Do you think technologies like these, even if they’re more targeted solutions, have a place to make a difference? Get a LARQ PureVis pitcher and start enjoying fresh, pure water today: bylarq.com/undecided. If you liked this video, check out: How Nanotech Can Help Solve the Fresh Water Crisis ruclips.net/video/D1kqGyPGsF8/видео.html
Wonder how long it'll be before this too is busted and debunked as it's clear from the title whatever this is it's another scam that was poorly researched. Bummer, used to respect this channel but it's time to unsub and go.
Israel already done it, upon completion of the seventh desalinated plant, desalinated water will cover up to 90% of Israel's annual municipal and industrial water consumption. The real question is how motivated, tax rich and aware of the problem the local goverments are. But the ICP+ED may the game changer. Gel ... no life span information means it is probaly a sigle use item ... also freeze-drying is one of the most expensive and most energy intensive processes.
This is a great example how an invention doesn't have to solve the whole problem at once. We just need a lot of inventions that solve a smaller problem and things are looking much brighter.
But then some genius exec will not want to move on it unless "it can save the world all by itself" We need to push to keep that from happening. That and the inevitable lawsuit by "do-gooders" who will sue precisely because it does not save the world by itself. This is one of those things where it is okay to cry out "This is good enough".
ya wheel as an inventor i combine things like geo-thermal and hugo culture to supply 10-20% of a houses heating and air conditioning for 2-3 thousand and you get it for 20-50 years and no fertilizing or watering and food or flowers also and carbon sequestering too. but don't have millions to billions to get it going so nothing but a waste thinking how to help our environment as no financial help for my idea's. so thanks billionaires.
I honestly think that powerless option would be amazing for regions hit by natural disasters (floods, hurricanes) where the local water system has been compromised, and may take weeks to get back online. Having a few dozen shipping containers setup in a way to produce semi-large volumes of refillable drinkable water would be literally a life saver.
I agree with you, the poor folks in Pakistan are surrounded by water they can't drink while other parts of the world are in drought. Alas this situation is only going to get worse.
I’ve heard the claims about the gels. They seem incredible (that is, unbelievable). Six liters per day? How much water is actually in the air to be harvested? What would be the environmental impact of stripping that water from the air? What happens when every home in a village or city sets up their own air-based water extractor? Will the citizens downwind have anything to drink? Will plants and trees in the area be able to survive their even more arid environment? What about wild animals? And so on.
Air can hold a percentage of it's weight in water vapor, and based on readily available data, air at 100% humidity, that is the absolute most it can hold (a.k.a. a cloud), at tropical temperatures of 90 degrees F can hold about 3% of its weight in water vapor. This would mean that in order to collect 6 liters of water in a day, you would have to force 200 L of an actual cloud through the membrane. Believable for a long fence running along a hill with a prevailing wind that runs uphill, and 6 liters of water can make a surprising difference in regenerative agriculture, but nowhere near the absolute bonkers claims here
@@UncleKennysPlace : yes, it’s an untapped resource in extremely dry areas like where I live. I have often thought it should at the very least be rerouted for drip irrigation in a few plant beds.
The water cycle is a very interesting thing - as is the capacity of air to hold water and why and when water is taken up as evaporation over bodies of water such as seas and lakes and eventually released as rain. Just because it isn’t raining doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of water in the air - also the process of breathing for animals and transpiring for plants continually puts water back into the atmosphere. Anyway wind moves over a body of water it picks it up and then may or may not drop it somewhere else. As long as there is moving wind there is water being added into the atmosphere from multiple sources. It would take a HUGE amount of extraction to fundamentally change the water content of the air in a given place - not impossible - but on a scale it is hard to imagine.
What tends to be forgotten, is the usefulness of the brine and other things removed from water. Salt is used all over, from food to roads and other industrial purposes. At larger scale, these will be easier to get and use elsewhere. For instance, the ocean is one of the largest containers for lithium. There's also a lot of other things in seawater that are useful. Many of them are put there by us. The byproducts of many processes, I feel, should be researched more to see what can be more reclaimed and cleaner than just dumping in random places.
I love your videos but the frequent conflation of power and energy is confusing. Energy is power applied over time. Joule (J) is the standard unit of energy and Watt (W) is the standard unit of power. A watt is defined as joules per second, i.e W=J/s. Other customary units for energy include (kilo) watt hours, i.e. how many joules is consumed by one watt over one hour. For example: 1 kilowatt hour = 1000W*3600s= 3.6 MJ of energy. When your say it takes 20 W to purify 1L of water this doesn't make sense without the time it takes to purify the 1L water. Did you mean 20 Joules per liter? 20 Watt hours? Or 20 KWh per liter? These are all widely different values and it's not clear which one you actually meant. Please, could you be more careful with units of energy so we can better understand the thing you're talking about?
Indeed, 20 W/l is nonsensical. But the rate of production is 0.3 l/h So I assumed the device would work roughly 3 hours to produce 1 liter, while using 20 Watt of power. Or in short: it's a 20W device, lol.
Thank you for writing this out. I was looking for a response like this. I was almost starting to doubt myself whether I didn't understand power use myself. Matt really needs to correct this mistake or end up turning into a meaningless technobabble channel.
The unit we're looking for is J/l (Joule per liter). Let's assume the device uses 20W during operation. 0.3 l/h = 8.33 10^-5 l/s 20 W = 20 J/s The energy requirement per liter is: 20 / 8.33 10^-5 = 240 kJ/l
@@Buzz_Purr Most people are probably more accustomed to Ws or Wh or kWh as units for energy, especially for electric energy. So your 240 kJ/l translate to roughly 67 Wh/l. This means about 67 kWh for a cubic meter of water. Compare this to reverse osmosis plants, which use around 3 kWh for a cubic meter of water. And you see that this method is highly inefficient compared to reverse osmosis. Of course it's only a prototype and a small device, so it remains to be seen, how scaling it up would affect the efficiency.
There is an error in the copy. “20 watts of power per liter” from reference [5] does not make sense. Watt is a power unit but we are seeking the energy cost per liter. I assume the answer is 20W / 0.3 L/hr = 66.7 Whr/L. Either way, great video. 👍
Dude the Larq is lit AF 🔥. I love your show! I think you do a really good job doing in-depth coverage of complex issues while keeping it within the grasps of a layman or novice! You are one of the only channels covering the issues i care about in an educated manner that i feels is beyond professional.Thank you!!!
Although not a "prepper" by my definition, I do like being less reliant on large scale infrastructure. This leads me to be more in tune with these small scale options. Thanks for bringing this information together for our consideration. ~P
Hey Matt, I think you should do more interviews with the researchers of these projects, I think you could give them a spot light and have great conversations on your channel also. I don't know how they'd feel about it but I would love to see more scientists becoming rock stars in this day and age.
Great suggestion, researchers are more accessible now and can reach a wider audience. Before people, I'd say they can use social media even to connect with researchers in their field. Vlogging experiments, asking questions and talking about encountered challenges via video would be really cool.
Very interesting. I am now retired, but worked in Pharma for over 25 years. Our USP water systems used Carbon beds, RO membranes, and Mixed Beds along with water softeners. There was a considerable loss of water along with the brine associated with softeners. Thanks, gives me something to think about while I’m drinking ice tea on the back porch!
Slightly off-tangent, but can we use the leftover brine from seawater desalination for Lithium production? Given that the U.S. is trying to boost domestic Lithium production, it would make sense to combine the two processes if it's scientifically and economically feasible. I don't have a STEM background so if I sound ridiculous asking this, please excuse my ignorance.
Very good observation, there is Lithium in Sea Water, but the brine is loaded in Sodium from the salt in ocean water, and right now scientists are working on a Sodium battery that doesn't use Lithium or rare Earth minerals, it potentially could be a win-win for everyone, but more scientific studies need to be done, but the concept is a good one.
Li accounts for a very small percent only. In the case that those countries or cities with desalinated water as their water, decide to switch to brine as their source of the metals than the cheaper mined ones, then it can be used. But currently there is no demand for such expensive metal
Assuming all of the worlds water desalination is from sea water (which it isn't) - You can get about 5000 kg of lithium. Which is very small already, but in reality only 1% of the worlds desalination is from sea water also. So 50kg of lithium from worlds sea water desalination, which is not a lot. So no, it's likely not really feasible at the moment.
I'm curious if there will be any impact from large scale adoption of these technologies. what will removing moisture out of the air do especially to an already dry area? Also had this question if wind turbines and wave power. energy removed would have to have some impact, wonder if this has been looked into. also the mit water purifier. I wonder if this can be scaled up seems like it would be a much better first stage for any desalination plant.
We can and should always run environmental impact analyses, but I’m skeptical that moisture extraction would have that much of an impact. Maybe at industrial scales? But it’s not as if the water permanently disappears. We can pull the water out of the atmosphere, but unless we bottle it up and never release it back out it’s going to eventually evaporate and re-enter the atmosphere. There is also such a large amount of water on earth that we cannot conceivably remove any consequential amount of it permanently. As for wind and tidal power, I don’t honestly know but many of the same arguments from above apply. Granted we’re not using them at very large scales today, but at current scales we’re simply not extracting even a fraction of a percent of the total available energy. And while we could discover unintended impacts in the future, you also have to ask yourself what the alternative is? Wind and other renewables have way less damaging environmental impacts than fossil fuels, and none of the perceived fears with nuclear fission. What other energy source would you recommend? To your overall point, yes everything we do has some kind of impact or cost. There’s not really any getting around that. Which means that every decision we make is a series of tradeoffs. At the same time, we don’t have perfect information and we have needs that have to get met today. We can’t always wait to perform a study on what exactly gets screwed over if we use A instead of B. Or we can, but that comes at the cost of needs not getting met. So it comes down to what things we value and prioritize.
