Solving the Water-Energy Crisis

I also saw Gasland, absolutely a must see for NG fans.
I was a TBoone Pickens supporter, no longer. As they say- the emperor has no clothes...
The way these people are treated is horrendous, and it is happening all across this country.
Cheney "snuck" wording into the 2005 energy bill that alows fracture drilling to happen AND EPA guidelines will not apply! What politicians would support this? This is Love Canal Revisited!!
Erin we need you now!

Hi All:

I think the most credible way to not run out of fresh water is to do Hydraulic Fracturing all over the planet for NG (CH4, Shale Methane). A massive marketing and advertising campaign can be custom designed by Dick Cheney, etc.. The focus should be that it is possible to precisely predict where and how big every crack in the shale formation will be created 8000 feet under the ground, so we can absolutely be sure that the water table will not turn flammable, carcinogenic and neurologically toxic. We then can use this wonderful NG to provide the energy for de-sal plants to provide fresh water.... additionally, money must be spent to buy off politicians to make sure the "Frack Act" does NOT get approved by congress when it comes up for vote... because this could put a real "monkey wrench" into the business opportunity... and there are Billions and Billions of $'s to be made yet...
On a non sarcastic note, does anyone know of a company making an RO membrane that will handle / not breakdown from all the VOC's and toxins in Frack Trashed water?? If you do, PLEASE contact Josh so he can tell all those poor bastards who have been victimized, since no one else is helping them....
Where is Erin Brockovich and company????

I re-did this because I had a typo in my Methane!!! LOL..
I wish they would fix Java on this site. To leave a comment, I have to turn off Java, but to delete I have to turn it back on etc..
This is the only site I visit with this problem!!

.....Bill
PS: "GASLAND" is now running the HBO channels... IT IS A MUST SEE, especially for RE people who think NG is apart of the answer...

Stephen - you've raised a key issue here, and I'm looking forward to listening. Water really is the invisible ingredient in so many products and processes. Global figures aren't available, but I gather in the US some 7%-8% of the fresh water consumed (rather than used-and-returned) is for power plant cooling and industry - more than is consumed as drinking water (water used-and-returned by this sector is more like 40% of total fresh water used). And it's estimated that the carbon capture technologies currently available or in the pipeline almost double water consumption of power plants. I'm sure other readers/listeners know more on this. As Vestas CEO Ditlev Engel urged planners at the World Future Energy Summit earlier this year, it's important to factor in H20 as well as CO2 when making energy planning decision.

I give the worlds first stand alone SolarPowered Hydro-electric Generators
powering Giant Desalination Machines...
SolarmanJD

There is another method and it does not require burning fuel per the desaline way. Harvesting Frozen Ice from the Ocean. When Ocean water freezes it kicks out the salt, leaving the ice block as fresh water. Cutting and then towing the blocks to a warm water collector could allow the blocks to melt without using fuel and piping the water to needed reservoirs.

djermano@yahoo.com

There are numerous books and articles out on water issues. The books Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World's Fresh Water Resources (ed. Peter Gleick, 1993) and The Unnatural History of the Sea (Callum Roberts) are worthy of your collective consideration. While armed conflicts currently rage over petroleum resources, just wait until we start fighting over potable water. Maude Barlowe's book and the documentary Blue Gold are also worth a read. This planet is overpopulated by at least 4 billion people and there are not many hopeful signs. Consider Peak Oil, Peak Water, Peak Soil, and Peak Fisheries and that pretty much spells doom.

Offshore Wind power Systems of Texas TITAN 200 platform, as well as providing the strongest offshore platform for large wind turbines offshore, also provides a means for providing fresh water
Offshore Wind Power Systems of Texas Titan Turbine Foundations

Sorry guys, I don't buy this. While climate changes may change where the water falls, it cannot cause the 'destruction' of water as these theories suggest. The best way to get new customers is to convince those who are not customers that there is a 'serious problem', a standard act of big money. I remember back in the 70s when I was stationed on an East coast Air Force base, we had gas lines all over the country because there were 'oil shortages'. Working on the flight line, a pilot told me there were hundreds of tankers anchored off the East coast running deep in the water. That meant fully loaded. The shortage had been created to raise the price. We had gas lines and these guys were parked off shore for a month. Money always leaves a trail, and if you follow this 'water shortage' nonsense you will find a big money trail. Probably some of the very people here on this site ...

Amid the gloom, I feel compelled to recommend Geoff Lawton's Greening the Desert again, for a before/after picture that is astonishing. Geoff's example is in Jordan.

