A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest

Wow, what a fantastic post!<p>The author, who holds a PhD from Caltech, proposes taking advantage of the decreasing cost of solar power to enable a new age of clean water <i>abundance</i> in California, sustainably, with the potential for massive revenues and profits at all steps in the value chain. Even if the author&#x27;s calculations are off by a factor of two, the proposal looks like it could work. At a minimum, it merits serious consideration. The status quo will not solve our pressing environmental problems.<p>The main challenge an innovative large-scale project like this one would face, I think, is a regulatory bureaucracy which to me often seems like it was designed for the technologies and infrastructure of the 20th century, not for those of the 21st century. I shudder to think of, say, inspectors who are highly trained on narrow technical matters, but who lack a fundamental, multi-disciplinary, big-picture view of the entire project, deciding whether to approve individual tiny little parts of it.

Maybe we should not use so much water (for agriculture) in a desert area at the first place. Feels like we are putting fixes on top of fixes.<p>&quot;A Saudi Arabian company grows alfalfa on farmland in Arizona and California and sends it overseas to feed the country&#x27;s cows. These legal farming operations extract groundwater in Arizona and water from the Colorado River across the border in California, experts say.&quot; source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.maxwell.syr.edu&#x2F;news&#x2F;article&#x2F;koch-discusses-saudi-arabian-farms-using-water-from-arizona-and-california-in-kusa-article" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.maxwell.syr.edu&#x2F;news&#x2F;article&#x2F;koch-discusses-saud...</a><p>Maybe if we stop exporting Colorado water packed in alfalfa and other agri-products, we would have enough water ?<p>Exporting water through alfalfa to Saudi Arabia who indeed banned alfalfa fields in their country because it was consuming just too much water, is one of the problem we should fix before installing PV and batteries in the desert, and dump concentrated brine somewhere.

I know he inputs some numbers, but I am just supremely skeptical of them. If solar + batteries + RO plants could produce water at a price that made agriculture economically viable, then I just don&#x27;t see how it wouldn&#x27;t already be happening. Or at the very least be being proposed more broadly than some random guys blog.<p>If I understand correctly, it is his plan for extracting value from the brine which represents the biggest unknown&#x2F;the most need for development, while also being the thing that makes it all make sense. I&#x27;ve never heard of any of the existing worlds desal plants doing this, so either it must be harder than he supposes or else he must think that every single person in charge of a desal plant the world over is an idiot.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I realize that sometimes people miss obvious things. And sometimes, there really <i>is</i> a $100 bill on the ground, despite what the apocryphal economist would have you believe.<p>But in this case, areas like that are what I need to be convinced of. While it&#x27;s maybe true, you don&#x27;t just get to assert it.<p>As they say &quot;What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence&quot;.

NYT daily had a relevant podcast episode on this (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;09&#x2F;01&#x2F;podcasts&#x2F;the-daily&#x2F;water-supply-arizona.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;09&#x2F;01&#x2F;podcasts&#x2F;the-daily&#x2F;water-...</a>?). Discussion centered around using the water for Arizona, not California. (I&#x27;m unable to speak of the relative merits of pumping the water from one state to another).<p>General takeaways:<p>Proponents of the solution seemed to understate challenges and risks associated with:<p>1. The pipeline itself (i.e., where to build it) 2. The disposal of brine solution into the Gulf of California. 3. Cooperation with Mexico.<p>That&#x27;s not to say the challenges couldn&#x27;t be addressed, but discussion of such challenges is noticeably absent from the original article.

