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Water Now More Awesome Than Previously Thought

Posted by samzenpus on from the it's-like-you-can't-live-without-it dept.

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."

19 of 708 comments (clear)

  1. More Efficient Coastal Farming by coop0030 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:More Efficient Coastal Farming by pHatidic · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:More Efficient Coastal Farming by Mattintosh · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:More Efficient Coastal Farming by David+Gould · · Score: 3, Interesting


      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.

      --
      David Gould
      main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
    4. Re:More Efficient Coastal Farming by ajlitt · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  2. I see a flaw. by __aavhli5779 · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

  3. ocean temperatures? by victorl19 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:ocean temperatures? by fireduck · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:ocean temperatures? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting
      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.

  4. Never dealt with sports injuries, have you? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  5. This guy is even cooler than you might think by ScentCone · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
  6. Some of his ideas are nuts by Locke2005 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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...

    --
    I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
    1. Re:Some of his ideas are nuts by Altima(BoB) · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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...

      --
      Yup...
  7. He Doesn't Have the Half Of It... by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  8. Re:very low thermal efficiency by Beryllium+Sphere(tm) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  9. Aspects of this already in use by limabone · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  10. Who modded him insightful? Try -1, utter nonsense by jcr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  11. Re:Good, but... by ultramk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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-

    --
    You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
  12. Schauberger? by sunwolf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.