Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label sustainability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sustainability. Show all posts

Saturday, September 04, 2021

We Should Try It


One of the things we have to understand is that we generally don't have big problems with the actual quantities of the stuff we need - we're just not all that good at distribution.

And I guess more accurately, we're a little too good at identifying - and sometimes creating - choke points, and then battling for control of those choke points.

Anyway, building pipelines to carry water from the oceans to people inland seems like something we should be studying. Not that it's automatically a good idea to fuck with the nature of things, but if we're going to have a chance at sustaining ourselves in the long term, we'd best be gettin' with the program - even if it turns out not to be a good thing (there's always the problem of "waste & by-product"), at least we'll have a decent shot at making an informed decision.

Reporting on proof of concept, and field testing the real gizmo at Wired:

What’s inside this giant ‘solar dome’ coming to Saudi Arabia
Middle East water plants pose a threat to sea life. But this desalination plant hopes to harness some serious brine power to deliver H20 more sustainably.

Malcolm Aw’s quest to create fresh water using the power of the sun started out with two salad bowls.

It was the early 1980s, and the entrepreneur was sitting on his balcony on a bright, sunny London day. Pondering the power of the rays beaming down from our star 150 million kilometers above his head, Aw conducted an experiment that wouldn’t be out of place in a high-school science class.

He placed some saltwater in a salad dish, with another, larger bowl on top. After a while, somewhat unsurprisingly, some of the salt water evaporated and condensed, gathering in a tray below.

It wasn’t exactly a eureka moment. But it did set Aw’s mind racing as to how such a basic principle could be used on a grand scale. And, almost 40 years after that improvised experiment, he is trying to make this a reality in the Middle East.

It’s no secret that the world’s looming water crisis affects this region more than most. According to the World Resources Institute, 12 of the 17 countries facing “extremely high” water stress are in the Middle East and North Africa.

The lack of natural water resources in the Arabian Gulf, especially, has led to some expensive, and highly polluting measures. The Gulf has the dubious honor of being the world’s “leader” in desalinated water, producing 40 percent of the world’s total supply, according to a study in early 2020. Saudi Arabia—home to the world’s largest water desalination facility at Al-Jubail, and which is expected to invest $80 billion in similar projects over the next 10 years—is responsible for about a fifth of the world’s total output.

Desalination plants spew out a combined 76 million tons of CO2 per year, with emissions expected to grow to around 218 million tons by 2040 if no action is taken, according to Abu Dhabi sustainability initiative Masdar. Yet they also pose a specific danger to marine life, thanks to the salty water that gets pumped back into the sea, warns Leticia Reis de Carvalho, coordinator of the UN Environment Programme’s Water Management Branch.

Waste brine from desalination can limit the growth of marine organisms, increase seawater temperature, and lower the levels of dissolved oxygen, causing further harm to aquatic life, Carvalho says.

“Hot and highly saline brine associated with desalination facilities, a range of pollutants, high energy use, and associated repercussions including carbon emissions, represent… increasing environmental threats,” she adds.

It is a problem Malcolm Aw thinks he can solve. After his balcony experiment, Aw became consumed in other projects. But the entrepreneur returned to the idea in 2000, forming a company called Water L’eau—a pun on the English and French words for “water”—and which later became the somewhat less playfully named Solar Water, a UK-based company looking to deliver “carbon neutral” desalination.

Developing the salad-bowl desalination concept was “not rocket science,” says Aw—but still took many years. It was accelerated by an association with the UK’s Cranfield University, where a proof of concept was developed over the course of six months in collaboration with researchers and students.

The bowl will be much bigger this time. Imagine a sphere formed by a dome extending 25 meters into the air, which covers a cauldron extending a further 25 meters into the ground. Solar Water envisages seawater being transported inland via aqueducts topped with glass that, under sunlight, would warm the water. This would then feed into the cauldron, where it would be superheated thanks to energy feeding down from the “solar dome.” The glass-and steel dome would itself be heated using concentrating solar power (CSP), with more than 100 solar reflectors around the structure directing the sun’s energy onto the frame. After the salt water evaporates, it condenses as freshwater as it is piped to reservoirs.

Although similar technology has been used to generate electricity—typically by generating heat to create steam, driving a turbine—this is one of the first to use it directly for desalination. Yet Aw downplays the sophistication of the tech involved. “Basically what we have is a huge kettle,” he says. “You can’t get more simple than that: We have a big kettle boiling water, and producing 30,000 cubic meters per hour.” There is a little more to it than that. The mirrors surrounding the dome have to be adjusted to maximize efficiency. “It’s like a sunflower—it’s got to follow the sun,” says Aw. “Even though it’s a very simple thing, there has to be precision.”

The problem of leftover salt remains. Aw says Solar Water’s system allows for the byproduct to be drained away to tanks, which can then be sold on to, for example, battery producers.

Some have expressed reservations about the feasibility of the design, as well as some of the projected production costs. One estimate was 34 US cents per cubic meter of water produced—significantly lower than desalination plants using reverse osmosis methods. The solar dome is yet to be tested on an industrial scale.

But that is going to change. Neom, Saudi Arabia’s ambitious $500 billion country-within-a-country currently under development, said in January it had signed an agreement with Solar Water to pilot the first ever solar dome. The initial plan is for a 25-meter desalination sphere, followed by three more of between 50 and 80 meters, says Aw. Work on the first plant was expected to be completed by the end of this year, although the announcement was made before the full extent of the coronavirus pandemic was known.

Solar Water also says it has signed a contract with a Jordanian mining company, and hopes to have several plants under construction by the end of the year.