Wind turbines are no "worse" than anything else in the way of wind like trees or buildings. It would take absolutely ludicrous amounts of them to change the weather. If you're unsure, remember that a turbine can only take part of the energy out of the wind, if they took it all they would stop turning.
I remember something about this being looked at. I think there was the idea of getting electricity at the same time you take energy out of areas with violent weather, or something like that. I just remember the end conclusion would require basically the entire area of the Sahara to be covered in windmills before any effect became noticeable. I'm just pulling scraps out of the back shed of memory here, so don't take my word for anything. Just look around online, I'm sure you'll find something
Higher humidity is a negative consequence of climate crisis. I'd bet removing water from the air would be net positive. Bonus points: install zillions of gel film packs in forests, to replenish soil moisture lost to heat.
I imagine it would be similar to current cloud seeding, it doesn't really work outside of specific conditions and has no real impact on the environment at large because it is just not that effective. Cloud seeding efforts that are ongoing in China impact large areas for hours at a time and seem to only increase rain fall by at most 10%. The gel tech might be usable on a small temporary scale for disaster relief or backpacking but I don't see it being an industrial scale solution.
Matt, you are great and another wonderful video. Many people here and who live in our level of wealth need to broaden their knowledge, I’ve worked in some of those countries and there is no water shortage, they lack the infrastructure to simply clean and deliver. It’s not about people of color, global warming, or the earth drying up, it’s about money, ineptitude of government, or just peoples ignorance. Local instability and lack of education is a much bigger issue. The idea that water processing is bad for the environment is wrong too, rivers today are vastly cleaner then they were 50 years ago. Water born disease were here long before Europeans showed up. This tech is very cool and ideas and tech like this will solve the problems we face and ensure our ecosystem continues to improve.
These are technologies that definitely have a place in the future especially in water stressed area. It might help if people had a solution like this at home to further lower the strain on water resources. Of course, recycling used water should still be an important part of the process of generating fresh water.
Thank you for this! I have been pondering all kinds of thoughts and ideas on the subject for a long time. Despite where I live, there are still many concerns about our drinking water, such as hexavalent chromium that was leaked into our water supply recently, etc. There's more I can say, but I really just wanted to thank you for all your work and sharing this amazing information ~ I, and am sure all your viewers, are really very grateful for what you are doing! It is extemely useful and very helpful ~> and trustworthy, as you cover many other factors and it's effects, etc.... so Thank You!!!
Just read an interesting factoid today in "The Precipice", by Toby Ord (hey Matt, could you review this book?). There are 26 million liters of accessible fresh water for every person on Earth. The problem is, they're not equally distributed. Hence interest in desalination. For example, here in Minneapolis, there are multiple actual lakes within walking distance of every resident. It rains and snows all year round, so fresh water is plentiful. But we considered moving to New Mexico, where lakes are nearly nonexistent, and most of the water is coming from drilling into an aquifer that is being drained at an alarming and unsustainable rate. And of course, most of humanity's population is concentrated on or near seacoasts.
One of the weird things people don't really comprehend is how much water is around us. Some areas obviously much less than others, but if we as a society, stop flattening our land we could repair the earth. If you create conditions where the land has terrain features that direct but slow water down, and allow it to pool into ponds, it keeps the surrounding area wet and able to sustain life, and as it slowly drains, it refills aquifers. Today we build flat land, and direct the water into run offs and sewers and dump it somewhere, which just dries out land and makes droughts worse. You'd be shocked at how many areas of the world struggle for fresh water, but get so much rain and dump it right into the ocean. Then there are areas that have repaired their land, get a small fraction of that water, and never even have to irrigate their fields. Pulling moisture from the air in all buy a few select areas seems really damaging.
@@rll9911 As any serious hiker will tell you, assume none of it is potable. fwiw, I said fresh water, not clean water, meaning water with no (or nearly no) salt, water we can drink if it’s clean. But basically, any water out in the wild can be assumed contaminated with potentially dangerous bacteria or other microorganisms, and possibly dangerous chemicals as well. But if it’s fresh water, it can be cleaned, by something as simple as boiling or as complex as a city water plant.
We've definitely got lakes here in NM, but nothing like the number you've got in MN. Something that's positive about our landlocked state is that we aren't going to get drowned by sea level rise! We may burn up and blow away-- a lot of our state did this year-- but we won't drown. (Um, except in the monsoon flooding of the burnt areas.....) We don't get many tornadoes, either. We're already very good at conserving water here, and we need to keep getting better. You'd probably like northern NM. Mountain lakes, lots of green.
@@EleneDOM Yeah, we’re still thinking seriously about northern NM. Mountains in the high desert are a happy place for my body. I’d dreamed of finding someplace around Pecos, but the Calf Canyon/Hermit’s Peak fire definitely gave me pause. But yeah, a few mountain lakes and reservoirs here and there are nothing like being four blocks from the Mississippi and a brisk walk from two separate lakes. We’re called the “Land of 10,000 Lakes”, but it’s actually closer to 20,000. We’re just modest about it.
I've always seen getting water from the air as a somewhat lacking strategy because most of the people who genuinely need water are in arid areas with low humidity. I find improvements in desalination technology the most likely solution to the water crisis. While not everyone lives near an ocean, desalination can produce massive amounts of water especially if done more efficiently than we do it now.
Did you watch the whole video? If you did, and are sticking by what you said, then you need to specify the amount of humidity in the problem areas you would be speaking about. Because the video addressed rather low humidity areas, even below 15% though I do not know how far below 15% it could be handling,.
as long as there is energy to put into it water from air can work, but if it's not free (paid off or very optimal solar) it's a huge energy consumer for very little water. you can't get a full flowing garden hose of water without a sports field of solar, or more. it is very energy intensive, enen in humid areas.
Man, you put together a top-notch channel here. I *love* how you provide a write up of the script with citations, and that's one of the main reasons whenever I see an Undecided new video I go straight there.
One factor in the puzzle that is rarely talk about is most Desal plants are at sea level (obviously) and the clean water then needs to be pumped uphill to be used. This adds a lot to the energy costs.
You can pump uphill without adding energy, IF the water you want to pump uphill is flowing. The technology is called "Ram Pump" it's using the energy in the water tu pump it uphill.
A little comment just to thank you for your videos. I'm not a native English speaker but you speak well enough for a full understanding. So I don't comment most of the time, but it helps the YT algo so it worse it sometimes, for your referencing.
there is a super easy fix to the brine solution. Pump it to large holding areas on land. This would actually replenish underground aquifers create more humidity in the air as well so areas down wind of these would experience more rain events. Plus we can harvest lithium from this process as well as sea salt.
Why not skip the desalination all together? Nevada and Utah have large dry lake beds, some already covered in salt. Pump sea water into them and let nature take care of the desalination process.
And Mg, Na, Cl, K, S, he'll even Uranium. These aren't worth extracting at the concentrations found in regular seawater, but not only is the idea that desalination will have a massive throughput, but it is doing exactly what you would want to do to make extracting minerals appealing, it concentrates them. I don't see any reason why there needs to be a waste stream from desalination at all, at least with some targeted development
@@got2kittys it actually depends on the depth of the aquifers. And they can still make large holding areas lines with something that would filter it out the salt. Which would just produce more humidity for more rain events. Especially if the bottoms of the shallow holding areas are dark in color.
Thermodynamically, how does that "zero electricity" solution work? It seems too good to be true. Looking at the Nature source, it says they have to heat it above 45°C to break the hydrogen bonds and actually get the water back, and that heat has to come from somewhere. In fact the picture they show of the full setup shows wires connected and something labeled "heaters" so there is definitely energy involved and it seems they're using electricity. At best this seems like a more efficient dehumidifier.
When I hear about the brine-residue from desalination, I always wondered if it's possible to dump that salt residue in areas like the North Atlantic to counteract the freshwater runoff from Greenland that threatens to interrupt the flow of the Gulf Stream due to the different water densities.
@@Sancarn You wouldn't dump it on the ice. I was thinking that you'd put it in freighter ships and release it in the ocean further off of the coast to add more salt content to the freshwater diluted ocean water. No idea if it works, it was just an idea how to potentially use the brine and alleviate the looming dangers of the ocean current disruption.
@@Equulai I see two problems with your idea: 1. It would be expensive. 2. Would probably be an ecological disaster, because you will inadvertently introduce invasive species. If you move and dump such amounts of material from one area to another that is unavoidable. (that's already a huge problem with the ballast water of ships. If you want to know more about that topic you should look up the "Ballast Water Management Convention")
@@Jehty_ It would cost money, but what do we do with the brine at the moment?Just dump bit back into the water where it was extracted?` And the ecological disaster: I cannot see that. The brine is a result from a filtration and separation process. Except for extremophiles, can something of substance really survive and pass through all these processes? I can see, however, that the introduction of all the salt in specific areas could cause an unhealthy increase of salinity in these areas until it dilutes enough.
