Urban Water Thread

[M II A II R II K]

Arid Australia Sips Seawater, but at a Cost


July 10, 2010

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/wo....html?_r=2&hpw

In Australia, the world’s driest inhabited continent, early British explorers searching for a source of drinking water scoured the bone-dry interior for a fabled inland sea. One overeager believer even carted a whaleboat hundreds of miles from the coast, but found mostly desert inside. Today, Australians are turning in the opposite direction: the sea.

- In one of the country’s biggest infrastructure projects in its history, Australia’s five largest cities are spending $13.2 billion on desalination plants capable of sucking millions of gallons of seawater from the surrounding oceans every day, removing the salt and yielding potable water. In two years, when the last plant is scheduled to be up and running, Australia’s major cities will draw up to 30 percent of their water from the sea.

- The country is still recovering from its worst drought ever, a decade-long parching that the government says was deepened by climate change. With water shortages looming, other countries, including the United States and China, are also looking to the sea.

- But desalination is also drawing fierce criticism and civic protests. Many homeowners, angry about rising water bills, and environmentalists, wary of the plants’ effect on the climate, call the projects energy-hungry white elephants. Stricter conservation measures, like mandating more efficient washing machines, would easily wring more water from existing supplies, critics say.

- “Big waste of money,” said Helen Meyer, 65, a retired midwife in Tugun, the town where the northeastern state of Queensland opened a $1 billion desalination plant last year. “It cost a lot of money to build, and it uses a lot of power. Australia is a dry country. I think we just have enough water for 22 million people. What are we going to do when we’re up to 36 million?”

- Besides restricting water use and subsidizing the purchase of home water tanks to capture rainwater, the state spent nearly $8 billion to create the country’s most sophisticated water supply network. It fashioned dams and a web of pipelines to connect 18 independent water utilities in a single grid. To “drought proof” the region, it built facilities for manufacturing water, by recycling wastewater, to use for industrial purposes, and by desalinating seawater. Production of desalinated water can be adjusted according to rain levels.

Government-subsidized tanks are used to capture rainwater for home in the Australian state of Queensland, part of the response to recent drought.

[JDRCRASH]

California needs to get the ball rolling. And cloud-seeding along with wastewater treatment should do the trick.

[Spocket]

Originally Posted by JDRCRASH

California needs to get the ball rolling. And cloud-seeding along with wastewater treatment should do the trick.

I've always wondered why we don't make a concerted effort to tap the oceans for water instead of relying solely on a rather limited freshwater supply (and it's limited no matter where one lives really)

As for your comment I highlighted , you're absolutely right about California needing to put a lot more effort into water conservation . One thing though is that cloud seeding is far from a proven technology . Basically , we're not sure if it works or not and , unfortunately , the only evidence in its favour is almost purely anectdotal .

[Doady]

Originally Posted by Spocket

I've always wondered why we don't make a concerted effort to tap the oceans for water instead of relying solely on a rather limited freshwater supply

Desalinization probably requires energy.

[dimondpark]

Originally Posted by JDRCRASH

California needs to get the ball rolling. And cloud-seeding along with wastewater treatment should do the trick.

Well, the drought was declared over last week by Governor Brown. Our Sierra Snow Pack is well over 100% of normal and most of our reservoirs are overflowing at this very moment.

I found it disturbing that they actually had to release fresh water into the sea cause there was nowhere to put it.

We should figure out ways to keep that water. And I love the idea of each individual residence having some sort of on-site water collection unit.

[10023]

Originally Posted by JDRCRASH

California needs to get the ball rolling. And cloud-seeding along with wastewater treatment should do the trick.

Cloud-seeding? So they can induce rainfall in California and cause droughts in the Midwest and Southeast? Are you nuts?

You guys can feel free to filter seawater and your own urine for drinking water. The cloud-seeding this is just never going to happen.

[JDRCRASH]

Originally Posted by 10023

Cloud-seeding? So they can induce rainfall in California and cause droughts in the Midwest and Southeast? Are you nuts?

What the hell are you talking about? How would increasing California's rainfall hurt the Midwest's and Southeast's?

You guys can feel free to filter seawater and your own urine for drinking water. The cloud-seeding this is just never going to happen.

Why not? It's happening in other countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding#Modern_uses

[10023]

Originally Posted by JDRCRASH

What the hell are you talking about? How would increasing California's rainfall hurt the Midwest's and Southeast's?

