Water Now More Awesome Than Previously Thought

Dan writes "Wired has a great article about a guy who thinks we can provide unlimited energy , accelerate crop growth, desalinize and purify drinking water, obtain health benefits and provide air conditioning, all by pumping up water from the depths of the ocean."

Comments

More Efficient Coastal Farming

[coop0030]

This is a fantastic idea, except for one flaw. This would only work for cities near the coast. Where I'm from (Minnesota) I don't see how this could possibly work (Lake Superior is very cold though, that is a possibility).

I like how he irrigates the farms. The sweating of the pipes below ground is a great idea. It seems much more efficient than spraying water everywhere, and having a lot of it evaporate.

He may be a nut (or not, I'm not a good judge of character), but he does have a great way of looking at his environment.

Re:More Efficient Coastal Farming

[pHatidic]

Also, here is the . The coolest thing about this system is that the loop that goes from the bottom of the lake to the surface and back into the lake is separate from the loop that goes from the LSC plant to the campus and back. Once the water is pumped up from the bottom of the lake, there is a huge series of heat exchangers where the warm water from campus is chilled enough to run the AC. The significance of this is that you only need enough energy to pump the water from the bottom to the surface, not from the bottom to campus. The reason for this is that the campus loop is a closed loop full of water, so by the laws of fluiddynamics when water goes downhill it pushes the watter on the otherside uphill. You only need to expend the minimal amount of energy to overcome friction to keep it running. Truly amazing stuff, I'd highly recommend checking it out if you are ever in Ithaca.

Re:More Efficient Coastal Farming

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't that be where hydrogen comes in? People keep thinking that hydrogen is this great SOURCE of energy when it's really more of a great way to store and transfer energy. The problem with fuel cells is that without renewable sources of energy, you're still stuck burning fossil fuels in order to make the hydrogen. Wouldn't it be interesting if tiny little islands in the Carribean and South Pacific become the Saudi Arabias of the future.

Re:More Efficient Coastal Farming

[Mattintosh]

Bingo.

And to top it all off, chilling the moisture out of the ground is going to dehydrate that soil, causing things to die. There's a good reason that cooling systems are used for dehumidification.

However, if they're talking drip irrigation from buried pipes, then it's an excellent idea. However, it's nothing new. You can buy the materials to set a system like this up in your garden from the nearest hardware store with a decent lawn and garden department.

And any water exposed to open air is going to have a certain amount of evaporation, so i'm not sure why he's on about that. I'd be willing to bet it's more efficient from an evaporation viewpoint to spray the water from above, since evaporation causes cooling. Cooling causes dehumidification of the surrounding material by condensation. If you evaporatively cool the soil by drip irrigation, the soil cools and releases it's moisture faster. It goes into the water table or an underground aquifer, taking with it unused nutrients, unsettled herbicides, unspent pesticides, and it still doesn't reach the plants for the time needed for them to absorb it. If you instead evap-cool the air above it, the water condenses out of the air and falls onto that soil, hydrating it and leaving nutrients and chemicals undisturbed for a longer time.

Re:More Efficient Coastal Farming

[David Gould]

Yes, and if that were what TFA said they were doing, then you'd be right and the OP would look foolish, instead of vice versa.

However, TFA talks about just running the cold water through the pipes, and specifically uses the term "sweating" in exactly the same way as it uses that term to refer to using cold pipes to extract water vapor from the air through condensation. The OP's point, which I was wondering about too, is that this doesn't seem to make much sense, because the soil wouldn't be full of vapor to condense.

And of course, as another reply has already called you on, seawater isn't the best thing for irrigation, anyway.

We can probably assume that the idea involves irrigating with the fresh water produced by the other part of the system. (Yeah, okay, figuring this out really isn't rocket science.) But TFA is apparently not just telling us what even we non-rocket-scientists could figure out, namely that having a supply of fresh water will come in handy for all the applications where fresh water is needed, including irrigation. It also talks about "cold irrigation" being a new way to increase crop yield. I'd assume the full answer is that cold irrigation is properly viewed as a whole separate innovation that's also made possible by this system, and that TFA just described it wrong.