Hi, Can't sea water be filtered by the ground itself? If you find the proper place, with the right permeability, somewhere close along the shore line, then dig a big area that's under the sea level, won't the water permeate? Use gravity to have clean water. I haven't researched this, just thought of this now. Maybe you know more on this subject? Thanks
The concern with pulling moisture out of the air is the same with cloud seeding, you take rain and or local moisture and keep it for your area and prevent it for other areas ... take the moisture out of the air for drinking but prevent plants from collecting water from morning dew. So people that can afford to take it prevent others of getting it. Because something can be done, should it it be done?...Sci should always look at the long term affects.
It is not the same; cloud seeding triggers a system that is supersaturated with moisture causing water to precipitate. in the other case, you are simply condensing the water present in the air either by cooling or by adsorption. In the later case, taking out the water from the adsorbed matrix can be difficult.
@@janami-dharmam sorry you misunderstood, it's was not about the how to get water. It was about taking the water before it would naturally go somewhere.
I want to hear more about this gel solution. Konjac root is extremely hydrophilic (it's essentially composed entirely of dietary fiber, hence its use in shirataki noodles), so it would make sense if it had the capacity to absorb ambient air moisture, but I see no way to release that moisture without the use of significant energy. I suspect the environmental impacts of such a technology would be minimal at best, air is highly fluid and mixes much more easily than saline water, and there is a TON of water in the air, but the tech leaves me with questions.
Could the brine be utilized for anything else useful? It would seem like it could be moved, dried/cleaned/purified to then be used for the sodium based batteries that were talked about recently?
This is a good time to explain my idea. So, you have wind turbines that aren't running because we don't need the power at that moment. You need fresh water. Boy do I have the solution for you. Giant dehumidifiers. This idea came to me when I got a large dehumidifier for my garage. It would fill up it's one gallon tank in a few hours and I would have to constantly empty it. I thought to myself 'this water could be used out west' and that's how it all came about.
That sounds like a good idea to get fresh water from the air but if it takes more power to get the humid air to drop the water you may as well import/buy gallons of fresh water for some other place.......I doubt that an area that is not gifted with high humidity would get much fresh water form a device that you state so your device would be running on power all of the time but little water would be made..........you should try out your idea in a dry area (desert maybe) that lacks humidity.
for how to handle the brine: we use it to make salt further inland, we sell some of the resulting salt, the rest we package up and throw back into salt mines, from the salt mines we can resell and refine it for molten salt thermal batteries and molten salt based power plants. we could also likely use it to mine lithium and sodium for lithium and sodium based batteries. Something else we could try is weather manipulation, if we start pumping a good amount of sea water inland into deserts we could raise local humidity levels, increase cloud cover for the surrounding areas and use this to fight desertification, we could make more of the desert habitable, we might even be able to start reforesting a desert in a few decades of pumping or using canals to move sea water inland.
Use the brine from desalination for salt production. Instead of discharging the brine, allow it to evaporate in a shallow pool and you've got crude salt.
Yeah, it seems like an obvious solution, so I'm wondering why that's not done. Is it the land area needed? Is it some of the salts you'd get if you evaporate all the water? I know I've heard for commercial sea salt production they don't boil off all the water because you'll contaminate your salt with bitter tasting magnesium(think it was magnesium) salts
I used to live near polar circle as a kid. Salt has low commercial value. Hence shipping costs limits practical use. Dumping it back into the sea creates issues with marine life. Major desalination plants in Texas have been refused permission to get setup by the EPA blocking desalination... No smoke without fire?
I always get so excited by these new technologies and find a I use for them in my personal life. But I have learned to hold back my enthusiasm some as it seems they disappear of never make it to production. Would love to see a video on the ones you have looked into that actually made it to production
yeah, most of these are investment startups. the company has a barely feasible idea, and just throws marketing money at it to get hype based investment. if it were that easy, they wouldn't be talking to me and you. countries would be flipping out over it. but there is always a cost, it's not as simple as quick, cheap, organic filters. there IS a downside.
I was with you until you said the solar ion device required 20 watts per litre. Why does anyone - let alone a presumably well educated technology expert always confuse watts (i.e. joules per second) with energy (i.e. joules). Was that 20 watts over a period of a hundred years for 1 litre? or was it 20 watts for 1 litre every minute (damn - that would be impressive)
From his citation, the journal says: "The resulting water exceeded World Health Organization quality guidelines, and the unit reduced the amount of suspended solids by at least a factor of 10. Their prototype generates drinking water at a rate of 0.3 liters per hour, and requires only 20 watts of power per liter." So 3.33 hours for one litre of water. E = P*t = 20W * 3.33 hours = 66.66 Joules per litre.
@@richardlighthouse5328 Nonsense. You're confusing power with energy again. Or maybe the article cited does. if the device really consumes energy at the rate of 20 watts (that is, 20 joules per second), and can process 0.3 litres in an hour (i.e. 3600 seconds) - then that would work out at 20 * 3600 / 0.3 joules per litre - or 240,000 joules per litre. Now the thing is, joules are really, really small. There are 3.6 million joules in a KWh, so 240,000 joules is still only 0.066 KWh, or about a cent's worth depending on the price your utility charges. Regular tap water costs around 0.1 cents per litre (again, depending on your utility), so it looks like this desalination process costs 10 times that of regular tap water. Sounds steep, but if it's true, and if the device lasts for a long, long time - this would still be impressive.
So, my question would be, given that humans need water (as well as salt) to exist, why can't we use the brine as part of the whole 'collect sea salt' thing? Honestly asking due to curiosity.
The amount of 'need' we have for salt is a tiny fraction of the 'need' we have for water. The ratios are not there, and most of the salts recovered by desalinization are genuinely a waste product - best stored back in the ocean we pulled them from... that's where the fresh water will end up again anyway, so this is not going to result in an increase in ocean salinity - the desalinization plant effluent concentration is only of a concern at the local discharge site.
Liked this!! Instead of solving the world on a sliver platter I like how these solutions are "one of the kind" into solving SPECIFIC problems and targets. Instead of wondering how to solve everything and anything.
Most people have a water generator in their houses right now - their air conditioners. Air conditions put out way more water from the air than people think, and if we can sanitize and filter that water (its usually heavily bacteria infected) , I think it could be part of the fight for clean water.
Agree 100%. When I was on holidays in Greece, they had the AC connected to a bucket that we had to empty 2-3 times a day. I guess it created about 30-40 liters of water per day. We used it to water plants, but filtering it would be a good source of potable water.
so is there a reason why large desalination plants don't have clear quasit huts to pump the discharged water into to get the rest of the water out of it and produce more clean water and then use the left over salt for things like salt for roads? or possibly for food production as people add salt to brine food ?
To convert water in the air (steam) into liquid water, you need to extract a precise amount of energy from it. This amount never changes. How would rhis gel make this any different?
Dehumidifiers also have one other significant problem: There is a very small amount of water in the air, and the dehumidifier would need more and more energy to flow more and more air with lower and lower humidity - while in significant scale to produce any sort of sufficient amount of water, it also eventually creating a desert all around its location. And with scale, I mean that if considering 30°C / 100% humidity drained to 0%, it means 35 ml of water out of cubic meter of air. Thus to obtain 2 L of water per 24 hours, you need to completely drain 57 cubic meters of 100% humid air. In case, that humidity is only 30% and you can drain it up to 10% (= 5,5 ml/cubic meter), you'll need 363 cubic meters of air - that's a cube with an edge of 7,2 meters - just to get enough liquid for 1 person for 1 day. Not to mention, that it would be "distilled water" and you would have to mineralize it first, to prevent serious health issues… It's just another SCAM…
Vapour and steam aren't the same. Vapour is in a higher energy state. Convince that vapour to give up some energy to its surroundings and you have liquid water. The transition yields energy.
These are very promising technologies, thanks for the video! Here in S CA we have a desalination plant in Carlsbad that produced 50M gallons per day of water from the ocean. There seems to be a lot of debate about it, so while people debate, the plant continues to pump out 50M gallons per day at a fairly low cost, using an environmentally freindly process. It's amazing how Americans can fight over anything, even proven technology. If we could just harness Americans ability to argue, we would have an infinite source of energy.
Carlsbad Desalination Plant in San Diego, California, requires approximately 35 MW to run and provides 50 million gallons of water supply per day. Where does that power come from. Well A lot of it is hydro, the more you need desalinization the more likely your not going to have the hydro power to run it. So yes harnessing the hot air would be a good idea!
if 50 mil gallons and 35MW checks out, that's 4.43 Wh per liter. Assuming he meant the MIT device uses 20W and takes 3.3 hours per liter, that's 66 Wh. Ouch. Hope it gets better when it's scaled up. At $50 per unit it would cost 1.32 billion USD to get the same capacity. (about 26 million devices) The Carlsbad desalination plant cost one billion according to Wall Street Journal, via Wikipedia.
Quenching it with b.s. All this "water from air" nonsense is completely impractical and very expensive. Yet another magical handwavium is not gonna change it.
Is using the gels and similar technologies to remove water from the air the best approach? In our complex eco system, I imagine taking water from the air will have unintended consequences. Maybe using the ocean is safer overall. Imagine pulling water from the air and causing an ever increasing reduction in rainfall.
The orders of magnitudes are OK. There is as much water in the air than there is drinkable water underground, and there is 1000x less water in the clouds.
@@jowjor considering the recent report of ground damage and sinking due to the huge reduction of the water table in the area, I'd say you're confirming my point. We have a bigger impact on the climate both local and large scale than we realize. There are A LOT of us now and if we're not careful, outlr "solutions" will only lead to worse, more unsolvable problems.