It's quite simple really. There's a certain amount of moisture in the atmosphere. If it falls on California instead of continuing the move east across the North American continent, then some other place is deprived of rain it would otherwise have gotten. It's just like building a dam upstream and diverting water from a river - there will be less water that gets to the places downstream. And in the case of atmospheric moisture and clouds, we know even less about how it works and what we would likely screw up.

In other words, cloud-seeding will never be used to any meaningful degree for political if not technological reasons.

Originally Posted by JDRCRASH

Why not? It's happening in other countries.

It is being used in very limited ways over very small areas.

China used it to keep rain away from Beijing's Olympic venues during the games, ski resorts use it to induce blizzards (over an area of a few square miles) when they haven't gotten enough snow to open for the season, sometimes it is used to prevent particularly severe weather (if such weather is predicted in time). None of those examples are remotely like solving California's water problem by increasing annual rainfall.

edit: read your link and apparently they're doing larger scale operations in Australia and in a couple of African countries. But then, there's nothing but thousands of miles of ocean to the east of Tasmania (so no harm done really), and Mali and Niger probably aren't winning any accolades from their neighbors. Perhaps if North Carolina experienced a massive drought, they would be allowed to try cloud seeding. California is on the wrong end of the continent.

[Don B.]

Originally Posted by 10023

It's quite simple really. There's a certain amount of moisture in the atmosphere. If it falls on California instead of continuing the move east across the North American continent, then some other place is deprived of rain it would otherwise have gotten. It's just like building a dam upstream and diverting water from a river - there will be less water that gets to the places downstream. And in the case of atmospheric moisture and clouds, we know even less about how it works and what we would likely screw up.

In other words, cloud-seeding will never be used to any meaningful degree for political if not technological reasons.

If I recall correctly, most of the midwest's rainfall comes north from the Gulf of Mexico. The Rockies provide a huge rain shadow and suck out most of the moisture that comes from the Pacific already.

--don

[M II A II R II K]

In the U.S. there is a plant is San Diego.

However to accommodate just California and the desert states only to produce 30% of the water would include up to 3x the number of people in Australia. Maybe the cost per person would go down with greater numbers.

And an increase in water costs may not be such a bad thing. It could prompt people to be more likely to not waste water, an increase in the production of more efficient appliances, and less purchases of plastic bottled water.

[M II A II R II K]

Innovative India water plant opens in Madras


30 July 2010

By Swaminathan Natarajan



Read More: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-10819040

A desalination plant which begins operating in Madras on Saturday will provide some of the cheapest drinking water in India, backers say. They say that the plant will supply 1,000 litres of drinking water for just over $1 and could well be a "template" for other coastal Indian cities. The company behind the plant says that it is the biggest in South Asia. It will provide 100 million litres of water a day to the city by filtering sea water under high pressure. In comparison, the government-run water board supplies about 650 million litres of water to the city's seven million residents.

"We are using the advanced reverse osmosis technology. We are purifying the water by filtering it under high pressure. Unlike other desalination plants we are not boiling the water and as a result we are saving a lot of energy," Natarajan Ganesan, Joint General Manager of the Chennai Water Desalination company told the BBC. Mr Ganesan said that because the plant used "energy recovering technology", electricity consumption was reduced - making water produced there arguably the most competitively priced in India.

"It can be competitive even when compared to supplying water from natural sources like lakes. One has to spend lot of money on transport water from lakes," he said. The plant will process 237 million litres of sea water per day. An initial treatment will remove solids present in the water, before it is passed through a membrane under high pressure. The plant - which cost $140m - is the joint venture between an Indian company IVRCL and Befessa of Spain. It is built under the "deboot" system - design, build, own, operate and transfer.

[M II A II R II K]

Desalinization Projects Promoted By Water Shortages


July 31, 2010

By: Richard Lyon

Read More: http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/62877

- I live in California where water wars have shaped the history of the state and they have never come to an end. A growing population of over 40 M is straining what have always been limited and unpredictable water resources. There is a vast infrastructure that moves water hundreds of miles from the mountains of the north to the semiarid regions of the south. The amount of water that is being taken from rivers has reached the limit of environmental laws. The Middle East and Australia are other areas that have been historically worried about water. However, other places that we think of as having wet climates are facing increasing water problems.