Re:More Efficient Coastal Farming

[Quirk]

It's a very difficult and serious situation, and, I hope we can pull together to resolve the issues. I tried to find a recent report that pointed to the Ohio river system (watershed) encroaching on the lakes. IIRC the two watersheds are now only a few klicks apart, if the Lakes start draining into the Ohio/Mississippi system it's going to trigger a radical change. Water's an ongoing interest of mine, it's one of, if not the most, fascinating compound; including the fact that, other than "just so stories", we haven't adequately explained how the earth came to be so water rich

cheers

Re:More Efficient Coastal Farming

[ajlitt]

Correct. The grandparent poster should read the article and notice that nowhere did it say that the sweat irrigation was to be derived from buried pipes. It even went so far as to describe one of his PVC cold water pipe sweat condensers in detail, noting that it was out in the open.

The problem is, in costal areas, fresh water for irrigation is scarce, and current desalinization processes are expensive. His cold water system is an inexpensive (almost free) method for generating fresh water, and as such is practical for providing for irrigation as well as potable water.

FYI, pipes sweat because the water (or whatever) fluid flowing through them is colder than the surrounding air, which causes water vapor in the air to condense on the pipes. This is the same principle used in dehumidifiers, though the water is usually an unwanted by-product in that case.

Re:More Efficient Coastal Farming

[Lumpy]

drip irrigation for lawns has been around for decades. Back in 1988 I remember a neighbor who had a perfect lawn all summer and no sprinklers it was a mesh of pipes under his lawn that on a regular basis used 1/5th the water the other homes did and produced a greener and helthier lawn, as well as all the other plants in his yard.

Maybe it was because the guy was a botany and agriculture professor, but I always knew it was because he invented things all the time. The guy had things he made everywhere. he even had a cascading waterfall that went down his roofline and was recirculated back to the top that kept his home much cooler in the summer without running AC.

Re:More Efficient Coastal Farming

[tetsuji]

I have noticed an interesting phenomenon in my front yard that supports his hypothesis: The strip of lawn that my water pipe runs beneath is usually a shade greener than the surrounding area. While it's possible that the pipe could be leaking, it's unlikely that it would leak along its entire length, so the most reasonable hypothesis is that the cooling of the ground reduces the amount of evaporation and drying.

This is fantastic!

[stratjakt]

What the world needs, facing this energy crisis, is more pseudo-scientific, completely unfeasible, sketchy "unlimited energy" solutions.

Luckily it's pure grade-A horse poop. Imagine the climactic effects, and effects on the oceans ecosystems, if we had the equipment to pump that much water up from the floor? IIRC, it takes 100s to 1000s of years for nature to do the same thing..

I see a flaw.

[__aavhli5779]

Doesn't pumping up water from the ocean consume lots of energy?

ocean temperatures?

[victorl19]

Wouldnt excessive use of this method perhaps alter ocean temperatures?

Maybe it will turn out like windmills- they take negligible energy out of the wind.

Re:ocean temperatures?

[fireduck]

Pumping warm water back into the ocean is not going to make that much of a difference on the oceans.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. In Huntington Beach, California, for the past several years, the beaches have had to be closed during the summer due to bacterial pollution. The obvious cause was the wastewater treatment plant dumping partially treated sewage 7 miles off shore, and that was somehow coming back onshore. Models, however, demonstrated that this was very unlikely because of water column stratification based on temperature (colder water, more dense, can't come up).

One factor not included in the models was an electrical generator station on the beach that drew in ocean water for cooling. It would discharge the warm water back to the ocean. However, it discharged the warm water at depth. Warm water, being less dense, rose to the surface, creating a nice thermal pump that would carry with it the colder water at that depth, some of which was certainly co-mingled with the discharged sewage. (this wasn't the entire reason for the beach pollution, but certainly was a contributing cause.)

So, yes, discharging warm water back into the ocean can have unintended effects.

Re:ocean temperatures?

[Anonymous Coward]

Us out here in the east coast know this problem pretty well, and when i was in highschool i was part of a research program that went out onto the ocean water and collected samples.

Turns out the problem is when it rains, the sewage treatment plants reach compacity and dump untreated sewage into the ocean(this is pretty prevalent in the long island sound and would happen anywhere there is sewage treatment facilities and rain).

Overflow spillage happens much closer to shore usually than any pipe they send out and 7 miles seems way excessive as the outflows i visited were at best 3 miles from the plant, most much much closer, like 4 - 8 hundred yards.

The algae bloom and nitrate concentration near these pipes was insane. In fact in the long term this increases algae so much surface algae becomes so thick once vibrant life deeper down gets no light, dies, creates more bacteria and it can become a run away reaction. Eventually the algae bloom can cause massive amounts of fish to die, then mammals and so on.. quite nasty.

