Water: Where will it come from in 2050?

[Monomer]

I was doing some searching on desalination, and discovered there is a desalination plant on Kangaroo Island built because the Penneshaw community had no drinking water available. It sounds like the plant has been there for a while.

 

Desalination - SA Water

 

 

Nanoparticles make desalination more energy efficient and less expensive:

ScienceDaily: Engineers Develop Revolutionary Nanotech Water Desalination Membrane

[Michaelangelica]

The biggest worry with Lake Erie is how to put it out if it catches fire again.

Bill

:)

You are kidding are you not?

 

What a tragedy that such a beautiful part of the planet can be so degraded.

It diminishes all of us.

[Buffy]

Unfortunately the darn tree-hugging liberals won't let us dump the flammable chemicals into the lake any more that would allow this glorious conflagration to happen ever again... :shocked:

 

Pollution is an illusion,

Buffy

[HydrogenBond]

The biggest untapped source of fresh water is Antartica. It is a little frozen at the moment but could be harvested and melted in ships during ocean transit. With bottled water at $1/liter or more, it may actually be cost effective to tap into this pristine source once a year. This water could probally dominate the fancy drinking water market.

[TheBigDog]

:shocked:

You are kidding are you not?

 

What a tragedy that such a beautiful part of the planet can be so degraded.

It diminishes all of us.

I am half kidding. The Cuyahoga River burned several times up until 1969 or so, but it is infinitely cleaner now. The city of Cleveland will never live it down no matter how much it improves, so they celebrate it instead.

 

Great Lakes Brewing Company Burning River Fest

Great Lakes Brewing Company, Cleveland, Ohio

 

Nothing like a green themed beer festival. I like their Elliot Ness Amber Lager myself (on the rate occasion that I have a beer).

 

Bill

[Michaelangelica]

The biggest untapped source of fresh water is Antartica. It is a little frozen at the moment but could be harvested and melted in ships during ocean transit. With bottled water at $1/liter or more, it may actually be cost effective to tap into this pristine source once a year. This water could probally dominate the fancy drinking water market.

It is fast melting so get there quick.

You need to see how difficult it is to get to Antarctica. The waves and sea are humongous and cold. God knows how Captain cook survived.

 

We need to keep the Japaneses refueling tankers out of the area ( for the whale fleet). There was a near disaster this year.

 

The West Coast of Tasmania has some of the purest water and most pristine environments in the world.

The "roaring forties" dump meters of pristine water there. Someone was bottling it at one stage.

 

In Oz dentists are upset by bottled water and want to add fluoride to it.

[Michaelangelica]

ForOzzies this is coming up

(for others a transcript usually follows within a week)

Catalyst > Coming up email . print

Ground Water, The last freshwater porpoise, Schizophrenia – Living in the dark, Meeting Ian Frazer

 

Thursday, 15 March 2007

 

Ground Water - Every drop counts

 

Everyday, millions of thirsty city-dwellers don’t give a second thought to popping into their kitchen and filling up a glass with water from the tap.

 

But, with rain becoming scarce and our dams evaporating at an alarming rate, this precious resource is getting harder and harder to find.

 

The city of Perth has long relied upon underground aquifers to supply the majority of its drinking water. And now, in Sydney, plans are also underway to tap the potential of groundwater.

 

But how much water will these subterranean reserves provide? And can they be managed sustainably?

 

“Around the world about 97% of drinkable water supplies are groundwater they’re not water from dams or water from rivers”, says Dr Ian Acworth of (TITLE). Dr. Acworth believes Australia still has a lot to learn. “Groundwater and surface water have been mismanaged in the past quite severely as much as they’ve been separated we really have to manage and understand the situation far better”.

 

In a country that has the highest water use per capita than any other country in the world, all eyes are looking underground in a bid to relieve the water crisis.

 

Maryanne Demasi goes in search of the answers.