Toby Hemenways book Gaia's Garden has some examples in the U.S. Southwest.

In regard to remediation of water spoiled by fracking, there is possibility in the work of Paul Stamets, easily accessible by searching TED. The competition that he won was for remediating asphalt with mushrooms. He also has used mycilia filters for water where he keeps cattle near water in Washington state.

Floating solar platforms in ponds and lakes cut evaporation and make energy to monitor water. This seems to work well for California vineyards.

Covering water in hot, dry climates makes sense, but covered water should always be tested carefully. Radon contamination, nitrification, small animal drownings, and other issues are more likely in covered water. Out of site, out of mind is not good in the case of water.

Our water issues can be productively addressed but not with mass projects if they are more designed to enrich legacy contractors and cronies than to address practical issues in scale-appropriate ways with science that could be vetted outside of industrial revolving-door scientists.

These revolvers are impoverishing ordinary people unmercifully. I don't know how bad it will have to get in the U.S. before the people shut them down.

An EPA unfunded mandate is turning into a disaster of unnecessary and onerous debt for Portland. Beyond the hurtful debt is the increase in energy use to ruin an efficient, gravity-fed system that we have now.

An expensive, inefficiently fueled, centralized system in earthquake land makes no sense. People are putting in their own storage, but not everybody can do that.

I'll add a bit to the posts regarding hydraulic fracturing and the impacts it has on water. I am one of those "poor bastards" living in the gas patch. In fact, as I write this the roar of the industrial machinery fracing a new gas well on the property adjacent my own is peaking at over 80 dbA. Will this be the one that kills my domestic water well? Hard to say, but the long-term effects seem inescapable. Over 60 billion gallons of "produced water" (like it came from nowhere vs being groundwater) are extracted each year from this one basin alone. It is either reinjected to very deep depths or if the salinity isn't too high, they just dump it in the river. Either way, it's gone.

Water flows towards money. With our county's insatiable quest for energy, the water of entire regions and the people and ecosystems that depend on that water are becoming acceptable casualties. Fighting it has proven to be largely futile.

The great irony for me personally is that my wife and I live off the grid in a solar powered home. Even our water well (which may be being destroyed as I write this) is solar powered. I have worked for 20 years developing renewable energy solutions for remote research projects in the arctic and Antarctica for the National Science Foundation. We have tried to reduce our own footprint as much as possible but the general wave of environmental degradation has still been inescapable.

The point to take away from this is that we really are all in this together. I may be very directly impacted by the energy/water interface today, but in the end it will affect everyone. Take a stand now, because it will be in your back yard soon.

Tim is right, water cannot be "destroyed". The climate changes where the water may fall (American SE vs. American SW) or what form it may take (ice vs fog), but it certainly doesn't get destroyed. This is basic biology every highschooler learns. Oh, at least, is attempted to be taught.
Sorry, Stephen, but this is a little too fear-mongering for the facts. If someone is touting "the death of water", I also say to follow the money and see what ulterior motives they may have.

We Got the solution Here http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/partner/universal-solution-international-corp- Pure drinking water from the air and solar generators.

Or www.usolution.tk

Hi All:

Boy, this thread exploded out of nowhere.
TD, god, it sucks to be you (location wise) right now.
Josh's last statement was an echo of your last.. I take you saw GASLAND.
If you did, talk about hitting close to home. I would not enjoy that kind of proximity irony.
NSF, that must give you an interesting view of the government/business symbiotic relationship.
Pushing people into a corner on a country wide scale is not a smart move.
I remember a post a bunch of weeks ago,
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2010/05/are-we-all-climate-deniers
..there was a respondent pushing the "civil disobedience agenda" big time for which I responded in a negative way mostly. To pull a sentence or two from one of my responses:
"To act in a manor to invoke immediately a high probability personal disaster, based on the possibility of a long term probable but maybe litigable outcome, is foolish and goes against basic survival instincts. A long term outcome is unavoidable as determined by existence, but is irrelevant if the short term is not survived."
...he threw a couple of E-charged words to invoke anger etc., anyway to him, I am guessing, his perception of my pacifist "thinkings" were not his cup of tea. However, as much as I believe logic guided the creation of my response to him, logic also dictates a different course if the threat changes from the very, very far out to knocking on your door in the here and now, and a litigable solution is not available. If the masses are part of a system that no longer provides the individual a "practical and truthful" path as opposed to "illusion and lies", the types of learning, applications and actions that the masses engage in on a daily basis can change very quickly, and the world as we know it as well. The power entities always think and rationalize a thousand reasons it won't happen, and another thousand ways to suppress if it does start, but at the end of the day, history shows their thoughts to be fiction.

