Discussion on:

Ground zero in the energy-water nexus

They must make large water reservoirs like lakes, and plant so many plant when they can. Create a place where good people want to visit, maybe then their water problems start solving. But don't forget the culture........Zero zero is good stuff....

THe area is a desert for a reason. You can't just make a lake and expect it to stay there with no way to replenish it. And with no water there will be few animals.

Think further, water attracts water.. If you plant enough life around..... Maybe sealevel must rise a mile then you understand.

In arid India, the government build canals to bring water to various settlements, including an artificial lake. So someone did try. For a number of these canals, the water evaporated before it arrived at its destination.

In Abu Dubai, the situation is even worse.

The key, if you know anything about permaculture, is not the water, but the plants. If you can grow plants that will create a microclime that traps water, in effect, an artificial oasis, then you could keep water on the surface. However, In Abu Dubai, that's still incredibly difficult.

Abu Dhabi lies in the middle of a vast stretch of salt flats that are barely above the level of the Persian Gulf. Any sea level rise will flood the entire city. Conversely, pumping out ground water will cause land subsidence, also flooding the city. together, they'll create a new Netherlands of the Desert.

Abu Dhabi's future requires three things; draconian population control, draconian water conservation, and development of energy efficient solar distillation factories.

Perhaps the choice is bigger

- Solar/Nuclear generated electricity to drive mass desalination
- De-population to sustainable levels
- A global push back on the Sahara, aspiring to re-forest and re-agriculture the land, changing the climate positively for the entire world. One for Bill Gates to seed capital it with $10bn. it might even occupy near destitute people otherwise courted by Radical Moslem nutters into new forms of sustainable living, supported by good governance.

The highest consumptive use of fresh water is wet cooling at conventional thermal power plants (coal and nuclear) -- more than lawns in the desert and any other consumptive uses where consumer conservation might make a difference, This elephant in the room somehow gets ignored when the water-energy nexus gets discussed.

Water consumption for power generation is indeed very high at wet-cooled plants, as I detailed at length in my previous article on the energy-water nexus.

Something I meant to mention but never got around to here in this article is that the 100 MW Shams 1 CSP plant in Abu Dhabi is dry-cooled, using the biggest radiator I've ever seen. It's quite a marvel to see.

For a start, all of the grey water from those high rises could be used for irrigation, saving the need to treat it and the potable water typically used for irrigation.

Mr. Nelder mentioned that currently desalination is done via cogeneration from natural gas electric plants. What's the desalination process? Do they evaporate the water using waste heat or do they use the power for osmosis or both? When they switch to renewables, is the plan to use osmosis instead of evaporation?

One nice thing about using renewables to power osmosis is that nightfall would be less of a problem with solar. Osmosis can be turned on and off quickly with little loss, and of course extra fresh water produced during the day can be stored for use during the night. This means the usual problem with renewables and electric storage goes away. On the downside, the cost of keeping desalination plants idle during the night might be too expensive. What are the prospects for wind power in Abu Dhabi?

...than just water.

Their mere existence at the scale that they exist today is very, very expensive. The long-term solutions to their problems are even more expensive. The only reason that these populations get to exist at anything beyond a 7th-century standard of living, much less their their current scale is due to the income provided by world-wide oil consumption.

What is going to happen when the rest of the world finally frees itself from the "addiction to oil"? What are these people going to do then?

It all depends on how fast things happen. If it's quickly they'll just die. If it happens over and extended time their will be mass migrations of non-sustainable populations world wide to areas with more resources. Translated, that means they're coming for the water - and the food that you think of as "yours." The future is described by a thirst and a hunger that this planet has never known - unless we get back to sustainable population levels before we reach catastrophic tipping points - if we haven't already.

Although, I'd doubt they'd just "die". More likely, it would be the kickoff to a new world war. They aren't going to go quietly.

This is another reason why "managed" solutions to energy are more-than-likely a big mistake. The carbon regulation crowd would love it if we could just turn it off overnight. That would be disastrous not only for the world's consumers, but even more so than these producing countries that produce little else. It will take decades, if not a century to adjust in a stable manner.

John,

No thinking member of the "carbon regulation crowd" imagines that could happen, so why the bullet aimed at us? Markets are near instant short term solutions that can't handle long term problems without awful overshoot from instant scarcity when the resources run out or go gaga expensive. Carbon taxes coupled with FITs can make markets work for longer term societal goals and sustainable solutions when we talk energy..

Over the long term, as oil becomes more scarce and harder to harvest, the price for it will slowly increase. On the other side, alternatives will slowly improve and become economically viable on their own. The marketplace will adjust on its own, just as it did when petroleum and electricity replaced whale oil.

Imposed solutions such as carbon taxes and FITs are politically imposed creatures, designed to pick winners and losers, and are intended to act in shorter terms, and always with unintended consequences that are rarely in sync with what most would call "societal" or "sustainable" goals.

Want an example? Ethanol, which we still continue to mandate and subsidize long after the policy has been fully discredited on environmental, economic, and even political grounds.

Chris, good article, but including some of the cost/gallon of water desalinated either in dollars of energy units as well the specific desalination technologies would have made the article far more useful.

Cost data is generally hard to come by in this part of the world, being closely held as state secrets. Perhaps I'll look into the specific desalination technologies they're using in a future article.

Chris, Oh, please do so. I'd like to know more about how it works.

One of the reasons the Saudis, UAEs... are moving fast to install nuclear and solar is that they know their oil can only give them so much $ from the rest of us into the futur3e, while solar & nuclear can satisfy energy, water and carbon-neutral fuel needs forever.

Who are the fools?
;]
.

Dr. Alex,

That's who!

We are working with several architectures that are energy source agnostic. Wind, Solar CST, Gas etc., that can reduce the fuel needed for desalination by 60% or more. My company Altresco, Texas Tech University, and associated companies have created a semi proprietary method of integrating known technologies to achieve the highest possible capacity factor, continuous desalination for the lowest long term levelized cost of desalinated water available today. By a decent margin. Our barrier has been that because our system is innovative and crosses over several core competencies, it does not fit it any of the boxes people try to fit it in. It also exceeds the training of the high expertise extremely well qualified and brilliant minds in most camps today. The specificity of their learning has made it much harder to see the whole landscape. My position is that they are all right, if we can work together.
The reason I used the phrase semi proprietary, is because, once it's understood by someone more interested in freshwater than selling machinery, it is like finding your sunglasses on top of your head after hours of looking. I am in discussions with several investment groups and will select two that demonstrate that their primary interest is fresh water at affordable prices, rather than "How much pain will they endure."
I'm just a common man, but my life of solving problems considered impossible has taken me through a very large amount of learning.
William Ross Williams

William,

Thanks for the report!

. . . and what exactly are they doing with the salt ??

There's a market for that.

It depends if they boil the sea water down to nothing. If they only boil away a fraction of it, the salt is still present in solution in a concentrated form. It can be sent back to the ocean with little effect as long as you spread it over a wide enough area.

If reverse osmosis is used, it never desalinates all the water, just a small amount of it. The leftover water has a slightly higher concentration of salt which again can be returned to the ocean as long as you spread it out over a wide enough area to prevent a local concentration of salt.