 

Reporter: Maryanne Demasi

Producer: Susan Lambert

Researcher: Anja Taylor

Bit of an amazing figure on ground water.

Locally we have given much of ours to Coca Cola.

[Michaelangelica]

February 22, 2007

New Wave-Pump Technology Hits the Water

Minneapolis, Minnesota [RenewableEnergyAccess.com]

 

A new pump system designed to turn salt water into fresh water when combined with desalination systems -- and produce clean renewable energy when combined with hydroelectric systems -- is currently being tested in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Texas coast.

 

"Going forward, we're seeking actual ocean environments where we can place a wave-farm test field involving 14 to 200 SEADOG wave pumps."

 

-- Mark A. Thomas, Independent Natural Resources Inc., CEO

To create hydroelectricity, the SEADOG ocean-wave pump captures energy from ocean swells or waves to pump seawater to a land-based holding area or water tower, where the water can be returned to the ocean through hydroelectric turbines.

 

In addition, because the device pumps water to a reservoir, it can store salt water or desalinated fresh water in the form of potential energy to generate power on demand, even if the current wave regime during a particular period is too low to generate power.

 

Developed by Minnesota-based energy technology company Independent Natural Resources Inc. (INRI), preliminary estimates based on SEADOG test results suggest that 1 square mile field of SEADOG pumps could generate anywhere from 50 megawatts to more than 1,500 megawatts (MW) of hydropower on average, depending on the wave regime.

. . .

The lack of sufficient fresh water is a growing concern in many regions of the world and seawater desalination is increasingly essential.

The state of Texas alone has more than 100 desalination plants.

Energy consumption is significant in desalination, sometimes accounting for as much as one-third of the operating cost of desalinated water.

 

New Wave-Pump Technology Hits the Water

[freeztar]

The biggest untapped source of fresh water is Antartica. It is a little frozen at the moment but could be harvested and melted in ships during ocean transit. With bottled water at $1/liter or more, it may actually be cost effective to tap into this pristine source once a year. This water could probally dominate the fancy drinking water market.

 

Too late!

 

On Tap Magazine - Spring 2002

Have a Glass of Iceberg with Dinner

 

If you’re one of the millions of people who buy bottled water, be on the lookout for the latest craze: iceberg water. In a March 2002 Atlantic Monthly article titled “The Iceberg Wars,” Wayne Curtis reports on the latest development in bottled water. “Although commercial harvesting began only in the past decade,” he writes, “iceberg products are rapidly evolving from a novelty to a commodity, and the business is gearing up for greater industrialization.” Plans include a floating plant that will both “harvest” the icebergs and bottle the water from them while at sea.

 

The current process of harvesting icebergs, developed by Iceberg Industries, involves a renovated barge with a large crane and an eight-claw grapple. Spotter planes identify icebergs that have drifted into coves, protected from the large ocean swells. Then, the barge, a former Great Lakes molasses ship, ties up to the iceberg and begins taking chunks out of it with the grapple. When the barge is loaded to its 1,200-ton capacity, it returns to the firm’s storage facility in Newfoundland, Canada. The harvesting season lasts from April through November.

 

Industry leaders tout the water’s purity. “Water in these icebergs fell on Greenland as snow 10,000 or more years ago and has been bound up in glaciers ever since, safely sequestered from modern contaminants,” writes Curtis about the industry’s assertions. Spring water, by comparison, is filtered naturally, while distilled water is mechanically processed. “A lot of people want pure water and they’ll pay the price,” says Gary Pollack, president of Canadian Iceberg Vodka Corporation in the article. “It’s great that a large inland city can clean its drinking water and strip out impurities. But 10 million people pee in it on a daily basis. And you know what? Nobody peed in mine. Isn’t that worth an extra 10 cents a bottle?”

[Michaelangelica]

Aye, true enough.