The water produced could be used as drinking water—although further treatment would be required—but Aw sees a major use as being in desert farming and irrigation.

“We can build miles of canals into the middle of the desert, and turn the desert green,” he says. “We can reverse climate change. The only thing we need is water… We can make the desert blossom.”

Aw believes solar technology could replace traditional desalination plants—but that would not, of course, happen overnight.

“We got out of the Stone Age, but not because we ran out of stones. So we can get out of fossil fuel age by going straight on to solar power,” he says. “There are 18,000 desalination plants across the world. If we can replace all of them in due course, can you imagine how healthy the ocean would become? Because at the moment, what they are doing is horrible.”

Supplemental Reading - at BritannicaWhat's in sea water?

Sunday, September 13, 2020

Sustainability





Paulownia tomentosa (common names princess tree, empress tree, or foxglove-tree, is a deciduous tree in the family Paulowniaceae, native to central and western China. It is an extremely fast-growing tree with seeds that disperse readily, and is a persistent exotic introduced species in North America, where it has undergone naturalisation in large areas of the Eastern USA. P. tomentosa has also been introduced to Western and Central Europe, and is establishing itself as a naturalised species there as well.

Monday, November 27, 2017

Fouling The Nest



The world generates at least 3.5 million tons of solid waste a day, 10 times the amount a century ago, according to World Bank researchers. If nothing is done, that figure will grow to 11 million tons by the end of the century, the researchers estimate. On average, Americans throw away their own body weight in trash every month. In Japan, meanwhile, the typical person produces only two-thirds as much. It’s difficult to find comparable figures for the trash produced by mega-cities. But clearly, New York generates by far the most waste of the cities I visited: People in the broader metropolitan area throw away 33 million tons per year, according to a report by a global group of academics published in 2015 in the journal of the National Academy of Sciences. That’s 15 times the Lagos metropolitan area, their study found.

With a sharp increase in the world population and many economies growing, we are producing more waste then ever. In Europe and the United States our trash is largely invisible once it’s tossed; in other parts of the world it is more obvious, in the form of waste dumps, sometimes in the middle of cities.

Dumps are a problem because they release methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere. Burning trash outdoors is also harmful, to the environment and people’s health.

Change is scary. Especially when the people in positions to make decisions have built their careers on doing things a particular way.


Nothing good happens quickly enough unless we figure out how to sell the corporations on making the changes - and do that without having to wait for the usual effects of pain and difficulty to motivate those decision-makers.

Monday, June 08, 2015

The Golden Arrow

A classic from 2007:

Special note 1: starting at about 02:15, she makes the point that among the 100 biggest economies in the world, 51 of 'em are Corporations - 8 years ago in 2007.  



Things have "improved" since then, with the number of Corporations in those top 100 spots dwindling to 37 (as of about 2012 or 14).  So, OK, but take a look at how the smart money has been playing its hand of late, and you might notice that the power those companies can wield in terms of controlling interests in governments has increased (by orders of magnitude me thinks) - so the actual number of dollars in those "economies" isn't as significant as the fact that they've been very busily ensuring themselves of a reliable military capability (eg).

And how do they do that?  Well, in terms that are admittedly kinda simplistic, they don't have to own the whole government when they can own several of the key people who run the government.

Out of these 10 randomly selected folks: John McCain, Bruce Rauner, Lindsey Graham, John Boehner, Dianne Feinstein, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, Tom Cotton and Jack Lew - which ones do you think would go against the opinions of the people who spent the money to put them in their positions of power in the first place?

Special note 2: Externalizing The Costs - about 08:15 - is where she addresses the bullshit notions of Supply Side Economics.

Anyway, what really and truly bugs me is the fact that we're still not talking about sustainability as a guiding principle.  I can see some efforts here and there, but it looks more like a fashion thing than it does a real shift in how we do things.

Change is scary, but the like the man said, it's either change or die.  So yeah.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

What's In The Desert?

Sunshine.  There's lots and lots of it in the desert.  So instead of doing incredibly stoopid things like irrigating the sand in an attempt to magically transform it into a totally unsustainable garden; or poking holes in the ground to reach all that smelly goo that ends up choking us as we burn it - maybe we could try doing something with what the desert has to offer us - which doesn't require us to deny what the desert actually is, and doesn't make it necessary to rationalize blowing shit up and shooting people down.



Just a tho't.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Flipping The Message

A while back, Cadillac ran this ad aimed at the Douche Bucket demographic:




Here's an Answer Ad from Ford:



The world is what we make it, kids.

Friday, August 02, 2013

Loser Sosh'list Dweebs

According to this piece from The Pachamama Alliance website, the idiots in the Swedish gubmint put together a program that's become so efficient, they've run out of garbage.

Of course here in God's USAmerica, we'd never allow such a thing - there's a not-so-subtle (even if subconcious) attempt to flaunt our status by making sure the neighbors can see the evidence of our latest acquisition, or the sheer volume of the shit we discard, cuz everybody knows the success of your lifestyle is directly proportional to the amount of trash you put out at the curb every week.
In order to continue fueling the waste-to-energy factories that provide electricity to a quarter of a million homes and 20 percent of the entire country’s district heating, Sweden is now importing trash from the landfills of other European countries. In fact, those countries are paying Sweden to do so.
You read that correctly, countries are paying to get rid of a source of fuel they themselves produced so that Sweden can continue to have the energy output they need. You don’t have to be an economist to know that’s one highly enviable energy model.
Why do we insist on being the Capital of Dumb-Ass-istan?