28th of a series

“Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It’s called rain.”

- Mike McAlary

In the last post we discussed scarcity. Today we consider abundance, specifically the possibility of producing much more fresh water. There is a lot of water in the ocean – 352 quintillion gallons (352,000,000,000,000,000,000) more or less. All we have to do is remove the salt.

Humans have been doing that on a small scale for a long time. The Ottoman Empire began providing desalinated water to Mecca pilgrims in the 1890s; and in 1951, Kuwait, which has no – zero – rivers and almost no groundwater, built the world’s first distillation plant; today Kuwaitis get 90% of their drinking water from desalination. Saudi Arabia, as the story goes, was actually drilling for water when it discovered the massive Abqaiq oil reserves in 1939. While that’s a fable, Saudi oil is critically connected to Saudi water. It has enabled the dry desert kingdom to desalinate so much water that it now trails only the U.S. and Canada (which has ironically been dubbed the “Saudi Arabia of fresh water”) in per-capita water consumption.

Today, desalination is a big and ever-growing business. Some countries rely on it almost entirely for fresh water; others, including the U.S., are ratcheting up their efforts. Yet it accounts for just 1% of the world’s freshwater consumption. Why?

1. Cost: the process is very expensive – and essentially unaffordable for poor countries, where almost no desalination is occurring.

2. Energy: much of the cost is due to the massive amounts of energy required to produce it. Saudi Arabia uses 15% of its oil production (down from 25% a decade ago) to desalinate its water.

3. Environmental concerns: most of the required energy comes from fossil fuels. The brine that is the waste byproduct of desalination is twice as salty as seawater, contains toxic chemicals used in its treatment, and is destructive to marine ecosystems. To produce one gallon of fresh water results in 1.5 gallons of brine.

Twenty-five years ago, Bern Sweeney, who taught me pretty much all I know about the science of rivers and water, told me that, for him, desalination represented less a solution to the problem than a manifestation of it. But it’s clear now that desalination is here to stay. And  with public promises to reduce costs, switch from fossil fuels to green energy, and develop constructive uses for brine, it is going to get much bigger. It will need to, the argument goes, because so are the earth’s water shortages.

Amid the debates about desalination’s environmental impact – and about whether technology is the solution to every human problem – the fact is that we don’t know what the future holds. So, at least for now, the debate is less about science than it is about personal philosophy. Ultimately, I believe it’s a theological debate. Will progress, at least as we have defined it in the West, lead to Nirvana or to Armageddon?* Should we embrace technology as the means to subdue nature? Or should we recognize ourselves as an integral part of the natural world? Immanence or transcendence? Control or balance? More or less?

Like Pascal’s Wager on the existence of God and Einstein’s faith that God doesn’t play dice with the universe, this is a cosmic bet. Its outcome may determine our future.

*It’s worth noting that Nirvana literally means “blowing out or becoming extinguished, as when a flame is blown out or a fire burns out.” Armageddon, on the other hand, refers to the “place where the kings of the earth under demonic leadership will wage war on the forces of God at the end of history.” I have to admit that the difference between the two is completely lost on me.