water crisis

Hi chtank

You are 200% correct. I think thirst will kill us before global warming can.

Irrigation is one of the biggest users of water and fortunately they can and have improved over the years.

When I was young it required 2m³ to irrigate 1 m² of fodder crop under flood irrigation and now it is about 1:1 (my guess for Texas) If crops and irrigation methods and scheduling is improved by another 5% there will be an additional 500m³ / ha available.

The desalination of sea water should receive attention.

Saudi Arabia is irrigating about 160000 ha with 'fossil water' from 1000 m deep. There were an inland ocean in SA with the result that the deep water is very salty.

The recovery of sea water is one of our best hopes and the further development of reverse osmosis membranes has lowered the costs and improved the efficiency of this method. However, there are a number of ways for less fortunate peoples to produce water for both domestic and irrigation. By using an adaptation of one of the "survival" techniques used for the USA (and other) military, by letting tidal water into a sealed lagoon with clear sloped cover and allowing the sun to evaporate sea water which condenses on the slope and drains into a troff to be pumped by a windmill to inland places of use. (long sentence but tells the story in a nutshell). In fact, I do believe Saudi Arabia could use this technique very effectively, at lease that would save them form using legacy water.

There are other techniques to be consider, too, such as collecting the exhaust from hydrogen/oxygen fuel cells. Perhaps we can put our collective minds together and come up with still more cost effective ways to provide the world with safe drinking water. Why don't we follow the APIX Project's example and go to work on this problem, too. Hendrik, if you wish to take the lead on this, you are very welcome to do so. The Apix Project does have people (members of the project working group) already working on the South Africa energy crisis. I can see SA being a shining star example in this area.

I believe Dean Kamen has developed a machine that purifies water (regardless of the contaminant) to drinking quality. He is attempting to produce these and distribute them worldwide to areas of the world where they are needed at little or no cost. He was on television a week or so ago talking about it.

d m roseberg:

Thanks for the heads up. A few Links would be helpful.

I am presently working on a device that sanitizes water to drinking quality in smaller quantites (e.g. 1 gallon in 5 minutes). This can be used for small areas and is going to be relatively inexpensive to produce in quantity. If you want more information contact Harbec Plastics, they have the design.

As far as large quantities of water are concerned there would appear to be a large potential improvement possible by growing crops appropriate for the climate. For example, producing rice in California requires a lot of irrigation with water diverted from far away. It doesn't make much sense. Water costs should be allowed to float to end waste.

Of course with the present increase in commodity prices anybody proposing an increase in food costs would be committing political suicide. Good thing I'm not in politics...

Hi friends

Yes! Water availability to many common folks in developing nations IS a problem; but we need to look at the root cause.

Let us look at the following examples of "plenty and failure to tap them".

1. The river Congo is precipitated by tropical rains for a total period of nearly 200 days in a year; the total drainage area being about 4 million sq. km. It is estimated that the huge water resources in just one River basin would be about one-sixth the total water potential of the world. But Africa is one of the worst affected regions, where more people go thirsty than elsewhere in the world.

2. Here, in my part of the world (India), we have about 3, 500 billions cubic meters of water through rains alone (roughly available for a total of 180 days in a year). The quantity is so huge that even a total population of 1.1 billion Indians could have average daily water per capita of 9, 000 L for every 365 days! But, we in India do not have facility and engineering to supply potable water to more than about 200 million people ... over 850 million people reeling under thirst!

3. Amazon river, the largest river system in the world, and the other South American Rivers (Parana/ Paraguay) all combined could supply water to about half the total world population (6.66 billion). But, not even 5% of these river potentials have been tapped.

Now look at what the US had done during the last one hundred years: The Rivers Mississippi and Missouri have been tapped to over 90% and these two river systems (draining about 3.25 million sq. km area) are the economic life-blood of over 25 States in the USA and part of Canada. Further the furious River Colorado has also been "tamed", harnessing water power through such mighty dams like Boulder Dam ...

The stories of other developing nations would be no different and pathetic, barring China, which is now taming a few of its greatest rivers (Yangtze and Mekong).