@@NoTimeLeft_ Main difference is, any water you take from the air is back in a few days, while the underground water takes years to do a full circle, and you can take more than there is raining. And you don't need to take all the underground water tu causes issues, only a small part and there is voids everywhere.
@@falconerd343 take out as much as I think. Are you considering if tens of millions of people if not hundreds of millions used it? I am talking about foresight. How many people in a given area can use it? If each person pulls 17L of water out of the air, how many people in one square mile can do the same? Pretty sure if an item like that is needed, it's needed for many people. Just because something CAN work, doesn't mean it WILL work, given the scaling and impact. But all the focus was placed on making it work.
Nice video. Current state-of-the-art seawater desalination membranes are actually a very energy efficient separation technology. The "large energy input" that is required occurs because thermodynamics tells us that energy is required to de-mix solutions (e.g., de-mix salt and water molecules). Current desalination membranes operate close to the thermodynamic minimum for separating salt from water. This energy is relatively large because there is so much salt in the ocean that must be de-mixed, not because the membranes have poor efficiency.
@@anneeq008 More trouble than it's worth in most cases, in homes it would require a third set of pipes within houses and to houses. The main cost of drinking water is in the transportation rather than the purification.
My favourite one of these is the Solar Water Dome that is being put up at NEOM in Saudia Arabia. I think if we can create relatively low cost reverse rivers that can irrigate crops, we can pull lots of carbon down to current desert lands that could help nature, human food requirements and the carbon cycle..
Problem with NEOM is its a fantasy. The Line is made with false promises and tech that doesn't work. They show flying people and parks with trees but only people that live on the top level will see sun light and that would be only 4 hours a day. Food would have to take up all the land they can see from the line which is a desert.... see an issues. Couple this with the new research that recently came out that human must eat some a percentage animal protein in their diet to get proper nutrients, the fact you can't expand the line for new families, hyper loop doesn't exist and the train going one way with no stops would have to go faster than the current bullet train and you can imagine how dumb the line idea actually is.
i was wondering is the gel can use as dehumidifier and supply us water the same time?if it can, i would like to have a bunch of them. it will make my room cooler and less moldy. hope it can be use as air conditioner.
If we really want to get serious about reducing water usage, it's the agricultural sector that needs to be changed. By placing crops, that are capable, in greenhouses, using hydroponics and, eventually, artificially lit plant factories (vertical farms.) Not only would this save tremendous amounts of water, there would be also be increased yields and in less space. There would, of course, be an increase in energy required to make crops this way but it will likely be the only way as farming land and water resources becomes less available in the future.
Yes, but there are limits to how much we can possibly save all our resources like water, food, energy, you name it. Why do we need so much resources and become stingy with it in the first place? Take a moment to ponder the root cause of all these problems caused by....humans.
I do think that these technologies have a place in solving the water shortages. Just like solar panels on your house. Both these offer a level of independence from a system that can be unreliable.
I still don't understand the potential form factors for the gel in the field. Would it be suspended in the air with collection plates beneath it? Could they be placed similarly as rooftop solar panels with drain lines going down to a tank?
could it be that you have made a mistake by mentioning that the MIT device will be available for around 50$? in all the sources i have found about this device only the price of 50$ of the portable solar panel is mentioned. like they wanna sell it on the side while writing abut the MIT thing.. but i cant find a price estimation for the desalination unit anywhere
I do field work in remote locations of Alaska, often in the Y-K Delta where fresh water is not available outside of villages. In those cases, we can't even use a portable gravity filter unless meltwater is available, which is only for a brief time at the start of summer. The only alternative has been hauling in jugs of water which requires takes up precious fuel and space in support aircraft. Something like this, combined with a solar panel, would be ideal. I'll be watching the development of this tech. Thanks for the informative video!
I have a concern about those gel packs. If they work like a dehumidifier bucket I'm a basement by pulling water out of the air, wouldn't that create a long term problem in areas that are already arid? You could be creating a larger problem by making the air even drier. This could be a solution in tropical areas though, such as a rainforest.
how does the spongy hydrophilc thing work? i'd think it would just attract water and reach some kind of equilibrium if temp stayed constant. or does it attract enough water that it forms a large bead and gravity pulls the bead off the surface...? so it's like condensation but without needing something below the dew point? could a hydrophobic surface humidify air faster than evaporation without needing additional energy too?
The gel sounds great, but it does need to be freeze dried before use and it requires a heater and condenser to collect the water. Also the water still needs to be filtered after collection.
So I could of course be incorrect, but as far as I can find, MIT's ICP filtration is not $50. On the MIT news page they state, "...can also be driven by a small, portable solar panel, which can be purchased for $50." I believe this was misconstrued as the price of the filter. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find an actual price point for the filter at this time. Just thought this was worth mentioning, in case you're like me and wondering when you can get one to replace your RODI filter.
How is the water separated from the gel? Does the water just run off? Would you deploy the gel in large sheets that let air pass over it? I really wish you would have addressed the functional aspects of how the gel is to be used.
I’m originally from the Philippines Islands .. there are some difficulties providing fresh drinking water to everyone .. watching this makes me wonder on a family home basis .. would MIT’s ICP work with rain capture as well as sea water?? .. there are plenty of sources of rain water and I have family in the Philippines that provides filtered well water for drinking and cooking to hotels and restaurants .. but with the ICP on a larger platform (200-500ga per day) so closet sized instead of suitcase sized .. it might also be an inexpensive way to provide potable water to households that get their potable water from other sources (ie: stores, distributors, filters) ..
Swales and water retention are the long term solutions. Look up some desert reforestation projects. It all starts with slowing/capturing water and letting it soak into the ground. This can be done other places too, if you have wells that have dried up, this is for you!
I’m unclear on how the water is extracted from the gel, ie after it pulls water out of the air, how do you get the water out of the gel? I noticed some reference to temperature, but it wasn’t clear to me.
Is the brine not a good source of sodium for Na-ion batteries? How much effect would the runoff have over time if it's returned to to ocean or great lakes? wouldn't residual liquid replenish the water and dilute the salt content?
I love your attitude towards new inventions and technology - optimistic and yet critically thoughtful. One potential use for brine is as ice melt for winter roads (after dried).
So the gel can be stored (?) in an emergency kit such that in case of a remote land/water emergency or plane crash, people can break out something that can produce decent qty. of safe water???
What will taking more moisture out of already arid air do at scale? 6 liters a day would add up quickly when there's an entire village or city using it. I think that it might be better in a coastal area, instead of desalination, pull water from the air. Many people already use dehumidifiers in their houses.
Very interesting Matt. Perhaps the saline output should be thought of as a potential source. There are so many contaminants of sea water that could be recovered if they are concentrated. Even Salt itself is a useful product when dried out although the volumes produced to recover sufficient water would be in excess of our needs and maybe utilise too much energy, it is an interesting possibility. When we view the vast areas of drying seawater to produce commercial masses of edible salt (seen for example in the north of western Australia) there is the possibility to utilise one of these techniques as a primary stage to pre-concentrate the seawater and recover some potable water at the same time..
What happens to the air/moisture content and the precipitation in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, if 38m people in California start to pull moisture out of the air with this gel or with one of those source panels?
Could the brine be added back to the discharge from waster water treatment plants, basically matching the salinity of the discharge to that of the ocean?
Lol LARQ. I supported them through their kickstarter and got 4 bottles. They all got red rings of death. They replaced them and had problems with those. It wasn't until they redesigned the caps that they problems seemed to go away. Another problem just showed up to take its place. The metal inside the cap was corroding underneath the paint and caused paintchips to get into the water, which I assume is because the cap is made of aluminum and the bottle is made of stainless steel. End of the story was they wouldn't warranty it since it was out of warranty (1 year lol) even tho every bottle will eventually have this problem, and they basically told me that wasn't why its chipping.
Here's an idea. Put a thin layer of that gel on the back of a solar panel to collect water at night and release it during the day when the panels heat up. This would not only produce some water but would also cool the panels making them more efficient.
The gel sounds amazing but I didn't quite get what it was doing. Is it like a sponge for the air? Then you heat it and it drops the water? sounds like the first steps to one of those Dune Stillsuits 😎
Do you think technologies like these, even if they’re more targeted solutions, have a place to make a difference? Get a LARQ PureVis pitcher and start enjoying fresh, pure water today: bylarq.com/undecided.
If you liked this video, check out: How Nanotech Can Help Solve the Fresh Water Crisis ruclips.net/video/D1kqGyPGsF8/видео.html
The podcast needs to be longer🥺
Wonder how long it'll be before this too is busted and debunked as it's clear from the title whatever this is it's another scam that was poorly researched. Bummer, used to respect this channel but it's time to unsub and go.
Israel already done it, upon completion of the seventh desalinated plant, desalinated water will cover up to 90% of Israel's annual municipal and industrial water consumption. The real question is how motivated, tax rich and aware of the problem the local goverments are. But the ICP+ED may the game changer. Gel ... no life span information means it is probaly a sigle use item ... also freeze-drying is one of the most expensive and most energy intensive processes.
How about mold within the gel?
Is anyone desalinating water via ice? how feasible is it at an industrial scale?
This is a great example how an invention doesn't have to solve the whole problem at once. We just need a lot of inventions that solve a smaller problem and things are looking much brighter.