&gt; <i>The solar panels convert wasted sunlight into electricity, one of the most useful forms of energy, at the lowest cost ever in human history. The batteries make this power available at night, enabling 100% utilization of the higher capex systems downstream. The RO desal plant uses this power to strip salt out of fresh water</i><p>I wonder if you could store the energy as pressure instead of electricity in batteries.<p>From what I gather[1], the biggest energy draw in reverse osmosis is pressurizing the water to force it through the RO filters. So, while the sun is shining, fill a tank halfway with salty water, then use solar energy to run pumps to pressurize air above the water. When the sun isn&#x27;t shining, you now have pressurized water you can let through the RO filters.<p>Compared to a regular RO plant, this requires high-pressure storage tanks and additional pumps. I&#x27;m unsure whether that costs less than batteries or not.<p>Another part of the analysis is that, if you do build the batteries, they can earn extra money with a side gig stabilizing the grid. Occasionally, when grid conditions get very gnarly, you could shut down the RO plant for a few hours and make a quick buck selling your battery power on the market.<p>Alternatively, you could pump the water uphill during the day and let gravity supply the energy to force it through the RO filters at night. This means you&#x27;ll have to build a special reservoir for pre-treated salty water somewhere, though, and you need a lot of pressure, so it would need to be at a high elevation.<p>---<p>[1] Source (kind of old): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oas.org&#x2F;dsd&#x2F;publications&#x2F;unit&#x2F;oea59e&#x2F;ch20.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oas.org&#x2F;dsd&#x2F;publications&#x2F;unit&#x2F;oea59e&#x2F;ch20.htm</a>

He&#x27;s doing it wrong.<p>I don&#x27;t mean some grander point about environmentalism or development, I mean that I have specifically examined solar desalination for the Imperial Valley and he&#x27;s missed a much simpler way to get the water from point A to point B.<p>See, there&#x27;s this other basin in nearby Mexico called Laguna de Salada which is basically an empty salt flat about ten meters below sea level. If you flood that by dredging a canal (about 10-20 km and not very high), you only have to transport the desalinated water about five kilometers to get it into the Imperial Valley drainage basin.<p>There&#x27;s no need to back up the Colorado and mess up what&#x27;s left of the delta, plus you can put the rejected brine back into the now Golfo de Salada where it will mix more slowly and (hopefully) less destructively with the seawater to the south. The area will still be something of a dead zone, but it would only replace an existing dead zone.

I am by no means a desalination expert, but pumping vast amount of a salty water 100+ kilometers (Pacific Coast) or from the Sea of Cortez (closer to 200kms) seems strange as compared to building the desalination plant on the shore and transfer the electricity generated in the desert. One can also replace some drinking or agricultural water used way closer to the coast in CA from the Colorado Basin with the newly desalinated one. Way less pumping. Or do I miss something?

Apart from whether the economics make sense brine disposal from desalinization is a big issue. Waste with high salt concentrations can wipe out marine life - it would be nice if this piece took the issue a little more seriously. It&#x27;s a continuing problem in the Canary Islands which are dependent on desalinization plants:<p>&quot;Rejected brine is a serious threat to marine ecosystems, causing negative effects on both flora and fauna. This is especially so when the optimal initial high dilution capacity is lacking in the discharge system. Consequently, brine discharge plumes spread over large areas of the sea floor and modify the structure and distribution of benthic communities such as seagrass habitats. ... Rejected brine disposal costs are between 5 and 33% of the whole desalinization process, depending on the characteristics of the brine, its pretreatment level before disposal, disposal method, and volume&quot;<p>from: Jiménez-Arias, D., Morales-Sierra, S., García-Machado, F.J., García-García, A.L., Luis, J.C., Valdés, F., Sandalio, L.M., Hernández-Suárez, M. &amp; Borges, A.A. 2020, &quot;Rejected brine recycling in hydroponic and thermo-solar evaporation systems for leisure and tourist facilities. Changing waste into raw material&quot;, Desalination, vol. 496, pp. 114443.

A solution is there if we had the will to implement it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.osti.gov&#x2F;biblio&#x2F;963122" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.osti.gov&#x2F;biblio&#x2F;963122</a><p>Take excess water from SE floods and pump it west opportunistically using excess renewables. Bonus because you can use the pumped water as gravity storage.<p>Yes, it is not cheap, energetically, to pump water. Yes, you have to cross a big mountain range(which increases opportunities for gravity storage).<p>For some reason, this suggestion always gets a lot of comments from folks living around the great lakes who think we&#x27;re going to &#x27;steal&#x27; &#x27;their&#x27; water(just like they &#x27;steal&#x27; CA grown produce, I guess?).<p>Anyway, a national water grid is needed for national food security and can mitigate flooding damage in the SE(probably more important b&#x2F;c of AGW).