Biomagnification of the toxins is much worse than a diluted-polluted water source. (ie, eating fish from Lake Eerie is much worse than drinking the surface water, by an EXTREME magnitude)

I have just read that many of the chemicals are estrogenic, mimic this hormone, cause many problems in males and promote estrogenic-sensitive cancers in women

 

World Water Day: 1 BILLION PEOPLE Lack Access to Clean Drinking Water

Sustainable Waters Program - World Water Day 2007: Water Scarcity - 1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water

 

Every eight seconds, a young child dies from lack of water or a waterborne disease. That's the same as a 747 jetliner full of kids going down every hour. The majority of water-related diseases are linked to what humans are doing to our land and water.

 

A home desalinator

AVIVA PURE

The unit is quite small. For example, a 10,000 litre per day unit is about 1.3m long, 0.4m wide and 0.8m high, draws only 2200 Watts (2.2kWh)and runs on single or three-phase power. It fits easily into a shed corner and is cheap to run. Most of our desalinators typically use only about 1.5Kw for 1,000 litres of fresh water. The cost of running one of our desalinators can be as low as $0.22 per 1,000 litres of clean, fresh water.

 

 

 

We install your AVIVA PURE Fresh Water desalinator in the corner of a garden shed or garage. We set it up to run on automatic mode, so it shuts off when your rainwater tanks are full, and you simply leave it on to produce fresh water every day of the year. The AVIVA PURE monthly service means we visit you every month to service and maintain your AVIVA PURE Desalinator. This means that you can relax knowing that your AVIVA PURE Desalinator will continue to run day and night, delivering the purest water you have ever tasted.

 

We have built a number of safety features into your AVIVA PURE Fresh Water Unit, which reduces the possibility of damage from low or high pressure water events. By coupling your bore pump to a pressure or float switch and an outlet ball valve or float switch at the storage tank, you save money because your bore pump isn’t running full-time. We can also run an overflow pipe from your fresh water tank to another tank or dam.

[Michaelangelica]

Happy World Water Day:bdayparty:

 

World Water Day - 22nd March 2007

 

Water for Life

 

 

Cactus goo purifies water

 

Aimee Cunningham

 

From Washington, D.C., at a meeting of the American Chemical Society

 

Many Mexican communities have drinking water laced with unsafe levels of arsenic and unappealing amounts of sand and other solids. To make the water cleaner, Norma Alcantar, a chemical engineer at the University of South Florida in Tampa and her colleagues are working on an environmentally benign filtering process based on a plant found all over Mexico: the nopal cactus or prickly pear.

 

a6539_1493.jpg

 

WATER FILTER. This nopal cactus could help Mexican communities purify drinking water.

Alcantar

 

Latin American communities once used the cactus (Opuntia ficus indica) to filter water, says Alcantar. After boiling the edible plant, they dumped the pot water into a separate vessel containing drinking water, a practice that caused gritty particles to settle to the bottom. But this is "knowledge that is almost gone" in Mexican homes, she says.

 

Alcantar and her group suspected that the nopal could provide a solution for Mexican villages with contaminated groundwater.

Cactus goo purifies water: Science News Online, Sept. 17, 2005

[Larv]

I wonder how soon icebergs will be seen as a freshwater resource and humans start towing them up or down from the poles to serve that purpose in critical areas.

 

—Larv

[TheBigDog]

I wonder how soon icebergs will be seen as a freshwater resource and humans start towing them up or down from the poles to serve that purpose in critical areas.

 

—Larv

Brewter's Millions?

[freeztar]

I wonder how soon icebergs will be seen as a freshwater resource and humans start towing them up or down from the poles to serve that purpose in critical areas.

 

—Larv

 

Well the chiselers are already at work in the name of....vodka :hihi:

 

Cecil Stockley has run Twillingate Island Boat Tours in the ocean region known as Iceberg Alley for 20 years.

 

And too many times his tours have been interrupted with gunshots or chainsaws as harvesters try to break a berg into manageable pieces, he said.

 

"People come from all parts of the world to see an iceberg, and the last thing they want to see is somebody out there blasting it with a water cannon or shelling it so they can make vodka," he says.

