I realize that the cost of obtaining and cleaning fresh water will vary greatly from location to location, however this is my thought:
There should never be a drought anywhere. There's plenty of water on the planet, however most of it has salt in it. The Saudi's desalinate just about all of their water. We could turn the entire planet into a green, fertile garden if we wanted to....It would just cost a lot. I realize that this is very cost prohibitive, but I'm just wondering about it.
We could pump it over (or through) the rocky mountains, into North Africa, etc.
Your thoughts???
2006-09-11 21:23:33 · 5 answers · asked by Ender 6 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Earth Sciences & Geology
I run a 75 unit apartment complex in St Thomas, Virgin Islands. We are currently putting in a 1,000,000 gallons a year de-sal plant. It measure 6 feet by 6 feet by 5 feet and makes about 3 gallons a minute, so we have to run it about 200 days a year.
The cost per gallon, including electricity at .30 a kWh, ( which is about 3 times the rate in the continental US) will be 1.1 cents a gallon.
Can humans produce fresh water at a scale big enough to run cities countries civilizations? Sure. As was mentioned the Saudis have huge de-sal plants making life and agriculture possible in the Arabian peninsular; the Israelis have been doing it for 40 years.
2006-09-15 03:35:08 · answer #1 · answered by yankee_sailor 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Why not...the atmosphere does it for free daily.
However, combatting a spreading desert...doesn't that strike you as ultimately doomed? If the goal is to counteract the very transition of the planet, and the expense of time and money is so great, couldn't there be a better priority? Not meaning to be crude, but it's a bit like polishing a turd. It *can* be done with sufficient resources, but does the end justify the means and the expense? What about taking that expense and manpower and relocate to a more fertile area?
The whole "don't fool with mother nature" generally carries a grain of truth and substance behind it. Rather than swimming upstream against nature by fighting drought, perhaps putting the solar power to use might be a more practical use of the resources. If the desert is barren, there's little ecological impact of a ginormous solar array...be it photovoltaic or perhaps concentrated solar steam turbines. Harness vs. counteract...sound reasonable?
2006-09-12 04:34:26 · answer #2 · answered by Trid 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
It's insanely expensive. For a class project in chemical engineering I designed a desalination plant, and it costs a lot to build, and then it's a couple orders of magnitude more expensive than surface water and about an order of magnitude more expensive than ground water. And that price is only going to rise as oil gets more expensive since it takes a lot of energy to do.
So no, it's not feasible to use desalination plants anywhere except when you have a really good reason to bring a lot of people into the desert (like pumping oil, for example).
2006-09-12 04:33:46 · answer #3 · answered by Sinai 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
The Rocky Mountains are in America which is not connected to Africa...it's where Coors Light comes from Rocky Mountain Fresh!
2006-09-12 04:30:02 · answer #4 · answered by Skinny 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
about $2.00 (S)
2006-09-12 04:29:00 · answer #5 · answered by tigger19 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