost effective way to produce it for profit. They don’t care about us just money

Really great explanations and comparisons. Thank you for taking the effort to set up the bench top examples. I believe that desalination won't come into popular view until it is the only choice left for larger regions of the world outside of the middle east. As mentioned, water is plentiful but the amount of energy it takes to transport it and prepare it is key.

I've been wondering for years now if we could develop a piece of large machinery that operates off of tidal currents, consumes salt water that is constantly surrounding it, and desalinates it right there to be put in storage containers to be retrieved, or pumped back to land

desalination plants are terrible for the sea wild life. it destroys animals and it kills eggs of many endangered species

You might be able to increase the efficiency by using an induction burner and a steel boiling pot like you'd see on a spirit still.

I was stationed on a modern Aircraft Carrier. Heat is not in short supply when you have a couple of reactors, nor is electricity. We distilled all of our potable water, and then it must have been re hardened to some degree, because it was easy to rinse soap off in the shower. It also tasted really good if I remember correctly. It has been about 30 years.

?? Warm plate, cool plate... this membrane desalination idiocy is so energy intense. You can use the sun, and a shaded spot to desalinate water... "what about scale?" Do you have an acre? Do you know how much precipitation you can artificially transpire from the earth, over an acre? Everyone is literally retarded in their approach to this. The energy gradient doesn't HAVE to be steep to achieve valuable results. There simply needs to be a gradient, and it is nice to have handles on some kind of potentiometer so you can regulate the thing... beyond that, hard? Dummy.

The Carlsbad plant isn’t outside of San Diego it’s in Carlsbad in San Diego county lmao tf

It’s not on a mass scale though very cheap to do as well -Elon Musk

I hate seeing this brilliant ad!!!!

The major part of water used by households isnt used for drinking. Why not wash and shower using salt water and only desalinate the water thats needed for drinking and cooking?