- There are a variety of approaches to these problems being explored. One that is being resorted to with increasing frequency is desalinization, taking salt water and processing it to make it useable as fresh water. The traditional method of accomplishing this is distillation. That requires boiling the water and condensing the steam back into a liquid form. It’s the same method as a moonshine still. Of course the process of heating large amounts of water uses large amounts of energy.

- There are however, new developments that offer a somewhat more optimistic prospect. There are two under development in California that have promise. One in the city of Carlsbad will be a cogeneration facility and another in Monterrey will use methane gas from the city landfill.

- Cogeneration is a process that holds much prospect for reducing our total energy demand. Most of our existing methods of producing electrical energy are very inefficient. A typical generating plant only converts about 33-50% of the energy used to electricity. The rest is discharged as heat. In most case that is simply discharged into the atmosphere. The energy of that heat can be used for other purposes such as heating buildings or boiling water. Cogeneration is likely to be one of the major approaches to reducing our energy demand.

- There are newer desalinization technologies in the works. Reverse osmosis desalinization is presently in use. It involves pumping salt water through a series of membranes that filter out the salts. While this uses less energy than distillation, the pumping still uses a lot of energy. Two technologies that are under development are forward osmosis and low temperature thermal desalinization. Forward osmosis is a mix of membrane and thermal purification, using a solution of removable solutes that draws water towards it. The low temperature process works by placing the salt water in a partial vacuum so that it will boil at a lower temperature.

[M II A II R II K]

Arid El Paso makes every drop count


10 Aug 2010

By Marie "Louie" Gilot

Read More: http://www.grist.org/article/2010-08...of-water-count

El Paso is the Wild West. Dust storms, scorching temperatures, and 9 meager inches of rain a year (New York gets 43). A border town at the very end of Texas and in the middle of the Chihuahuan desert, El Paso is a great setting for a cowboy movie, but the harsh landscape makes the future uncertain for this growing city of 600,000 people. In 1979, a study warned El Pasoans that if they continued to dip freely into their underground aquifer, it could run out of fresh water by 2030. The town turned that bleak prognostication around when it made water conservation a priority 20 years ago, and became a national model in the process

Today, El Paso is a city that's hyper conscious of water. The use of low-water plants and crushed rocks in landscaping -- a practice known as xeriscaping -- is the norm. Neighbors rat out neighbors if they see water runoff in the streets. And water news gets front-page treatment in the local press. But that wasn't always the case. Twenty years ago, El Pasoans were blissfully wasting water. Lavish lawns were everywhere and the Hueco Bolson, the aquifer that provided 90 percent of El Paso's water, was being depleted by a foot and a half per year. Then, in 1991, the El Paso Water Utilities board put together a long-term plan. The highest priority was a conservation program which included a mix of strategies -- some compulsory, some incentive-based, and some voluntary -- including:

* A tiered water rate structure that punishes heavy users.

* A landscaping ordinance limiting lawns to no more than 50 percent of landscaping space.

* A watering ordinance that bans residential watering on Monday, and between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. during the summer. The ordinance allows even-numbered addresses to water on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, odd-numbered addresses on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. No water is ever allowed to flow into the street.

* A series of rebates which include $1 back for every square foot of turf replaced; $100 to switch to a front-loading washing machine; free low-flow shower heads; and rebates for low-flow toilets and to change from swamp coolers to refrigerated air units.

* Education programs including school visits by "Willie the water drop," and recent construction of the Tech2O education center.

El Paso homeowners conserve water by using crushed rocks and native, low-water plants (such as cacti) for landscaping, a practice known as xeriscaping. El Paso also has a city ordinance to limit turf use to no more than 50 percent of a house’s landscaping space. Photo: Marie Gilot

[HooverDam]

^Xeriscaping is terrific and needs to be done more throughout the SW but it needs to be done correctly. I was recently at a City Meeting here in Phoenix and someone from the water department said that most local Xeriscaped yards use about as much water as grassy irrigated yards because people are over watering. Most folks aren't used to just how little water the desert plants can survive on and thus end up wasting it.

60% of the water use in Phoenix goes to outdoor landscaping and a lot of that we're currently wasting with outdated techniques. Hopefully in the near future things like grey water systems, smart irrigation controllers, etc. will be able to reduce that waste. That would help keep the amount of water used steady while population increases.

