The World's Biggest Desalination Plants Should Not Exist

Just gotta say, I laughed at the steam Icon in the MSF diagram.

I studied for a time under Doctor Tzahi Cath, who researched membrane processes for water and wastewater treatment application. When speaking about desalination, he always made it clear to indicate that we were near the physical limits of efficiency when it came to current technology, and that concepts like low energy desalination "is not something that nature likes." Desalination does have clear use cases outside of freshwater treatment; specifically, industrial wastewater treatment, where membrane desalination processes become cost effective when compared to other methods for removing specific hard to break down chemicals from waste process streams. It these more limited, specialist applications where desalination gets its legs. To be clear, at least from people researching at the edge of the field, no one is anticipating some breakthrough that transforms the economics around this treatment tool.

9:00 Sponge balls, square plants. Got it. I ain't laughing, but I got it.

Nuclear is the ideal way to do desalination, zero carbon, 24/7, and you're processing large amounts of water for cooling anyway so you get it basically for free.

My state in Australia has two desalination plants and is currently building a third, but nowhere at the scale seen in the Gulf (I'm in Western Australia which is nowhere near as dry as places like Kuwait). I believe other parts of Australia built plants during the last big drought but by the time they were complete, the drought had largely ended meaning the economics of operating them was very different. Western Australia is so insanely wealthy that the state government could build a few and really sure-up the state's water supply for when the next drought hits.

Till now, water has been mostly free or very highly subsidized in Saudi Arabia, UAE, and other ME oil rich nations. The idea of a government provided service being non-subsidized and breaking even is unacceptable in the region, as citizens don't revolt as long as they are kept rich with plushy useless jobs in the public sector and services are provided at dirt cheap prices. Rather than invoke fury and revolt among citizens, Saudis, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE - all have chosen to privatize their water industry, with only government oversight to regulate profiteering. The problem is that these MSF plants are so damn expensive, that the water prices will shoot upto around $8/1000 gallons, assuming that the private players would have to buy energy at market prices. That is the landed price to customers. Another project silently undergoing is inviting renewable energy companies to partner with RO desalination private players (predominantly Israeli or using Israeli origin technology) but it faces two issues - lack of diplomatic ties with Israel and the surrounding waters in ME where the sites would be optimal have been polluted beyond repair in terms of increasing salinity and massive amounts of chemicals and heavy metals (which are present in cleaning chemicals). That can be repaired by changing the membranes somewhat and having additional pre-treatment, and this is one of the reasons that UAE has made diplomatic relations with Israel and Saudi is wanting too, all thrown off by the Hamas. Qatar is on the fence as the Qatari royal family is kind of a fundamental wahabi supporter and believer, but Qatar if it continues this will face massive backlash with Trump reportedly willing to remove the massive US base away from Qatar. The other factor in play is American oil and gas pumping. Europe wants more gas and ME had a market cornered but then US strikes back with massive LNG facilities and the ability to pump out enough gas to meet Europe's demand. At a cheaper price, as American natural gas is surprisingly cheaper, due to domestic cheap prices. Middle Eastern countries can no longer afford to continue subsidizing everything for its citizens as it as causing dents in their budgets. Another reason, ME governments want to get out of water desalination and privatize it. This isn't only about water, but - about water, geopolitics, and economics.

Bruh they are in the middle of a desert but won't use solar pannels to heat up the water smh

desalination seems like good use-case for dumping excess solar power. this allows you to over-build solar farms so that even cloudy days can meet 100% of electricity need. water is great at being stored in reservoirs, so it makes for easy "energy" storage. though, limiting population growth in resource limited areas is probably for the best, but that's not something easy for a government or group of outside countries to sell to a local population.

This is actually a really good reason why we should be investing in nuclear power plants because get a couple of those running and you'd have all the fresh water you need for a while

A US company called Capture6 is working on a method to use the waste brine from desalination for a carbon dioxide capture and mineralization process. They're getting government funding to build pilot plants in Australia, South Korea, and California, but it'll be several years before any of these plants can demonstrate if the technology is feasible.

I LOVE ASIANOMETRY

Dead Sea brine is processed for fertilizer, you can see it from space covering the south end of the sea.

07:55 Steam logo lol

Thank you for breaking that down into Olympic size swimming pools for us Americans 😂

Quick babe Asianometry just dropped a new vid 👀

9:03 Who lives in a pineapple under the steam?

Panacea: Pan - uh - say - uh ❤

Imagine when they finally run dry of their oil production (which allows them to run such huge and energy-intensive desalination plants): with such a huge population (relative to their water supply), you would witness one of the biggest humanitarian crises the world will ever see.

Singapore also have a desalination plant.

Was recently rewatching up the nuclear desalination video . There’s discussion of Arizona having a desalination plant at the sea of Cortez and unlike the west coast it has no clear outflow, meaning salinity will build up there over time.