If we switch to renewables, there will be plenty of water, which is now used by fossil fuels.<p>U.S. thermoelectric plants are the largest source of U.S. water withdrawals, accounting for more than 40% of total U.S. water withdrawals in 2015.: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eia.gov&#x2F;todayinenergy&#x2F;detail.php?id=50698" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eia.gov&#x2F;todayinenergy&#x2F;detail.php?id=50698</a>

Seems to me like atmospheric water generators are a good fit here. That gets rid of the brine problem entirely, and from what I&#x27;ve read it&#x27;s competitive in terms of energy consumption.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;solarimpulse.com&#x2F;solutions-explorer&#x2F;high-efficiency-atmospheric-water-generators" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;solarimpulse.com&#x2F;solutions-explorer&#x2F;high-efficiency-...</a>

I&#x27;ve been thinking about this as well. As climate change affects the distribution of potable water on the planet, it would seem prudent to start installing solar backed desalination and water pipelines to ensure water security for areas at risk.<p>Now I&#x27;m no hydrologist, and haven&#x27;t researched this idea deeply yet, so don&#x27;t know second and third order effects (i.e. brine disposal mentioned above, and of course the economics of such a venture.) It seems at some point our collective hands may be forced and we may have to do something that doesn&#x27;t make a profit, yet sustains humanity as a going concern.<p>Finally, the fact that we haven&#x27;t &quot;terraformed&quot; in this fashion drought-stricken places like Africa or elsewhere is a pity. But yes, economics, profit, geopolitics, power struggles, I get it.

I wonder if this would be cheaper than just paying the water rightsholders not to use the water?<p>If the Salton Sea doesn&#x27;t have a steady input (from snowpack? not familiar with it), doesn&#x27;t desal mean we&#x27;re really just expanding the unsustainable use of the Colorado, maybe delaying it another few decades, but ultimately still growing more and using more water than its watershed can naturally sustain -- especially as climate change increases?<p>I think the fundamental problem here isn&#x27;t that we need to make more freshwater out of brine, but that the California (and other) water rights are set to levels that cannot realistically be maintained. The law needs to change even if that hurts the grandfathered rightsholders; there just isn&#x27;t the same amount of water anymore.

Lots of questionable assumptions in this article, but I wanted to call this particular calculation out because it&#x27;s so blatant:<p><pre><code> 5 MAF&#x2F;year of 6% salinity brine contains more than 10 million tonnes of magnesium, comparable to current global production, not to mention other light metals. At spot prices around $5000&#x2F;T, a mature brine extraction industry could net &gt;$50b&#x2F;year </code></pre> &quot;Net&quot; means after expenses, so this calculation is assuming that extracting 100% of the magnesium from the brine would have zero cost, not to mention that it also assumes that doubling the world supply of magnesium would have zero impact on its price.

The article claims that the plan described could produce 5MAF &#x2F; year (the entire allocation of Colorado River water for California). There&#x27;s no explanation I could find of where this water will come from. The Salton Sea itself only holds 1.5MAF.<p>The title also seems a bit grandiose. &quot;The US Southwest&quot; for most people I think extends at least as far as the I25 corridor up through NM and CO, and for some it might even reach into western TX. The plan described would really have very little impact on the overall water situation here, even if it did actually live up to its claim of effectively freeing up CA&#x27;s Colorado allocation.

Just charge people for the natural resources of the country via taxes. Resource and land taxes solve basically <i>every single problem</i> in the current American economy yet people do not want to even think about doing it.

