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California City Considers Restarting Desalination Plant To Fight Drought
First time accepted submitter SaraLast (3619459) writes in with news about Santa Barbara considering the restart of its desalination plant. "This seaside city thought it had the perfect solution the last time California withered in a severe drought more than two decades ago: Tap the ocean to turn salty seawater to fresh water. The $34 million desalination plant was fired up for only three months and mothballed after a miracle soaking of rain. As the state again grapples with historic dryness, the city nicknamed the "American Riviera" has its eye on restarting the idled facility to hedge against current and future droughts. "We were so close to running out of water during the last drought. It was frightening," said Joshua Haggmark, interim water resources manager. "Desalination wasn't a crazy idea back then." Removing salt from ocean water is not a far-out idea, but it's no quick drought-relief option. It takes years of planning and overcoming red tape to launch a project. Santa Barbara is uniquely positioned with a desalination plant in storage. But getting it humming again won't be as simple as flipping a switch."
Now I never really looked into it, but it sounds easy. Too bad the people working on this aren't as smart as me.
Farmers in the desert use about 20 times as much water as California urbanites.
Agriculture in the southwest (i.e. in the desert) is being killed by the lack of rainfall, which seems to have caught everyone by surprise. They're idiots first, farmers second.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
> Rather, it is all about killing agriculture in the southwest to free up more water for California urbanites.
Agriculture uses about 70%, with industry using 20% and urban populations using 10% of the water. Agriculture, you know, that stuff you eat from those greedy bastards in California.
> Nevada rancher stand off...
Bullshit. It's about some welfare rancher not paying his grazing fee's. Pure and simple. He has no intellectual or legal argument, so he is whipping up the dummies over on Fox News to call out the Tea Party morons to protest his desire to rip off the Tax Payers.
Linux O Muerte!
To me all you need to do is boil water to strip the salt, you sell the salt and the water back.
The difficulty is not the ability to do it, it is that the energy requirements make it economically uncompetitive. Boiling that much water and then collecting the condensation generally takes a LOT of energy which is quite expensive in most cases. Places with a desert like climate and abundant energy resources (like the Middle East) can result in desalinization plants that are economically sensible but in much of the world it's just not competitive. Theoretically you could have a nuclear powered desalinization plant that might be economically competitive but I'm not aware that anyone has done this yet.
you sell the salt and the water back.
Doesn't work when it cost you more to get the salt and water than it costs to truck/pipe it in from elsewhere. Salt in this case is a byproduct but you wouldn't be able to sell it profitably or even on a breakeven basis given current prices in most places. Same with the water if it is being sold to farmers. It makes their crops economically uncompetitive with those from areas not experiencing drought.
Obviously it is more proccessing, and more expensive than getting just ground water or rain water because of that but how much more expensive can it really be?
Consult wikipedia for a quick answer.
could it not be done in a way where we use the salt water in a new type of energy generating plant, that collects the steam and makes it usable?
There are waste heat desalinization plants being experimented with.
Desalination plants don't boil water to filter the salt out. They use reverse osmosis, which typically requires about 3 kWh of electricity per cubic metre of water processed due to the very high pressure pumps required to force the water through the filters.