2 Breakthroughs That Could Solve the Fresh Water Crisis

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[pjlehtim]

This is a great example how an invention doesn't have to solve the whole problem at once. We just need a lot of inventions that solve a smaller problem and things are looking much brighter.

[spyrule]

I honestly think that powerless option would be amazing for regions hit by natural disasters (floods, hurricanes) where the local water system has been compromised, and may take weeks to get back online. Having a few dozen shipping containers setup in a way to produce semi-large volumes of refillable drinkable water would be literally a life saver.

[emilybjoerk]

I love your videos but the frequent conflation of power and energy is confusing. Energy is power applied over time. Joule (J) is the standard unit of energy and Watt (W) is the standard unit of power. A watt is defined as joules per second, i.e W=J/s. Other customary units for energy include (kilo) watt hours, i.e. how many joules is consumed by one watt over one hour. For example: 1 kilowatt hour = 1000W*3600s= 3.6 MJ of energy. When your say it takes 20 W to purify 1L of water this doesn't make sense without the time it takes to purify the 1L water. Did you mean 20 Joules per liter? 20 Watt hours? Or 20 KWh per liter? These are all widely different values and it's not clear which one you actually meant. Please, could you be more careful with units of energy so we can better understand the thing you're talking about?

[tobins]

What tends to be forgotten, is the usefulness of the brine and other things removed from water. Salt is used all over, from food to roads and other industrial purposes. At larger scale, these will be easier to get and use elsewhere. For instance, the ocean is one of the largest containers for lithium. There's also a lot of other things in seawater that are useful. Many of them are put there by us. The byproducts of many processes, I feel, should be researched more to see what can be more reclaimed and cleaner than just dumping in random places.

[cobuck]

I’ve heard the claims about the gels. They seem incredible (that is, unbelievable). Six liters per day? How much water is actually in the air to be harvested? What would be the environmental impact of stripping that water from the air? What happens when every home in a village or city sets up their own air-based water extractor? Will the citizens downwind have anything to drink? Will plants and trees in the area be able to survive their even more arid environment? What about wild animals? And so on.

[funguy]

Dude the Larq is lit AF 🔥. I love your show! I think you do a really good job doing in-depth coverage of complex issues while keeping it within the grasps of a layman or novice! You are one of the only channels covering the issues i care about in an educated manner that i feels is beyond professional.Thank you!!!

[sbirdranch]

Although not a "prepper" by my definition, I do like being less reliant on large scale infrastructure. This leads me to be more in tune with these small scale options. Thanks for bringing this information together for our consideration. ~P

[UncompressedWAVmusic]

Thanks for sharing these simple, cheap and portable drinking water solutions.

[eve_squared]

I've always seen getting water from the air as a somewhat lacking strategy because most of the people who genuinely need water are in arid areas with low humidity. I find improvements in desalination technology the most likely solution to the water crisis. While not everyone lives near an ocean, desalination can produce massive amounts of water especially if done more efficiently than we do it now.

[pooterist]

I was with you until you said the solar ion device required 20 watts per litre. Why does anyone - let alone a presumably well educated technology expert always confuse watts (i.e. joules per second) with energy (i.e. joules).
Was that 20 watts over a period of a hundred years for 1 litre? or was it 20 watts for 1 litre every minute (damn - that would be impressive)

[daedalusdreamjournal]

These are technologies that definitely have a place in the future especially in water stressed area. It might help if people had a solution like this at home to further lower the strain on water resources. Of course, recycling used water should still be an important part of the process of generating fresh water.

[terrywyatt]

Very interesting. I am now retired, but worked in Pharma for over 25 years. Our USP water systems used Carbon beds, RO membranes, and Mixed Beds along with water softeners. There was a considerable loss of water along with the brine associated with softeners.
Thanks, gives me something to think about while I’m drinking ice tea on the back porch!

[davestagner]

Just read an interesting factoid today in "The Precipice", by Toby Ord (hey Matt, could you review this book?). There are 26 million liters of accessible fresh water for every person on Earth. The problem is, they're not equally distributed. Hence interest in desalination. For example, here in Minneapolis, there are multiple actual lakes within walking distance of every resident. It rains and snows all year round, so fresh water is plentiful. But we considered moving to New Mexico, where lakes are nearly nonexistent, and most of the water is coming from drilling into an aquifer that is being drained at an alarming and unsustainable rate. And of course, most of humanity's population is concentrated on or near seacoasts.

[mkuc]

Hey Matt, I think you should do more interviews with the researchers of these projects, I think you could give them a spot light and have great conversations on your channel also. I don't know how they'd feel about it but I would love to see more scientists becoming rock stars in this day and age.

[joelleblanc]

There is an error in the copy. “20 watts of power per liter” from reference [5] does not make sense. Watt is a power unit but we are seeking the energy cost per liter. I assume the answer is 20W / 0.3 L/hr = 66.7 Whr/L. Either way, great video. 👍

[chrisbrown]

One factor in the puzzle that is rarely talk about is most Desal plants are at sea level (obviously) and the clean water then needs to be pumped uphill to be used. This adds a lot to the energy costs.

[Tommygunn]

This is a good time to explain my idea. So, you have wind turbines that aren't running because we don't need the power at that moment. You need fresh water. Boy do I have the solution for you. Giant dehumidifiers. This idea came to me when I got a large dehumidifier for my garage. It would fill up it's one gallon tank in a few hours and I would have to constantly empty it. I thought to myself 'this water could be used out west' and that's how it all came about.

[MrLawandorderman]

Matt, you are great and another wonderful video. Many people here and who live in our level of wealth need to broaden their knowledge, I’ve worked in some of those countries and there is no water shortage, they lack the infrastructure to simply clean and deliver. It’s not about people of color, global warming, or the earth drying up, it’s about money, ineptitude of government, or just peoples ignorance. Local instability and lack of education is a much bigger issue. The idea that water processing is bad for the environment is wrong too, rivers today are vastly cleaner then they were 50 years ago. Water born disease were here long before Europeans showed up. This tech is very cool and ideas and tech like this will solve the problems we face and ensure our ecosystem continues to improve.

[zemtek]

there is a super easy fix to the brine solution. Pump it to large holding areas on land. This would actually replenish underground aquifers create more humidity in the air as well so areas down wind of these would experience more rain events. Plus we can harvest lithium from this process as well as sea salt.

[halted_code]

for how to handle the brine: we use it to make salt further inland, we sell some of the resulting salt, the rest we package up and throw back into salt mines, from the salt mines we can resell and refine it for molten salt thermal batteries and molten salt based power plants. we could also likely use it to mine lithium and sodium for lithium and sodium based batteries. Something else we could try is weather manipulation, if we start pumping a good amount of sea water inland into deserts we could raise local humidity levels, increase cloud cover for the surrounding areas and use this to fight desertification, we could make more of the desert habitable, we might even be able to start reforesting a desert in a few decades of pumping or using canals to move sea water inland.