...Bill

I followed some of the links above. Seems this is more about clean water than no water. That makes more sense than saying outright the world is running out of water.
We're just running out of clean water.
Hmmmm,...
WE ALL GONNA DIE! SAVE ME, JOHN CUSACK!

Hey DP... you used that on gas2.org!!!
Did not see 2012 yet..
Sad part is, this IS NOT Sci-Fi....
It is happening right now, this second, for a very focused profit...

.....Bill

"THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up."

Please follow the links below. This is not new- only new to you. Corporations have practiced resource extraction without regard to human or environmental concern for decades. This type of careless exraction methods have affected primarily people of color in lands far away without much of an outcry from most Americans.

http://uprisingradio.org/home/?p=1489

http://www.risingtidenorthamerica.org/wordpress/2008/07/25/indigenous-peruvians-appeal-dismissal-of-federal-lawsuit-against-oxy-petroleum-for-contaminating-amazon-rainforest-poisoning-communities/

We can not let them continue on this path. We do have the power to stop them. At the end of the day we will all be judged by our actions and in-action.

Hi:

I didn't think it WAS new... but as a fact of our human social structures, one generally acts when it enters one's own backyard. Avatar is about such an extraction, or attempted one... the film is really very pessimistic in that it paints us far in the future with little change... probably correct..
A Darwinian rightist might say that the trampling of "poor" or "non-power possessing" people is just natural selection at an elevated level. Much like the T-Rex could kill most everything in its path, it was done in by nature which ironically favored the small and weaker, but more resilient and less resource demanding species.
One thing is certain, not to far in the future, there will be a time when there are far fewer people on the planet then there are right now...

.....Bill

Douglas and Tim --
I don't think anyone is saying that water is just going away. Yes, it's moving to different areas -- and clearly that has very negative implications for the impacted communities.

But beyond that, this is simple math. In the next 30-40 years, we're going to add 3 billion more people to this planet. There's only so much water to go around. It's not about water "disappearing." It's about limited resources for an expanding global population.

-Stephen Lacey

Ocean Thermal energy seems to have been overlooked in the line-up.... Capable of providing over 2 million liters of desalinated water per MW, Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) is a base-loaded RE solution that can produce vast amounts of water. A major American company is looking very seriously at it, as are two European entities, one of which is Energy Island (www.energyisland.com)

We need distributors is in spanish you can translate the webpage with google chrome http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/partner/universal-solution-international-corp-

I live in Santa Fe county New Mexico. Completely off grid. Collecting water off the house and garage into 6 1500 gallon underground water tanks has kept me and my wife going for 3 years. We have all the modern conveniences, front loader washer, dishwasher etc. In 3 years needed to purchase 3000 gal of water. Oh by the way, no backup well. We're using a multi-flow black/grey water system with an optional geo-flow collection/irrigation system for underground and above ground irrigation.

CROATIAN CENTER of RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES


World Water Day, a Call for Innovation


By 2030, water supplies may satisfy only 60 percent of demand, notes Dow's Snehal Desai. Here are some ideas for closing the gap.
.



This year's United Nations World Water Day, taking place March 22, is dedicated to the theme of "Water for Cities: Responding to the Urban Challenge." Around the world, many cultures are undergoing a tectonic shift from largely agrarian and rural living to dense urban living. According to Triumph of the City[1], more than half of the global population in 2011 will be urban.

Along with the benefits of urbanization, including lower environmental impact, come challenges such as how to provide large, dense and growing populations with clean water for an increasingly growing middle-class society with corresponding expectations.

Chances are you are at least somewhat aware of the growing water scarcity problem, particularly for urban populations, but if you aren't, here is a quick recap:

- Under an average economic growth scenario and without efficiency gains, global water requirements will grow from 4,500 billion cubic meters today to nearly 7,000 billion cubic meters -- representing more than half of all the water in Lake Superior and a 50 percent increase -- in only twenty years.

- By 2030, some analysts predict that available water supplies will satisfy only 60 percent of demand.[2]

- According to the World Economic Forum, nearly 60% of the world's population will be living in cities by that time, causing a shortage of clean water for people and businesses in urban environments worldwide.[3]

- In that same time period, one-third of the global human population will have only half the water required to meet basic needs[4], a situation that is likely to impact food production and agriculture, which account for more than 70 percent of water usage[5].

- Ceres, an environmental research and susta