Every few years, you hear about some new revolution in the process, but nothing much after. Why is that? Is it very hard to scale up or…?
Also, is it going to become more viable as fresh water is becoming more scarce?
Thank you in advance.
Thank you all. So it was basically what I thought. It’s not hard to do, but it is not really feasible due to many factors.
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Desalination itself is super easy. Take salt water, evaporate and recondense it to separate the salt and other minerals/etc from the water. You can do it yourself on a stovetop or a campfire.
The problem is that there’s no way to scale it easy for the massive demands of human use (personal, industrial, and agriculture). It takes a decent amount of energy to heat up water, and you need to do something with all of the salt you’ve got left over – no matter where you dump it, you’re going to cause environmental problems. Salt is also corrosive so there’s longevity problems with equipment/piping/etc but those are relatively minor problems with partial solutions. You can’t ignore physics, or just make giant piles of salt disappear.
Desalination isn’t particularly hard at a small scale.
The issues with desalination – the area around the plant gets saltier than the rest of the ocean (you have to dump that excess salt somewhere,) which kills all the marine life in the vicinity of the plant. Also, humans need a ton of water, so the plants need to be very large to fulfill all the domestic demand. And since the plants are at sea level, you need large pumps to get all that desalinated water into pressurized pipes – which means you need a lot of power.
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