But the problem happens without any warm water being added back into the ocean. Likely its just not understanding that its compeltely raw sewage overflowing because the plant cannot handle rain load and sewage load at the same time.

Re:ocean temperatures?

[Anonymous Coward]

Us out here in the east coast ....

Turns out the problem is when it rains, the sewage treatment plants reach compacity and dump untreated sewage into the ocean(this is pretty prevalent in the long island sound and would happen anywhere there is sewage treatment facilities and rain).

Here on the west coast, the bigger problem is flood control channel outlets (designed to take the surface water separately from the sewers). What it dumps into the ocean isn't as nasty as untreated sewage, but stuff does build up in the channels during the drier days and months.

I'm not sure why midwestern and east coast states like to dump all the surface runoff into the sewers. Maybe it's cheaper and makes a good excuse when it rains (a lot) to just dump the raw sewage claiming not enough capacity and save a bit of money on treatment costs.

Never dealt with sports injuries, have you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, cooling parts of yourself with ice causes the body to react and change bloodflow to the cooled area, usually increasing it markedly. The extra circulation does help healing.

Funny thing is, heat kinda does the same thing, albeit not as effectively. Most folks don't like the ice and go for the heat for injuries, though, because heat "feels better". Icing an injury can actually be painful - drop a sprained ankle into a large bucket of ice and water for ten or twenty minutes and the first minute or so will have you twisting and turning and writhing as your foot hurts like hell from the cold water. The pain does go away though after a minute or two.

Heat won't cause that pain. But heat will increase the internal bleeding from an injury if it's not fully healed yet, making the injury worse. Icing an injury will help stop any internal bleeding.

At least that's what my college football trainer told me one time as I was sitting waist-deep in a whirlpool of ice and water to treat a pulled groin muscle. Talk about having your balls shrivel up...

This guy is even cooler than you might think

[ScentCone]

Check out 'Blind Man's Bluff', which is about the post-WWII craziness that was Cold War submarine espionage. This guy is smart, smart, smart.

Some of his ideas are nuts

[Locke2005]

Conventional wisdom is that exposure to cold water causes arthritis, not cures it! Having worked one summer in a fish packing plant, I can attest that people do in fact hurt very much after spending 8 hours working with cold water...

In theory cold-water energy works; anytime you have a temperature differential it can be harnessed to create energy according to the laws of thermodynamics. In practice, I'd question whether the constant pumping and maintenance (saltwater is highly corrosive) wouldn't require more energy than you get out of this system.

One more thing: it's all fun and games until you suck a whale into the input pipe! But seriously, if you pump up nutrient-rich soup from the deep, in a few years your pipe is going to be so clogged up with marine critters that your flow rate is going to tend towards zero...

Re:Some of his ideas are nuts

[Altima(BoB)]

One more thing: it's all fun and games until you suck a whale into the input pipe! But seriously, if you pump up nutrient-rich soup from the deep, in a few years your pipe is going to be so clogged up with marine critters that your flow rate is going to tend towards zero...

Not to mention it'll be damn traumatic for anyone who digs out some of the deep sea's scarier denizens from those pipes...

He Doesn't Have the Half Of It...

[the eric conspiracy]

Water is way more awesome than most people realize - because of hydrogen bonding -

It is a key component in life; it's solvency and structure are what makes biochemistry work.

It has about the widest range of temperature as a liquid of any simple material - making life possible over the face of the earth.

It is the closest thing to a universal sovent we will ever see.

Since it expands on freezing ice floats - just think what a mess the oceans would be if they were made of something that shrank when it froze, and the ice sank. The planet would have much wider extremes in temperature just because of that small fact.

Wate has an immense heat capacity compared to other liquids... moderating our weather

The beat goes on; it's unique chemistry and physics are whe we live off of every day.

Re:Cold h20+Stirling engine=reliable 0-emission po

[alienw]

Pick up an introductory thermodynamics textbook. Find the chapter with the Carnot cycle. Calculate the Carnot efficiency of this setup. Calculate how many thousands of gallons you are going to have to pump to produce a single kilowatt (yes, it's that bad). This was actually a homework problem in my thermo class. You end up with some ridiculous numbers, and wonder how the hell these people are getting money handed to them to build something that's about as useful as a perpetual motion machine.

P.H.D.