But then some genius exec will not want to move on it unless "it can save the world all by itself" We need to push to keep that from happening. That and the inevitable lawsuit by "do-gooders" who will sue precisely because it does not save the world by itself. This is one of those things where it is okay to cry out "This is good enough".
ya wheel as an inventor i combine things like geo-thermal and hugo culture to supply 10-20% of a houses heating and air conditioning for 2-3 thousand and you get it for 20-50 years and no fertilizing or watering and food or flowers also and carbon sequestering too. but don't have millions to billions to get it going so nothing but a waste thinking how to help our environment as no financial help for my idea's. so thanks billionaires.
Please report this video for misinformation
Well that's the thing isn't it. Inventions won't save us, they are tools in the toolbox. Policy will save us.
Except it's old technology which has already been busted as not workable.
I honestly think that powerless option would be amazing for regions hit by natural disasters (floods, hurricanes) where the local water system has been compromised, and may take weeks to get back online. Having a few dozen shipping containers setup in a way to produce semi-large volumes of refillable drinkable water would be literally a life saver.
I agree with you, the poor folks in Pakistan are surrounded by water they can't drink while other parts of the world are in drought. Alas this situation is only going to get worse.
While good in theory there's a reason the gel option didn't show someone drinking from the prototype.
@@markquintonii the guy did drink it 09:40
The issue with the gel is you need a freezee dryer its not powerless in the slightest
there is no powerless option. Any process needs energy, and that needs to come from somewhere.
I’ve heard the claims about the gels. They seem incredible (that is, unbelievable). Six liters per day? How much water is actually in the air to be harvested? What would be the environmental impact of stripping that water from the air? What happens when every home in a village or city sets up their own air-based water extractor? Will the citizens downwind have anything to drink? Will plants and trees in the area be able to survive their even more arid environment? What about wild animals? And so on.
Air can hold a percentage of it's weight in water vapor, and based on readily available data, air at 100% humidity, that is the absolute most it can hold (a.k.a. a cloud), at tropical temperatures of 90 degrees F can hold about 3% of its weight in water vapor. This would mean that in order to collect 6 liters of water in a day, you would have to force 200 L of an actual cloud through the membrane. Believable for a long fence running along a hill with a prevailing wind that runs uphill, and 6 liters of water can make a surprising difference in regenerative agriculture, but nowhere near the absolute bonkers claims here
@@TheWhiteDragon3 Thank you. That makes much more sense.
@@TheWhiteDragon3 I get more than six liters from my home AC system on a typical midwest summer day.
@@UncleKennysPlace : yes, it’s an untapped resource in extremely dry areas like where I live. I have often thought it should at the very least be rerouted for drip irrigation in a few plant beds.
The water cycle is a very interesting thing - as is the capacity of air to hold water and why and when water is taken up as evaporation over bodies of water such as seas and lakes and eventually released as rain. Just because it isn’t raining doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of water in the air - also the process of breathing for animals and transpiring for plants continually puts water back into the atmosphere. Anyway wind moves over a body of water it picks it up and then may or may not drop it somewhere else. As long as there is moving wind there is water being added into the atmosphere from multiple sources. It would take a HUGE amount of extraction to fundamentally change the water content of the air in a given place - not impossible - but on a scale it is hard to imagine.
What tends to be forgotten, is the usefulness of the brine and other things removed from water. Salt is used all over, from food to roads and other industrial purposes. At larger scale, these will be easier to get and use elsewhere. For instance, the ocean is one of the largest containers for lithium. There's also a lot of other things in seawater that are useful. Many of them are put there by us. The byproducts of many processes, I feel, should be researched more to see what can be more reclaimed and cleaner than just dumping in random places.
the brine could be processed and be used for molten salt thermal batteries.
Salt has low commercial value. Hence high shipping costs limits the commercial value.
Brine is still majority water. Water content is still 93% for those brine. It is not pure salt yet. Still very high cost in processing.
@@zlmdragon. if too much brine, the marine echo system is also at risk of destabilizing...
@@zlmdragon. please can you elaborate more ?
It's less costly, apparently, to process sewage treatment water to drinking quality water again.
I love your videos but the frequent conflation of power and energy is confusing. Energy is power applied over time. Joule (J) is the standard unit of energy and Watt (W) is the standard unit of power. A watt is defined as joules per second, i.e W=J/s. Other customary units for energy include (kilo) watt hours, i.e. how many joules is consumed by one watt over one hour. For example: 1 kilowatt hour = 1000W*3600s= 3.6 MJ of energy. When your say it takes 20 W to purify 1L of water this doesn't make sense without the time it takes to purify the 1L water. Did you mean 20 Joules per liter? 20 Watt hours? Or 20 KWh per liter? These are all widely different values and it's not clear which one you actually meant. Please, could you be more careful with units of energy so we can better understand the thing you're talking about?
Indeed, 20 W/l is nonsensical.
But the rate of production is 0.3 l/h
So I assumed the device would work roughly 3 hours to produce 1 liter, while using 20 Watt of power.
Or in short: it's a 20W device, lol.
Exactly this! FFS, how hard can it be to get this right in a so-called "science"-channel? 20 Watts/Liter is absolute nonsense! Grrr!
Thank you for writing this out. I was looking for a response like this.
I was almost starting to doubt myself whether I didn't understand power use myself.
Matt really needs to correct this mistake or end up turning into a meaningless technobabble channel.
The unit we're looking for is J/l (Joule per liter).
Let's assume the device uses 20W during operation.
0.3 l/h = 8.33 10^-5 l/s
20 W = 20 J/s
The energy requirement per liter is:
20 / 8.33 10^-5 = 240 kJ/l
@@Buzz_Purr Most people are probably more accustomed to Ws or Wh or kWh as units for energy, especially for electric energy. So your 240 kJ/l translate to roughly 67 Wh/l. This means about 67 kWh for a cubic meter of water. Compare this to reverse osmosis plants, which use around 3 kWh for a cubic meter of water. And you see that this method is highly inefficient compared to reverse osmosis. Of course it's only a prototype and a small device, so it remains to be seen, how scaling it up would affect the efficiency.
There is an error in the copy. “20 watts of power per liter” from reference [5] does not make sense. Watt is a power unit but we are seeking the energy cost per liter. I assume the answer is 20W / 0.3 L/hr = 66.7 Whr/L. Either way, great video. 👍
Exactly....
What Joel said ;)
Probably "20 watt hours per litre" was intended. Or something like that.
Dude the Larq is lit AF 🔥. I love your show! I think you do a really good job doing in-depth coverage of complex issues while keeping it within the grasps of a layman or novice! You are one of the only channels covering the issues i care about in an educated manner that i feels is beyond professional.Thank you!!!
Although not a "prepper" by my definition, I do like being less reliant on large scale infrastructure. This leads me to be more in tune with these small scale options. Thanks for bringing this information together for our consideration. ~P
Please report this video for misinformation
@@jermsbestfriend9296 What counter-factual information was presented in this video?
@@jermsbestfriend9296 why?
What is your definition of prepper?
Air to water generation……simple
Hey Matt, I think you should do more interviews with the researchers of these projects, I think you could give them a spot light and have great conversations on your channel also. I don't know how they'd feel about it but I would love to see more scientists becoming rock stars in this day and age.
Great suggestion, researchers are more accessible now and can reach a wider audience. Before people, I'd say they can use social media even to connect with researchers in their field. Vlogging experiments, asking questions and talking about encountered challenges via video would be really cool.
This is a great idea. I’m commenting so hopefully it will get more attention.
Very interesting. I am now retired, but worked in Pharma for over 25 years. Our USP water systems used Carbon beds, RO membranes, and Mixed Beds along with water softeners. There was a considerable loss of water along with the brine associated with softeners.
Thanks, gives me something to think about while I’m drinking ice tea on the back porch!
Slightly off-tangent, but can we use the leftover brine from seawater desalination for Lithium production? Given that the U.S. is trying to boost domestic Lithium production, it would make sense to combine the two processes if it's scientifically and economically feasible.
I don't have a STEM background so if I sound ridiculous asking this, please excuse my ignorance.
Very good observation, there is Lithium in Sea Water, but the brine is loaded in Sodium from the salt in ocean water, and right now scientists are working on a Sodium battery that doesn't use Lithium or rare Earth minerals, it potentially could be a win-win for everyone, but more scientific studies need to be done, but the concept is a good one.
Unfortunately most brines do not contain Lithium salts. Most Lithium is mined in Bolivia and Zaire.
@@allanlank turns out in the us the salton sea is full of it and sea water has some too
Li accounts for a very small percent only. In the case that those countries or cities with desalinated water as their water, decide to switch to brine as their source of the metals than the cheaper mined ones, then it can be used. But currently there is no demand for such expensive metal
Assuming all of the worlds water desalination is from sea water (which it isn't) - You can get about 5000 kg of lithium. Which is very small already, but in reality only 1% of the worlds desalination is from sea water also. So 50kg of lithium from worlds sea water desalination, which is not a lot. So no, it's likely not really feasible at the moment.
Thanks for sharing these simple, cheap and portable drinking water solutions.
I'm curious if there will be any impact from large scale adoption of these technologies. what will removing moisture out of the air do especially to an already dry area? Also had this question if wind turbines and wave power. energy removed would have to have some impact, wonder if this has been looked into. also the mit water purifier. I wonder if this can be scaled up seems like it would be a much better first stage for any desalination plant.
We can and should always run environmental impact analyses, but I’m skeptical that moisture extraction would have that much of an impact. Maybe at industrial scales? But it’s not as if the water permanently disappears. We can pull the water out of the atmosphere, but unless we bottle it up and never release it back out it’s going to eventually evaporate and re-enter the atmosphere. There is also such a large amount of water on earth that we cannot conceivably remove any consequential amount of it permanently.