 

Stockley said he has no problem with Iceberg Products making use of the ice, but asks that they do so offshore and gather ice that has calved off already.

 

"Once it comes off the berg it's free game for them to get their ice," he said. "There's lots of ice around here."

 

The berg battle prompted one online commentator to suggest that free sample bottles of vodka could dampen the controversy.

 

"I say if it creates jobs let them go ahead," wrote another visitor to the Newfoundland magazine, The Downhomer. "You can't recycle them. (They're) going to melt anyway."

CTV.ca | Squabble erupts over Nfld. iceberg harvesting

 

May your vodka be more pure than your waterborne infections! Cheers!

;)

[Michaelangelica]

I thought vodka came from potatoes not icebergs?

 

 

World's mighty rivers on endangered list | Science & nature | The Australian

This story is from The Times

World's mighty rivers on endangered list

 

* Lewis Smith, Environment reporter

* March 20, 2007

 

THE Murray-Darling and nine other mighty rivers that inspired religions, civilisations and explorers are dying because of stresses put on them by mankind, the WWF said in a report published today.

 

Each of the 10 river systems is beset by man-made problems, including water being siphoned off, dams destroying ecosystems and pollution.

 

The other nine endangered river basins are said to be the Danube, Yangtze, Rio Grande, Salween, Nile, Indus, Ganges, Plata and Mekong.

 

They flow across six continents and the damage threatens the lives of people and wildlife, the WWF says.

 

About 41 per cent of the world’s population live in threatened river systems, and of the 10,000 species of freshwater animals and plants at least 20 per cent are already extinct.

 

“In the last 50 years we have altered ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any other period in history,” the report states. “Physical alteration, habitat loss and degradation, water extraction, overexploitation, pollution, and the introduction of invasive species threaten the planet’s freshwater ecosystems.”

 

Most river basins face multiple threats, and to draw up a list of the ten most endangered, the conservation charity used published reports and the judgment of its own experts. The list comprises river systems that have already suffered extensive damage and freshwater networks likely to be markedly changed over the next decade.

 

Australia’s Murray and Darling river system is under pressure from introduced species that are outcompeting native fish, which have suffered 90 per cent reductions in numbers in the past two centuries.

 

Central Europe's the Danube has already been severely damaged, having lost 80 per cent of its wetlands and floodplains.

 

In Asia, the Salween is one of only 21 of the world’s 177 longest rivers that still run freely from source to the sea. However, 16 large dams are planned for the river, and the alteration in the landscape could prove disastrous for wildlife.

 

Water extraction for agriculture, industry and domestic use is such a problem for the Rio Grande and the Ganges that there are shortages farther downstream, flow levels having fallen sharply.

 

Flow in the Ganges and the Indus is expected to be further reduced because of the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers, a trend attributed to global warming. “With climate warming, many glaciers will no longer exist to moderate the flow of these rivers,” the report says.

 

Overfishing is cited as another serious problem for rivers, notably the Mekong, which drains an area in Asia twice the size of Germany.

 

Similarly, pollution from rapid economic development is blamed for the deterioration of the Yangtze. “The Yangtze used to be so clear that you could see a pen sink to the bottom. Now it has become so dirty that it is not fit for drinking,” the report says.

 

The WWF called on governments and businesses to take better care of their water supplies to ensure that they remain sustainable resources for people and wildlife.

 

David Tickner, head of the organisation’s freshwater program, said: “Unabated development is jeopardising nature’s ability to meet our growing demands. The world is facing a massive freshwater crisis, which has the potential to be every bit as devastating as climate change.

 

“Conservation of rivers and wetlands and security of water flows must be seen as part and parcel of national security, health and economic success.

”

[Michaelangelica]

I thought vodka came from potatoes not icebergs?