[mkiwi]

I have never heard of an "ocean engineer," as opposed to chemical engineer or electrical engineer. Can one really engineer an ocean, or do we need a more politically correct title that accounts for trivialities.... Maybe something like "Cold Water Systems Engineer?" i dunno i'm sleepy. zzzzz

Atlantean Tech

[Doc Ruby]

We better work fast. The islands on which they plan to base these deep-ocean temperature mining operations will mostly submerge beneath the rising seas caused by our last wave of "unlimited energy", petrofuels. Their energy needs will be resolved forever, but that won't help the rest of us any.

hmm

[itzdandy]

a)underground sweating of pipes is not very effective BECAUSE the sweating is atmospheric condensation, in the ground you will just pull condensation out of the adjacent soil. though it would have some effect, it would not be a complete irrigation solution as soil does not flow like air :)

b)colder water from the depths would produce a LOT of condensation on a hot summer day, but the cost of pumping will reduce the efficiency of the method. consider that pumping will not be extramely expensive, similarly as expensive as pumping the volume of water horizontally because you dont actually lift a volume of water, just displace the water on the bottom to the top and the ocean does the work.

c)very cold water on ocean floor, mildy cool water to warm water on surface = nice temp difference. enough to run a sterling engine on to produce electricity. coupled with solar heat collectors this would infact be practical in some areas.

Re:freak accident

[anagama]

Unlimited energy?
I bet this guy will now die froïÎfreak accident of some sort.

Well, he was a spook. Check out the bolded portion in the excerpt below:

----excerpt-----

September 1, 1985, dawned gray and ornery over the North Atlantic. For nine days Ballard's Titanic mission had the turgid sea to itself. But that morning, as first light broke, the crew was astonished to wake up smack in the middle of a NATO antisubmarine exercise. Hours earlier Ballard had radioed that he'd found the long-lost Titanic. Was it coincidence that NATO had chosen this morning, this exact spot, to flex its muscle?

"Just chance," Ballard assures me.

"Probably not," says John Piña Craven, former chief scientist of the navy's special projects office and project manager of its deep submergence projects program. "I'd suspect something else was down there. Something we didn't want the other side knowing about. Because that's how the CIA and the navy work."

Talk long enough to Craven and he will have you checking your back every few minutes to make sure you aren't being followed. He says things like, "I'm under continuous surveillance, so if I inadvertently leak classified information they're going to move in." Craven, who traces his forebears back to Moorish pirates and to the British navy at the time of Cromwell, is 80 now and lives in Hawaii. But in the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, he was the navy's chief underwater spook.

Back then the submarine world -- in both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. -- was a labyrinth of secrecy and tension. With good reason: Subs, particularly the newer, nuclear-powered ones, could lurk for days just offshore, virtually undetectable, capable of lobbing nuclear payloads hundreds of miles inland at unprotected cities.

In that supercharged atmosphere the slightest strategic advantage was critical. Spies were our first line of defense, and Craven was the best. In 1966 he was on the team that located and retrieved a hydrogen bomb lost after a midair refueling collision off the coast of Spain. He outfitted a sub with a deep compression chamber, so divers could tap Soviet undersea cables. He located a sunken Soviet nuclear sub that the Russians had lost track of, and fished nuclear hardware from the sea. Over the phone he says, "Ballard is me, 20 years later."

Re:very low thermal efficiency

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

But since you're not paying for the heat, the only effect efficiency has on the economics is the cost of the plumbing.

What scares me is the environmental impact. These plants will pump a lot of bottom water back out near the surface. Because of the low efficiency, it will be a huge amount of water compared to the capacity of the power plant. Water near the bottom is oxygen poor because nothing can photosynthesize in the abyssal dark. It's nutrient rich because there's a steady rain of dead things from above. Dump that into hot oxygenated surface water and you're making an ecological change, which means the results are unpredictable. If you're lucky you get better fisheries from a fertilizing effect.

Aspects of this already in use

[limabone]

There are several office buildings in downtown Toronto that are cooled via cold water pumped from lake Ontario. http://www.enwave.com/enwave/view.asp?/dlwc/energy

you want awesomewater?

[Anonymous Coward]

put a bottle of club soda in the freezer.
wait until it's super cooled but not frozen
pour it into a glass of ice cbes.
the water will pour and suddenly freeze, right up the stream, into the bottle.
did it today.
AWESOME!