As for wind and tidal power, I don’t honestly know but many of the same arguments from above apply. Granted we’re not using them at very large scales today, but at current scales we’re simply not extracting even a fraction of a percent of the total available energy. And while we could discover unintended impacts in the future, you also have to ask yourself what the alternative is? Wind and other renewables have way less damaging environmental impacts than fossil fuels, and none of the perceived fears with nuclear fission. What other energy source would you recommend?
To your overall point, yes everything we do has some kind of impact or cost. There’s not really any getting around that. Which means that every decision we make is a series of tradeoffs. At the same time, we don’t have perfect information and we have needs that have to get met today. We can’t always wait to perform a study on what exactly gets screwed over if we use A instead of B. Or we can, but that comes at the cost of needs not getting met. So it comes down to what things we value and prioritize.
Wind turbines are no "worse" than anything else in the way of wind like trees or buildings. It would take absolutely ludicrous amounts of them to change the weather. If you're unsure, remember that a turbine can only take part of the energy out of the wind, if they took it all they would stop turning.
I remember something about this being looked at.
I think there was the idea of getting electricity at the same time you take energy out of areas with violent weather, or something like that. I just remember the end conclusion would require basically the entire area of the Sahara to be covered in windmills before any effect became noticeable.
I'm just pulling scraps out of the back shed of memory here, so don't take my word for anything. Just look around online, I'm sure you'll find something
Higher humidity is a negative consequence of climate crisis. I'd bet removing water from the air would be net positive. Bonus points: install zillions of gel film packs in forests, to replenish soil moisture lost to heat.
I imagine it would be similar to current cloud seeding, it doesn't really work outside of specific conditions and has no real impact on the environment at large because it is just not that effective. Cloud seeding efforts that are ongoing in China impact large areas for hours at a time and seem to only increase rain fall by at most 10%. The gel tech might be usable on a small temporary scale for disaster relief or backpacking but I don't see it being an industrial scale solution.
Matt, you are great and another wonderful video. Many people here and who live in our level of wealth need to broaden their knowledge, I’ve worked in some of those countries and there is no water shortage, they lack the infrastructure to simply clean and deliver. It’s not about people of color, global warming, or the earth drying up, it’s about money, ineptitude of government, or just peoples ignorance. Local instability and lack of education is a much bigger issue. The idea that water processing is bad for the environment is wrong too, rivers today are vastly cleaner then they were 50 years ago. Water born disease were here long before Europeans showed up. This tech is very cool and ideas and tech like this will solve the problems we face and ensure our ecosystem continues to improve.
These are technologies that definitely have a place in the future especially in water stressed area. It might help if people had a solution like this at home to further lower the strain on water resources. Of course, recycling used water should still be an important part of the process of generating fresh water.
Thank you for this! I have been pondering all kinds of thoughts and ideas on the subject for a long time. Despite where I live, there are still many concerns about our drinking water, such as hexavalent chromium that was leaked into our water supply recently, etc. There's more I can say, but I really just wanted to thank you for all your work and sharing this amazing information ~ I, and am sure all your viewers, are really very grateful for what you are doing! It is extemely useful and very helpful ~> and trustworthy, as you cover many other factors and it's effects, etc.... so Thank You!!!
Just read an interesting factoid today in "The Precipice", by Toby Ord (hey Matt, could you review this book?). There are 26 million liters of accessible fresh water for every person on Earth. The problem is, they're not equally distributed. Hence interest in desalination. For example, here in Minneapolis, there are multiple actual lakes within walking distance of every resident. It rains and snows all year round, so fresh water is plentiful. But we considered moving to New Mexico, where lakes are nearly nonexistent, and most of the water is coming from drilling into an aquifer that is being drained at an alarming and unsustainable rate. And of course, most of humanity's population is concentrated on or near seacoasts.
One of the weird things people don't really comprehend is how much water is around us. Some areas obviously much less than others, but if we as a society, stop flattening our land we could repair the earth. If you create conditions where the land has terrain features that direct but slow water down, and allow it to pool into ponds, it keeps the surrounding area wet and able to sustain life, and as it slowly drains, it refills aquifers. Today we build flat land, and direct the water into run offs and sewers and dump it somewhere, which just dries out land and makes droughts worse.
You'd be shocked at how many areas of the world struggle for fresh water, but get so much rain and dump it right into the ocean. Then there are areas that have repaired their land, get a small fraction of that water, and never even have to irrigate their fields.
Pulling moisture from the air in all buy a few select areas seems really damaging.
It's not really how much clean water that is available! It's more of how much of that"clean water" is potable?
@@rll9911 As any serious hiker will tell you, assume none of it is potable. fwiw, I said fresh water, not clean water, meaning water with no (or nearly no) salt, water we can drink if it’s clean. But basically, any water out in the wild can be assumed contaminated with potentially dangerous bacteria or other microorganisms, and possibly dangerous chemicals as well. But if it’s fresh water, it can be cleaned, by something as simple as boiling or as complex as a city water plant.
We've definitely got lakes here in NM, but nothing like the number you've got in MN. Something that's positive about our landlocked state is that we aren't going to get drowned by sea level rise! We may burn up and blow away-- a lot of our state did this year-- but we won't drown. (Um, except in the monsoon flooding of the burnt areas.....) We don't get many tornadoes, either.
We're already very good at conserving water here, and we need to keep getting better.
You'd probably like northern NM. Mountain lakes, lots of green.
@@EleneDOM Yeah, we’re still thinking seriously about northern NM. Mountains in the high desert are a happy place for my body. I’d dreamed of finding someplace around Pecos, but the Calf Canyon/Hermit’s Peak fire definitely gave me pause.
But yeah, a few mountain lakes and reservoirs here and there are nothing like being four blocks from the Mississippi and a brisk walk from two separate lakes. We’re called the “Land of 10,000 Lakes”, but it’s actually closer to 20,000. We’re just modest about it.
Thanks!
I've always seen getting water from the air as a somewhat lacking strategy because most of the people who genuinely need water are in arid areas with low humidity. I find improvements in desalination technology the most likely solution to the water crisis. While not everyone lives near an ocean, desalination can produce massive amounts of water especially if done more efficiently than we do it now.
He specifically went over the fact that it could work in low humidity environments though ?
Did you watch the whole video? If you did, and are sticking by what you said, then you need to specify the amount of humidity in the problem areas you would be speaking about. Because the video addressed rather low humidity areas, even below 15% though I do not know how far below 15% it could be handling,.
as long as there is energy to put into it water from air can work, but if it's not free (paid off or very optimal solar) it's a huge energy consumer for very little water. you can't get a full flowing garden hose of water without a sports field of solar, or more. it is very energy intensive, enen in humid areas.
25000 miles of desert coast line in the world.
Mountain areas are often dry but can have a lot of moisture
@@volvo09 They use it in mountainous areas gather the water and use gravity to move the water around
Man, you put together a top-notch channel here. I *love* how you provide a write up of the script with citations, and that's one of the main reasons whenever I see an Undecided new video I go straight there.
One factor in the puzzle that is rarely talk about is most Desal plants are at sea level (obviously) and the clean water then needs to be pumped uphill to be used. This adds a lot to the energy costs.
You can pump uphill without adding energy, IF the water you want to pump uphill is flowing.
The technology is called "Ram Pump" it's using the energy in the water tu pump it uphill.
A little comment just to thank you for your videos. I'm not a native English speaker but you speak well enough for a full understanding. So I don't comment most of the time, but it helps the YT algo so it worse it sometimes, for your referencing.
there is a super easy fix to the brine solution. Pump it to large holding areas on land. This would actually replenish underground aquifers create more humidity in the air as well so areas down wind of these would experience more rain events. Plus we can harvest lithium from this process as well as sea salt.
Why not skip the desalination all together? Nevada and Utah have large dry lake beds, some already covered in salt. Pump sea water into them and let nature take care of the desalination process.
And Mg, Na, Cl, K, S, he'll even Uranium.
These aren't worth extracting at the concentrations found in regular seawater, but not only is the idea that desalination will have a massive throughput, but it is doing exactly what you would want to do to make extracting minerals appealing, it concentrates them.
I don't see any reason why there needs to be a waste stream from desalination at all, at least with some targeted development
Salts don't filter out, you'll have salty aquifers. There are some naturally, they're not good for people, animals or plants.
@@got2kittys it can also cause damage to municipal wells as it changes the chemistry of the water.
@@got2kittys it actually depends on the depth of the aquifers. And they can still make large holding areas lines with something that would filter it out the salt. Which would just produce more humidity for more rain events. Especially if the bottoms of the shallow holding areas are dark in color.
Can you do a follow-up on the brine problem? Why have I not heard about mining the brine for resources we currently dig holes in the ground for?
Thermodynamically, how does that "zero electricity" solution work? It seems too good to be true.
Looking at the Nature source, it says they have to heat it above 45°C to break the hydrogen bonds and actually get the water back, and that heat has to come from somewhere. In fact the picture they show of the full setup shows wires connected and something labeled "heaters" so there is definitely energy involved and it seems they're using electricity. At best this seems like a more efficient dehumidifier.
Spoiler alert. it doesn't work. Matt always push this nonsense to his uncritical audience.
Can't wait for Thunderfoot's reaction
Forget water supply, can i use the dehumidifier gel to keep a basement dry? Or maybe mix it with a swamp cooler to get a cute AC loop going.
