Water, Water Everywhere and Nary a Drop to Drink

If The Graduate was to be remade today (and I'm surprised it hasn't been since Hollywood ran out of original ideas for movies about two decades ago) Mr Bailey would be telling Benjamin "I've got one word for you son, desalination".

As more people choose to live in areas where freshwater can be scarce, the process of turning seawater into potable water will become the hot industry of the 21st century.  Cape Town, South Africa--located on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean--is somehow going to run out of water in April.  Officials will be shutting off service to hundreds of thousands of homes and forcing residents to come to filling stations to get their daily quota of water.  Cape Town is suffering from a severe drought and its reservoirs--usually filled by winter rains--are at just 24% of capacity.  It should be noted that residents were warned this might happen--but they ignored requests to not water their lawns or wash their cars.

Several other countries are being much more aggressive in adopting desalination as their water source of the future.  Saudi Arabia will be building five such plants on the Red Sea.  Israel is almost completely dependent upon desalination for its water supplies.  San Diego is building it's own plant and Santa Barabara already has one it hasn't used since the 1980's--because the Southern California droughts have subsided.

If you can't get in on the ground floor of desalination-related companies, you may want to look at nuclear power plants instead.  Desalination works by forcing seawater through thin membranes that separate the salt and minerals from the water.  Unfortunately, this process requires a lot of energy.  Far more reliable and constant energy than wind or solar could ever hope to provide.  Now the Saudis have natural gas and oil to burn, so that will be their power source--but most other water-starved countries will have to opt for pairing their desalination plants with nuclear facilities.

James Casey penned the famous phrase "Water, water everywhere--but nary a drop to drink" in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  But with potential improvements in the process of desalination and efficiencies that could drop the price, the vast oceans could become an almost inexhaustible source of water for our over-populated planet--and reduce the pressure to divert riches of fresh water we enjoy here in the Great Lakes region.