Peltier-Seebeck effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not use the "Peltier-Seebeck effect"? Seems that in this instance it would be much more effient than evaporation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peltier-Seebeck_effec t

-AC

Re:very low thermal efficiency

[G4from128k]

What's more relevant is to compare the cost of building the plant to the money you can make by running the plant over its planned lifetime. That's the relevant figure of merit for a nuclear power plant, and I think it's the relevant one for an OTEC plant as well.

Absolutely! The cost of the plant must not exceed the total value of the energy provided by the plant. The efficiency does enter into this calculation because these plants extract such a small percentage of the heat energy latent in the water.

The problem is that fossil fuels are artificially subsidized.

True. All energy sources have additional costs and benefits that are not evident in the market price. For example, this technology might have environment impacts or land-use impacts that are not fully costed into the plant price. These ocean thermal plants also release CO2 into the air (brought up from the depths), although not as much as does a fossil fuel plant.

Ontario beat you to it

[danharan]

As reported by the CBC last August, Lake Ontario water cools Toronto offices

Sure, this guy is doing all sorts of neat things at once with the water. For getting it to market and economically proven though, I'd rather see a demo that shows that one of the features is useful than trying to make a whole range of things work.

Even more troubling is that he proposes to pay off investors in seven years- not a great ROI given the risks.

Re:Convenient...

[MustardMan]

I have one of the water clocks. Cute idea, but I have enough trouble remembering to water my plants. Watering my clock is a royal PITA. The clock is also annoying to set, so when it loses power and you have to refill it, you get to go through that fun of settng it all over again.

Who modded him insightful? Try -1, utter nonsense

[jcr]

Yes and by screwing with the oceans themodynamics we will have finally ruined earth as a livable habitat

Ok, take a deep breath, and try to develop a sense of proportion. Oceans are big. Very, very big. We're talking miles deep, and thousands of miles across.

Ocean thermal plants will work with pipes that are very, very small in proportion. Even 100-meter diameter pipes raising cold water from the deep, will have an effect that's just about immeasurable.

Ocean thermal energy poses no more hazard of disrupting ocean currents, than windmills do of stopping the wind.

-jcr

Re:Good, but...

[ultramk]

Well, there are some other places... for example the Monterey Bay submarine canyon (bigger than the Grand Canyon, all underwater.). Fantastic place for deep-sea ROVs to explore.

The biggest problem that I see is one of location. For a lot of this stuff to work, you need a few different things:
1. Cold, deep water.
2. Warm surface water.
3. Warm, humid air.

So you're limited to equatorial regions with available deep water. The UK won't be using this.

m-

Schauberger?

[sunwolf]

Interesting - this looks like it has the influence of Viktor Schauberger, commonly known as the water wizard, behind it. Blueprints for an ocean water pump is in Living Water.

I've seen it as well

[fbartho]

I've seen it happen with one of the Smirnoff "chick" vodka beers. This girl opened one, took a sip, and then held it for a few minutes while watching the tv, the carbonation escaped and the base of the bottle started getting foggy, as it froze from the bottom of the bottle all the way up to the top.

Re:Deep Sea Environment?

[goldspider]

So in other words, it is IMPOSSIBLE to come up with an alternative energy production solution that meets the unrealistic requirements of environmentalists.

Yes, we should investigate what footprint we might leave in any endevour like this, but it seems these days that environmentalists dismiss anything, out of hand, that has ANY impact, no matter how minimal.

The largest impediment to developing alternative energy sources, these days, seems to be environmentalists.

it is a bad idea

[dillee1]

Small scale extraction may be ok, but using cold water as global energy source is a very bad idea. e.g.:
- It can change the pattern of ocean current, causing major climatic shift.
- It can cause oxygen depletion in deep ocean, causing mass extinction.
- Deep ocean water contains large amount of methane hydrate. Heating them up will release the potent green house gas into atmosphere.
The worst thing is above effects are self reinforcing, potentially generating run away positive feedback loop. For more information, see this.

Where do you think all our waste heat goes?

[Colin Smith]

It ends up in the oceans. 60% of the heat from all of our power stations, including nuclear is pumped directly into the environment right now. Our power stations are only about 40% efficient. Rivers and seas are already used to cool power stations. Some of the heat goes into the water, some to the air. It all ends up increasing the baseline temperature, including the ocean.

In Finland and Denmark they use what is called District Heating and District Cooling , which improve the efficiency of power stations to 80%->90%. Instead of just dumping this "waste" heat they've created they pump it round homes and businesses or use it to power district cooling systems where cold water is pumped round houses and businesses in summer. It does still end up in the environment but it's at least useful first.