Even though the water is saline, to the best of my understanding, you can convert saltwater into freshwater so why is there a water crisis?
In: Biology
The world is not running out of water, not even close. What is happening is that a lot of parts of the world have grown beyond what their water resources can handle.
Short answer is that’s it’s not profitable yet. And your not just removing salt from water. You’re removing everything else we’ve put in there. So that makes it a little bit harder.
Desalination is very energy intensive and (probably) has it’s own environmental side effects from sucking lots of water (along with marine life/by catch) and emitting a hot briny plume on the other end.
Some places in the world has the poopoo water. Some has other harmful things. Some water sources are toxin chem dumps of big cash money corporations. Just because the water doesn’t have salt, it doesn’t mean it’s free of harmful substance
Money.
People want water to be almost free, so they can pour it on the ground to make plants grow. That’s not compatible with high tech desalination.
Desalination is expensive. It’s orders of magnitude more expensive to get fresh water from desalination than it is to harvest it from natural fresh water sources. It makes it economically unfeasible for many areas of the world that couldn’t afford to build and maintain the plants.
Desalination also doesn’t scale well. Absolutely massive plants are required to generate sufficient water for even a moderately-sized community. It’s not something you can scale up to providing for large regions.
Finally, desalination doesn’t help regions located far inland. The amount of water needed by a typical community would need a monumental water delivery system to get anywhere moderately far from the coast.
In a nutshell, desalinating water is VERY expensive, which means the water produced is very expensive. Who wants to pay $50, for a bottle of water?
Also, the entire process can be very damaging to the environment. It requires a lot of energy, which means more pollution to produce the energy. All of the salt and minerals removed from the water have to be dumped somewhere. And there are other issues, like trying to take in sea water without damaging the life within that water, such as tiny fish eggs.
In addition, the water would be produced on the coasts, but bringing it to areas far inland (where it is often needed most) requires even more money and energy.
And so, basically, desalinating water is simply not the ideal solution to water shortages–it ends up causing more problems than it fixes, which is why it is not being used more.
You skip a whole lot of points if you only intend to desalinize water, which by itself is already a process that takes time, and money. You also need to make sure the water is safe to use, so you might want to filter and/or clean it.
Add to that the sheer volume of water you want to desalinize, and you start to run in to conflicts if you look at f.e. poorer countries.
Hey, just giving my honest opinion here.
I’m no expert, but from what I understand it’s not so much about the a global shortage, but the a shortage in the area that need it. The countries/places that need these desalination facilities can’t afford to create them or don’t have a water resource to desalinate.
Secondly, transportation of water from these facilities would also be enormous in effort, scale, and resources as water is pretty heavy in mass quantity.
Thirdly, they don’t only mean water to drink, they also mean water required to irrigate land to maintain fertility which is a lot more than what you think it could be.
Lastly, and most sadly, different countries would have to work together to solve this global issue, but probably won’t. Hopefully in the future they can though!
I would ask a scientist or expert though for more accurate information. I hope this helps though and thanks for the question!
Desalination takes a lot of energy. Energy costs money. The places without enough water often also have little money. The only places you find desalination plants are rich areas, like the Arabian Gulf oil states. Go just a few miles southwest to Yemen, and there’s no water any more. They used it all up and have no oil to sell for money or burn for energy. So no desalination for them. Cannot has.
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