When I hear about the brine-residue from desalination, I always wondered if it's possible to dump that salt residue in areas like the North Atlantic to counteract the freshwater runoff from Greenland that threatens to interrupt the flow of the Gulf Stream due to the different water densities.
As far as I understand it that would have a devastating ecological impact, as you'd essentially be turning all that fresh water into salt water.
Great question. I like how you think.
@@Sancarn You wouldn't dump it on the ice. I was thinking that you'd put it in freighter ships and release it in the ocean further off of the coast to add more salt content to the freshwater diluted ocean water. No idea if it works, it was just an idea how to potentially use the brine and alleviate the looming dangers of the ocean current disruption.
@@Equulai I see two problems with your idea:
1. It would be expensive.
2. Would probably be an ecological disaster, because you will inadvertently introduce invasive species. If you move and dump such amounts of material from one area to another that is unavoidable.
(that's already a huge problem with the ballast water of ships. If you want to know more about that topic you should look up the "Ballast Water Management Convention")
@@Jehty_ It would cost money, but what do we do with the brine at the moment?Just dump bit back into the water where it was extracted?`
And the ecological disaster: I cannot see that. The brine is a result from a filtration and separation process. Except for extremophiles, can something of substance really survive and pass through all these processes?
I can see, however, that the introduction of all the salt in specific areas could cause an unhealthy increase of salinity in these areas until it dilutes enough.
Hi,
Can't sea water be filtered by the ground itself?
If you find the proper place, with the right permeability, somewhere close along the shore line, then dig a big area that's under the sea level, won't the water permeate? Use gravity to have clean water.
I haven't researched this, just thought of this now. Maybe you know more on this subject?
Thanks
The concern with pulling moisture out of the air is the same with cloud seeding, you take rain and or local moisture and keep it for your area and prevent it for other areas ... take the moisture out of the air for drinking but prevent plants from collecting water from morning dew. So people that can afford to take it prevent others of getting it. Because something can be done, should it it be done?...Sci should always look at the long term affects.
@Sci Me
Effects.
It is not the same; cloud seeding triggers a system that is supersaturated with moisture causing water to precipitate. in the other case, you are simply condensing the water present in the air either by cooling or by adsorption. In the later case, taking out the water from the adsorbed matrix can be difficult.
@@janami-dharmam sorry you misunderstood, it's was not about the how to get water. It was about taking the water before it would naturally go somewhere.
I live in Karachi Pakistan I like your comments
What prevents mold/algae from growing on the gel? Most wet/damp materials seem to speed the growth of molds/algae
I want to hear more about this gel solution. Konjac root is extremely hydrophilic (it's essentially composed entirely of dietary fiber, hence its use in shirataki noodles), so it would make sense if it had the capacity to absorb ambient air moisture, but I see no way to release that moisture without the use of significant energy. I suspect the environmental impacts of such a technology would be minimal at best, air is highly fluid and mixes much more easily than saline water, and there is a TON of water in the air, but the tech leaves me with questions.
Could the brine be utilized for anything else useful? It would seem like it could be moved, dried/cleaned/purified to then be used for the sodium based batteries that were talked about recently?
This is a good time to explain my idea. So, you have wind turbines that aren't running because we don't need the power at that moment. You need fresh water. Boy do I have the solution for you. Giant dehumidifiers. This idea came to me when I got a large dehumidifier for my garage. It would fill up it's one gallon tank in a few hours and I would have to constantly empty it. I thought to myself 'this water could be used out west' and that's how it all came about.
well it would stop rain to fall :/
That sounds like a good idea to get fresh water from the air but if it takes more power to get the humid air to drop the water you may as well import/buy gallons of fresh water for some other place.......I doubt that an area that is not gifted with high humidity would get much fresh water form a device that you state so your device would be running on power all of the time but little water would be made..........you should try out your idea in a dry area (desert maybe) that lacks humidity.
for how to handle the brine: we use it to make salt further inland, we sell some of the resulting salt, the rest we package up and throw back into salt mines, from the salt mines we can resell and refine it for molten salt thermal batteries and molten salt based power plants. we could also likely use it to mine lithium and sodium for lithium and sodium based batteries. Something else we could try is weather manipulation, if we start pumping a good amount of sea water inland into deserts we could raise local humidity levels, increase cloud cover for the surrounding areas and use this to fight desertification, we could make more of the desert habitable, we might even be able to start reforesting a desert in a few decades of pumping or using canals to move sea water inland.
Use the brine from desalination for salt production. Instead of discharging the brine, allow it to evaporate in a shallow pool and you've got crude salt.
Good idea, but the salt may be need to be treated and cleaned before it could be put to use.
Yeah, it seems like an obvious solution, so I'm wondering why that's not done. Is it the land area needed? Is it some of the salts you'd get if you evaporate all the water? I know I've heard for commercial sea salt production they don't boil off all the water because you'll contaminate your salt with bitter tasting magnesium(think it was magnesium) salts
Crude salt yes with a lot of pollutants too
Northern states use a lot of road salt in the winter!
I used to live near polar circle as a kid. Salt has low commercial value. Hence shipping costs limits practical use.
Dumping it back into the sea creates issues with marine life. Major desalination plants in Texas have been refused permission to get setup by the EPA blocking desalination...
No smoke without fire?
Where in the Southwest is the humidity as high as 15%. I lived In Arizona. The humidity was 5%. Good luck with that.
I always get so excited by these new technologies and find a I use for them in my personal life. But I have learned to hold back my enthusiasm some as it seems they disappear of never make it to production. Would love to see a video on the ones you have looked into that actually made it to production
yeah, most of these are investment startups. the company has a barely feasible idea, and just throws marketing money at it to get hype based investment.
if it were that easy, they wouldn't be talking to me and you. countries would be flipping out over it. but there is always a cost, it's not as simple as quick, cheap, organic filters. there IS a downside.
Yes, let's see the production model, one can actually buy rather than become a missionary for idea.
Thanks Matt! I really enjoy your channel - even the puns ;-)
I was with you until you said the solar ion device required 20 watts per litre. Why does anyone - let alone a presumably well educated technology expert always confuse watts (i.e. joules per second) with energy (i.e. joules).
Was that 20 watts over a period of a hundred years for 1 litre? or was it 20 watts for 1 litre every minute (damn - that would be impressive)
From his citation, the journal says: "The resulting water exceeded World Health Organization quality guidelines, and the unit reduced the amount of suspended solids by at least a factor of 10. Their prototype generates drinking water at a rate of 0.3 liters per hour, and requires only 20 watts of power per liter." So 3.33 hours for one litre of water. E = P*t = 20W * 3.33 hours = 66.66 Joules per litre.
@@richardlighthouse5328 Nonsense. You're confusing power with energy again. Or maybe the article cited does.
if the device really consumes energy at the rate of 20 watts (that is, 20 joules per second), and can process 0.3 litres in an hour (i.e. 3600 seconds) - then that would work out at 20 * 3600 / 0.3 joules per litre - or 240,000 joules per litre.
Now the thing is, joules are really, really small. There are 3.6 million joules in a KWh, so 240,000 joules is still only 0.066 KWh, or about a cent's worth depending on the price your utility charges. Regular tap water costs around 0.1 cents per litre (again, depending on your utility), so it looks like this desalination process costs 10 times that of regular tap water. Sounds steep, but if it's true, and if the device lasts for a long, long time - this would still be impressive.
I do not understand the unit 20W / l ... Could you maybe explain this in a bit more detail? Is it maybe linked to the 0.3 l / h?
So, my question would be, given that humans need water (as well as salt) to exist, why can't we use the brine as part of the whole 'collect sea salt' thing? Honestly asking due to curiosity.
You saved me the effort of writing that same question.
In fact, traditional salt production practically only needs an open space in the sun.
Better yet, they plan to harvest rare earth elements from it
The amount of 'need' we have for salt is a tiny fraction of the 'need' we have for water. The ratios are not there, and most of the salts recovered by desalinization are genuinely a waste product - best stored back in the ocean we pulled them from... that's where the fresh water will end up again anyway, so this is not going to result in an increase in ocean salinity - the desalinization plant effluent concentration is only of a concern at the local discharge site.
@@KhalidElMouloudi how much of rare earth elements can you harvest from it?
@@karolstopinski8350 the concentration is next to nothing but since they are precious it's probably worth the trouble
Liked this!! Instead of solving the world on a sliver platter I like how these solutions are "one of the kind" into solving SPECIFIC problems and targets. Instead of wondering how to solve everything and anything.
Most people have a water generator in their houses right now - their air conditioners. Air conditions put out way more water from the air than people think, and if we can sanitize and filter that water (its usually heavily bacteria infected) , I think it could be part of the fight for clean water.
Agree 100%.
When I was on holidays in Greece, they had the AC connected to a bucket that we had to empty 2-3 times a day. I guess it created about 30-40 liters of water per day. We used it to water plants, but filtering it would be a good source of potable water.
Seasonal only and output depends on run time and relative humidity.
@@lynncomstock1255 Yes, seasonal, but if we're talking about air conditioning, most productive at the times of year when fresh water is most needed!
so is there a reason why large desalination plants don't have clear quasit huts to pump the discharged water into to get the rest of the water out of it and produce more clean water and then use the left over salt for things like salt for roads? or possibly for food production as people add salt to brine food ?