So, where do the problems lie? Water resources or water Utilization?

We engineers would have to answer

pvhramani

We do have the "solutions". Talk to your government. Or replace it. I hate to sound mean about this, but not my problem. The US has it's own desert. We've had our own problems and are currently having issues in the southeast (Atlanta this year).

The solutions are not something that could be exported. The knowledge is available, it is the individual will to implement it. While it may sound naive (and I'm beginning to think that the global extermination of anyone who considers him/her self a politician would not be a bad thing), it is ultimately up to the people to solve the problem.

If you need any information on extremely gruesome and horrific devices designed to change peoples minds, I have a pretty decent working knowledge of many of the implements used during the Inquisition and several nasty techniques that were staples of the Native north and south Americas.

You've missed one major point. "We" (the royal we) engineers solved it millennia ago. We've refined some of the practices, but the basics are the same. It's not engineers that need to solve the problem. We have. You implement it.

Your government could easily (ok, not easily, but doable) implement a solution. To a country with a great deal of poverty and a massive labor force, the necessary public works are easily feasible. Now all you have to do is tell your government what your wishes are. If they do not comply, replace and then ask again.

Don't always follow the US model. You'd be an idiot if you followed anything past the late '20's. We are now a debtor nation that has a 53 Trillion dollar debt. That means every American born instantly owes $150,000.00. LOL, I don't think even the Romans under Caligula were in that bad of shape. And look where they are.

I'm not trying to be mean, but you've stated you have water aplenty. Use it. You'll solve your problem, or you will die. Nature is a harsh but fair mistress.

Don't worry about what other people do, just learn from how they do it. Then apply what works to your situation. No one is going to run in and 'save' you. Indians are India's own miracle. Make it so.

< But, we in India do not have facility and engineering to supply potable water to more than about 200 million people ... over 850 million people reeling under thirst!>

Need Not be reeling.

I will give you all knowhow --professionally- to convert ANY water to safe potable water for a few paise a litre.

Please go to www.innovation2survive.com

The water crisis is not new- I personally have been aware of it since the 1980's. The principal issue is generally not quantity, but distribution and contamination, plus the fact that the public generally will not support a pricing structure that actually reflects the costs associated with supplying water. Without the financial resources, building the necessary infrastructure to collect and redistribute the available water is not going to happen.

Reverse osmosis and evaporative purification systems are highly energy-intensive (on smaller RO systems with which I have worked, the cost of producing fresh water is on the order of 4 times the market price of public water). Evaporative systems would appear to be even more energy-intensive, for the quantities generally needed for a public supply.

Rainwater is the most cost-effective solution, but there are some considerations: the rainwater in much of the world is contaminated due to air pollution, and generally one needs a significant storage capacity to insure that the water is available when needed. Of course, one needs adequate rain to begin with.

I recently came across something called the "Life Straw" on CR-4 which is a personal purification filtration system that has the potential for alleviating at least the drinking water problem for the poorer areas (I think, perhaps, it would help with the arsenic contamination problem in Bangladesh and other parts of the world). Using brackish or saline groundwater for irrigation is ultimately catastrophic, as has been demonstrated quite vividly in California due to accumulation of salts in the soils as the irrigation water evaporates. It is not uncommon for once-sweet water wells to start producing brackish or salty water when too much demand is put on the supply aquifer. One has hope with the current efforts within the agro-industry to genetically engineer drought-resistant and salt-tolerant varieties of common food crops...

There is today no cheap or easy solution, short of a catastrophic reduction in population, which of course, is the natural social solution to a shortage of resources (i.e., the situation in the Sudan or Chad). The problem is going to get worse in the near future due to the urbanization of the world population, and the fact that most cities do not have the financial resources to maintain the existing infrastructure, let alone expand the infrastructure to support the mushrooming population. An unfortunate fact of life is that any species known, left unmolested by predators or disease, will expand its population to the limit of available resources...

We have a technique to make actual rainfall. jhsbusiness@yahoo.com

We also have a system that purifies water through atomic magnets at high volumes

jhsbusiness@yahoo.com

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