As we creep inexorably toward the one-year mark without meaningful rainfall (how mind-boggling is that, anyway?), ideas that were once bandied about in sci-fi mode now start to take on some semblance of credibility. Like, for example, the idea that we have plenty of water available to Texas, it’s just a bit on the salty side. So, let’s build some big honkin’ desalination plants like Saudi Arabia has and we can solve a bunch of our water shortage issues.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the reality is depressingly ironic. As this Reuters article<\/a> points out, the Saudis are starting to worry more about peak water than peak oil, and the cost of desalination is starting to make a significant dent in their oil-derived riches.<\/p>\n It’s an understatement to say that the Saudis are ginning out a lot of desalinated water. The quoted figure of 3.36 million cubic meters per day equates to almost 900 million gallons per day, enough to supply the equivalent of five cities the size of Midland with their entire water usage. The problem is the expense of producing that water. Using today’s currency exchange rate, it’s costing almost $2.4 million per day to make the water, and that doesn’t include the cost of transporting it.<\/p>\n Of course, the Saudis are hit with a “double dip,” as they’re using oil and gas that they would otherwise have been selling to us to produce the water. The article estimates that about half the cost of desalination is energy-related.<\/p>\n Desalination is still something that needs to be considered as a way of mitigating the effects of our extreme drought, but it’s not only a long-term solution, but also an expensive one. On the other hand, all the cheap alternatives are gone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As we creep inexorably toward the one-year mark without meaningful rainfall (how mind-boggling is that, anyway?), ideas that were once bandied about in sci-fi mode now start to take on some semblance of credibility. Like, for example, the idea that we have plenty of water available to Texas, it’s just a bit on the salty… Continue reading Desalination a solution for our water woes? Uh, not so fast…<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,33,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-science","category-society-culture","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8315,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677\/revisions\/8315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}