 

 

World's mighty rivers on endangered list | Science & nature | The Australian

This story is from The Times

World's mighty rivers on endangered list

 

* Lewis Smith, Environment reporter

* March 20, 2007

 

THE Murray-Darling and nine other mighty rivers that inspired religions, civilisations and explorers are dying because of stresses put on them by mankind, the WWF said in a report published today.

 

Each of the 10 river systems is beset by man-made problems, including water being siphoned off, dams destroying ecosystems and pollution.

 

The other nine endangered river basins are said to be the Danube, Yangtze, Rio Grande, Salween, Nile, Indus, Ganges, Plata and Mekong.

 

They flow across six continents and the damage threatens the lives of people and wildlife, the WWF says.

 

About 41 per cent of the world’s population live in threatened river systems, and of the 10,000 species of freshwater animals and plants at least 20 per cent are already extinct.

 

“In the last 50 years we have altered ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any other period in history,” the report states. “Physical alteration, habitat loss and degradation, water extraction, overexploitation, pollution, and the introduction of invasive species threaten the planet’s freshwater ecosystems.”

 

Most river basins face multiple threats, and to draw up a list of the ten most endangered, the conservation charity used published reports and the judgment of its own experts. The list comprises river systems that have already suffered extensive damage and freshwater networks likely to be markedly changed over the next decade.

 

Australia’s Murray and Darling river system is under pressure from introduced species that are outcompeting native fish, which have suffered 90 per cent reductions in numbers in the past two centuries.

 

Central Europe's the Danube has already been severely damaged, having lost 80 per cent of its wetlands and floodplains.

 

In Asia, the Salween is one of only 21 of the world’s 177 longest rivers that still run freely from source to the sea. However, 16 large dams are planned for the river, and the alteration in the landscape could prove disastrous for wildlife.

 

Water extraction for agriculture, industry and domestic use is such a problem for the Rio Grande and the Ganges that there are shortages farther downstream, flow levels having fallen sharply.

 

Flow in the Ganges and the Indus is expected to be further reduced because of the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers, a trend attributed to global warming. “With climate warming, many glaciers will no longer exist to moderate the flow of these rivers,” the report says.

 

Overfishing is cited as another serious problem for rivers, notably the Mekong, which drains an area in Asia twice the size of Germany.

 

Similarly, pollution from rapid economic development is blamed for the deterioration of the Yangtze. “The Yangtze used to be so clear that you could see a pen sink to the bottom. Now it has become so dirty that it is not fit for drinking,” the report says.

 

The WWF called on governments and businesses to take better care of their water supplies to ensure that they remain sustainable resources for people and wildlife.

 

David Tickner, head of the organisation’s freshwater program, said: “Unabated development is jeopardising nature’s ability to meet our growing demands. The world is facing a massive freshwater crisis, which has the potential to be every bit as devastating as climate change.

 

“Conservation of rivers and wetlands and security of water flows must be seen as part and parcel of national security, health and economic success.

”

[Monomer]

Some info on how the CSIRO's tackling the water issue:

 

There are many opportunities to improve water use efficiency and harvest large volumes of wastewater and stormwater that currently enter the ocean and waterways. However, technical, regulatory, public health and perception constraints limit current applications.

 

CSIRO, the Water Corporation and a number of organisations are working together to investigate improvements in the quality of reclaimed water using managed aquifer recharge.

 

PDF: http://www.csiro.au/files/files/p3tn.pdf

 

 

Water supplies in urban and industrial environments are prone to biological, chemical and radiological contaminants which can affect supplies for drinking water and irrigation.

 

CSIRO’s research and findings have significantly improved the process and design of remediation systems using air sparging and multiphase extraction, resulting in multi-million dollar operational savings for industry. In addition, the reduced risk to human health and improved protection of the environment is of great benefit.

 

Improving processes for flushing contaminants from groundwater (Achievement)

 

 

Water availability across Australia is being mapped in research that will help farmers and water managers prepare for drought, and use natural resources both productively and sustainably.

 

The Australian Water Availability Project (Profile - Project)