The details might be a bit goofy, but this sort of large scale geoengineering project is going to be the only way that the SW is going to remain inhabitable.<p>The American southwest has a couple big things going for it -- unlimited sunshine and an extraordinary amount of empty land. You can combine these things to create huge amounts of electricity which can be used to irrigate new farm land, power mines and build new cities.<p>The status quo of drawing down on the increasingly precarious water supply is not feasible though. Before the unprecedented snowpack of 2022&#x2F;2023, many regions were facing extreme water rationing.

Ok this keeps happening. I posted this exact URL 3 days ago.<p>Shouldn’t the same URL submitted again redirect to mine?<p>Is there a certain cutoff when someone else can submit the same URL?<p>(I’m not complaining, I just want to understand what the rules are)

So basically pump seawater up from the Gulf of California across the border over a flat floodplain to the Salton Sea (south of joshua tree) and use cheap PV to run desalination plants that will restore one of our biggest environmental disasters <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&#x2F;episode&#x2F;sea-worth-salt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&#x2F;episode&#x2F;sea-worth-salt</a> back into a vacation hotspot greater than Palm Springs.<p>Costs of the PV and desal (relatively cheap but still absurdly expensive in absolute terms at this scale) will be offset by real estate development and hand-wavey mineral extraction from the sea water.<p>Environmental impacts of desal&#x27;s salty waste stream is hand-waved away.<p>I mean, economic math miiight pencil out. But basing the speculative prosperity of an entire region on a bunch of water and energy machines seems... well... fragile? Full of hubris? Seems like a really expensive way of maintaining an otherwise-unsustainable Potemkin vacation village.<p>But then again, that&#x27;s basically the story of the american southwest, so, &#x2F;shrug? (see Cadillac Desert and all the water stories out there...)

And then there&#x27;s the problem of removing all that pesky lithium, 3400 kilotons, enough to support over 375 million electric vehicle batteries, which fortunately, is not very important towards reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. [0]<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.energy.gov&#x2F;eere&#x2F;articles&#x2F;us-department-energy-analysis-confirms-californias-salton-sea-region-be-rich-domestic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.energy.gov&#x2F;eere&#x2F;articles&#x2F;us-department-energy-an...</a>

We desperately need to focus on conservation efforts instead of attempting to engineer &quot;solutions&quot; that only end up encouraging further consumption. Hot take: Maybe the American SouthWest wasn&#x27;t meant to support &gt; 1&#x2F;3 of America&#x27;s agricultural output. Solar desalination of the Salton traps humanity in an energy contract when we could achieve meaningful conservation efforts instantaneously by banning the production of many water-intensive luxury crops. Why is Arizona farming alfalfa for Saudi horses? Why is California producing 2.8 billion pounds of almonds a year? Why is the United States one of the highest consumers of red meat in the world when sustainable plant-based alternatives exist and use a fraction of the water? This regional water crisis (as well as our global climate crisis) cannot be solved without making bold sacrifices to our daily lives. I know this is Hacker News, but not everything can be solved with new&#x2F;additional technology.

Would it be more efficient to use solar thermal for some of the desalination instead of $10b worth or regular solar?

I thought this would be a post from Rain Maker but it is another promising project altogether. If you’re interested check out Augusts Doricko’s company looking to do cloud seeding in the same region <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.makerain.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.makerain.com&#x2F;</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;energycentral.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;pip&#x2F;great-mexicali-energy-and-shipping-canal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;energycentral.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;pip&#x2F;great-mexicali-energy-and-sh...</a><p>Here&#x27;s an alternative proposal based on a sea level canal and tidal power.

I would really love to see the Los Angeles basin get its primary water needs met from desalination. This would lessen the need for the LA dept. of Water and Power taking water from the Owens Valley north of the LA area which subsequently turned the valley into a desert.

There&#x27;s an abundance of freshwater in the east coast, northwest and midwest. Why not shift some of the exess water from the great lakes, east coast and northwest to southwest? Can&#x27;t we pipeline the water to giant reservoirs in the sw or even carve extend tributaries from the missouri river or create canals down to the sw? It&#x27;s not exactly rocket science.