[Xing]

Originally Posted by M II A II R II K

Arid El Paso makes every drop count


10 Aug 2010

By Marie "Louie" Gilot

Read More: http://www.grist.org/article/2010-08...of-water-count






El Paso homeowners conserve water by using crushed rocks and native, low-water plants (such as cacti) for landscaping, a practice known as xeriscaping. El Paso also has a city ordinance to limit turf use to no more than 50 percent of a house’s landscaping space. Photo: Marie Gilot

Looks like my grandparent's front lawn. A lot of people there have rock lawns with cacti and palm trees.

[M II A II R II K]

San Diego already has a few desalination plants.

[futuresooner]

ATTN: State of Florida.

Tampa has a desal plant, and NE FL is planning for two or three, but the whole state really needs to get this on the fast track and realize the Floridan Aquifer only has a few decades left and we've already passed the tipping point. This especially goes for Central Florida.

[AusHou]

Originally Posted by futuresooner

ATTN: State of Florida.

Tampa has a desal plant, and NE FL is planning for two or three, but the whole state really needs to get this on the fast track and realize the Floridan Aquifer only has a few decades left and we've already passed the tipping point. This especially goes for Central Florida.

Good point. I've noticed that in a lot of Florida, the soil is so sandy that the grass and other plants dry out very quickly after even a heavy rain. So people water like crazy there. At least that's my impression from visiting the state.

[bobdreamz]

Originally Posted by NewTex

Good point. I've noticed that in a lot of Florida, the soil is so sandy that the grass and other plants dry out very quickly after even a heavy rain. So people water like crazy there. At least that's my impression from visiting the state.

Well the water battle seems to be more of a issue in the Panhandle of Florida with Georgia in the Apalachicola Basin than the rest of the state. South Florida's water supply is kept in Lake Okechobee and in conservation areas sandwiched in between the Everglades and the urban areas on the coast. Central Florida also has a huge amount of lakes and retention ponds. Florida gets a hell of a lot of rain during the summer months too.

[M II A II R II K]

The Colorado River Runs Dry


By Sarah Zielinski

Read More: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/scienc...-Runs-Dry.html

From its source high in the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado River channels water south nearly 1,500 miles, over falls, through deserts and canyons, to the lush wetlands of a vast delta in Mexico and into the Gulf of California. That is, it did so for six million years. Then, beginning in the 1920s, Western states began divvying up the Colorado’s water, building dams and diverting the flow hundreds of miles, to Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and other fast-growing cities. The river now serves 30 million people in seven U.S. states and Mexico, with 70 percent or more of its water siphoned off to irrigate 3.5 million acres of cropland.

- The river has been running especially low for the past decade, as drought has gripped the Southwest. It still tumbles through the Grand Canyon, much to the delight of rafters and other visitors. And boaters still roar across Nevada and Arizona’s Lake Mead, 110 miles long and formed by the Hoover Dam. But at the lake’s edge they can see lines in the rock walls, distinct as bathtub rings, showing the water level far lower than it once was—some 130 feet lower, as it happens, since 2000. Water resource officials say some of the reservoirs fed by the river will never be full again.

- Other regions—the Mediterranean, southern Africa, parts of South America and Asia—also face fresh-water shortages, perhaps outright crises. In the Andes Mountains of South America, glaciers are melting so quickly that millions of people in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador are expected to lose a major source of fresh water by 2020. In southwestern Australia, which is in the midst of its worst drought in 750 years, fresh water is so scarce the city of Perth is building plants to remove the salt from seawater. More than one billion people around the world now live in water-stressed regions, according to the World Health Organization, a number that is expected to double by 2050, when an estimated nine billion people will inhabit the planet.

- Mulroy is also general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which serves two million people in greater Las Vegas. The city is one of the largest in the Colorado River basin, but its share of the river is relatively small; when officials allocated the Colorado’s water to different states in 1922, no one expected so many people to be living in the Nevada desert. So Nevadans have gotten used to coping with limitations. They can’t water their yards or wash their cars whenever they like; communities follow strict watering schedules. The water authority pays homeowners to replace water-gulping lawns with rocks and drought-tolerant plants. Golf courses adhere to water restrictions. Almost all wastewater is reused or returned to the Colorado River.