To convert water in the air (steam) into liquid water, you need to extract a precise amount of energy from it. This amount never changes. How would rhis gel make this any different?
I know right, some people think it’s magic not science
Dehumidifiers also have one other significant problem:
There is a very small amount of water in the air, and the dehumidifier would need more and more energy to flow more and more air with lower and lower humidity - while in significant scale to produce any sort of sufficient amount of water, it also eventually creating a desert all around its location.
And with scale, I mean that if considering 30°C / 100% humidity drained to 0%, it means 35 ml of water out of cubic meter of air. Thus to obtain 2 L of water per 24 hours, you need to completely drain 57 cubic meters of 100% humid air.
In case, that humidity is only 30% and you can drain it up to 10% (= 5,5 ml/cubic meter), you'll need 363 cubic meters of air - that's a cube with an edge of 7,2 meters - just to get enough liquid for 1 person for 1 day. Not to mention, that it would be "distilled water" and you would have to mineralize it first, to prevent serious health issues…
It's just another SCAM…
Vapour and steam aren't the same. Vapour is in a higher energy state. Convince that vapour to give up some energy to its surroundings and you have liquid water. The transition yields energy.
@@FalkonNightsdale sorry, what health issues does distilled water cause? You can get minerals from food sources, it doesn't have to come from water...
Not STEAM, water vapor. Vapor and steam are completely different.
How much water does it take to manufacture the gel packs?
Is it more water than they will ever produce?
These are very promising technologies, thanks for the video! Here in S CA we have a desalination plant in Carlsbad that produced 50M gallons per day of water from the ocean. There seems to be a lot of debate about it, so while people debate, the plant continues to pump out 50M gallons per day at a fairly low cost, using an environmentally freindly process. It's amazing how Americans can fight over anything, even proven technology. If we could just harness Americans ability to argue, we would have an infinite source of energy.
Carlsbad Desalination Plant in San Diego, California, requires approximately 35 MW to run and provides 50 million gallons of water supply per day.
Where does that power come from.
Well A lot of it is hydro, the more you need desalinization the more likely your not going to have the hydro power to run it.
So yes harnessing the hot air would be a good idea!
if 50 mil gallons and 35MW checks out, that's 4.43 Wh per liter. Assuming he meant the MIT device uses 20W and takes 3.3 hours per liter, that's 66 Wh. Ouch. Hope it gets better when it's scaled up.
At $50 per unit it would cost 1.32 billion USD to get the same capacity. (about 26 million devices)
The Carlsbad desalination plant cost one billion according to Wall Street Journal, via Wikipedia.
Would the gel membrane not lower the overall humidity in an area if used in large scale, thus decreasing rainfall further and extending the drought?
As usual, Matt is quenching my thirst for knowledge.
😂
Quenching it with b.s.
All this "water from air" nonsense is completely impractical and very expensive.
Yet another magical handwavium is not gonna change it.
Lol, you have chosen a very bad source.
I'm sorry, my dude.
Could you clarify: 20 watts / L is not enough information - is that 20 watts per hour or over a day?
Is using the gels and similar technologies to remove water from the air the best approach?
In our complex eco system, I imagine taking water from the air will have unintended consequences.
Maybe using the ocean is safer overall. Imagine pulling water from the air and causing an ever increasing reduction in rainfall.
The orders of magnitudes are OK. There is as much water in the air than there is drinkable water underground, and there is 1000x less water in the clouds.
@@jowjor considering the recent report of ground damage and sinking due to the huge reduction of the water table in the area, I'd say you're confirming my point. We have a bigger impact on the climate both local and large scale than we realize.
There are A LOT of us now and if we're not careful, outlr "solutions" will only lead to worse, more unsolvable problems.
@@NoTimeLeft_ Main difference is, any water you take from the air is back in a few days, while the underground water takes years to do a full circle, and you can take more than there is raining. And you don't need to take all the underground water tu causes issues, only a small part and there is voids everywhere.
Air can hold lots of water. These are taking nowhere near as much water out as you think.
@@falconerd343 take out as much as I think.
Are you considering if tens of millions of people if not hundreds of millions used it?
I am talking about foresight.
How many people in a given area can use it?
If each person pulls 17L of water out of the air, how many people in one square mile can do the same?
Pretty sure if an item like that is needed, it's needed for many people.
Just because something CAN work, doesn't mean it WILL work, given the scaling and impact.
But all the focus was placed on making it work.
Nice video. Current state-of-the-art seawater desalination membranes are actually a very energy efficient separation technology. The "large energy input" that is required occurs because thermodynamics tells us that energy is required to de-mix solutions (e.g., de-mix salt and water molecules). Current desalination membranes operate close to the thermodynamic minimum for separating salt from water. This energy is relatively large because there is so much salt in the ocean that must be de-mixed, not because the membranes have poor efficiency.
Whenever I have a shower I marvel that I'm washing my body in drinking water
I've always wondered actually why we have never invested in two d different water: drinking and non mineralised water for baths, irrigation etc
@@emmanuelcarretero5758 haha. Golden!
@@emmanuelcarretero5758 lol
@@anneeq008 same.
@@anneeq008 More trouble than it's worth in most cases, in homes it would require a third set of pipes within houses and to houses. The main cost of drinking water is in the transportation rather than the purification.
The gel does not work under a certain moisture level. On dry days it might even lose charge.
My favourite one of these is the Solar Water Dome that is being put up at NEOM in Saudia Arabia. I think if we can create relatively low cost reverse rivers that can irrigate crops, we can pull lots of carbon down to current desert lands that could help nature, human food requirements and the carbon cycle..
Problem with NEOM is its a fantasy. The Line is made with false promises and tech that doesn't work. They show flying people and parks with trees but only people that live on the top level will see sun light and that would be only 4 hours a day. Food would have to take up all the land they can see from the line which is a desert.... see an issues.
Couple this with the new research that recently came out that human must eat some a percentage animal protein in their diet to get proper nutrients, the fact you can't expand the line for new families, hyper loop doesn't exist and the train going one way with no stops would have to go faster than the current bullet train and you can imagine how dumb the line idea actually is.
@@killrade4434 I mostly agree. Just think this particular technology has real potential..
i was wondering is the gel can use as dehumidifier and supply us water the same time?if it can, i would like to have a bunch of them. it will make my room cooler and less moldy. hope it can be use as air conditioner.
If we really want to get serious about reducing water usage, it's the agricultural sector that needs to be changed. By placing crops, that are capable, in greenhouses, using hydroponics and, eventually, artificially lit plant factories (vertical farms.) Not only would this save tremendous amounts of water, there would be also be increased yields and in less space.
There would, of course, be an increase in energy required to make crops this way but it will likely be the only way as farming land and water resources becomes less available in the future.
Yes, but there are limits to how much we can possibly save all our resources like water, food, energy, you name it. Why do we need so much resources and become stingy with it in the first place? Take a moment to ponder the root cause of all these problems caused by....humans.
How does the gel work? Hang it up and the water drips off it? or do you have to ring it out like a rag? You never explained the tech properly.
I do think that these technologies have a place in solving the water shortages. Just like solar panels on your house. Both these offer a level of independence from a system that can be unreliable.
I still don't understand the potential form factors for the gel in the field. Would it be suspended in the air with collection plates beneath it? Could they be placed similarly as rooftop solar panels with drain lines going down to a tank?
could it be that you have made a mistake by mentioning that the MIT device will be available for around 50$? in all the sources i have found about this device only the price of 50$ of the portable solar panel is mentioned. like they wanna sell it on the side while writing abut the MIT thing.. but i cant find a price estimation for the desalination unit anywhere
QUESTION, what is brine if not salts, metals and Organics, so why don’t we mine the stuff
Does the water pitcher filter remove fluoride and radioactive particles
I wonder if it's economical to use the waste brine to make sea salt.
I do field work in remote locations of Alaska, often in the Y-K Delta where fresh water is not available outside of villages. In those cases, we can't even use a portable gravity filter unless meltwater is available, which is only for a brief time at the start of summer. The only alternative has been hauling in jugs of water which requires takes up precious fuel and space in support aircraft. Something like this, combined with a solar panel, would be ideal. I'll be watching the development of this tech. Thanks for the informative video!
I’ve always wondered why they can make salt out of the brine that comes from the desalination?
I have a concern about those gel packs. If they work like a dehumidifier bucket I'm a basement by pulling water out of the air, wouldn't that create a long term problem in areas that are already arid? You could be creating a larger problem by making the air even drier. This could be a solution in tropical areas though, such as a rainforest.
Re the gel, I still have no idea how it would be used, how someone would get potable from it. Please explain.
how does the spongy hydrophilc thing work? i'd think it would just attract water and reach some kind of equilibrium if temp stayed constant. or does it attract enough water that it forms a large bead and gravity pulls the bead off the surface...? so it's like condensation but without needing something below the dew point? could a hydrophobic surface humidify air faster than evaporation without needing additional energy too?
The gel sounds great, but it does need to be freeze dried before use and it requires a heater and condenser to collect the water. Also the water still needs to be filtered after collection.
Great episode, congrats! And what’s the risk of biocontamination in the gel? Thanks…
Agreed to your point nobre
How much more water can you get from those pads if you put a fan infront of one, so it comes in contact with more air at a time?
So I could of course be incorrect, but as far as I can find, MIT's ICP filtration is not $50. On the MIT news page they state, "...can also be driven by a small, portable solar panel, which can be purchased for $50." I believe this was misconstrued as the price of the filter. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find an actual price point for the filter at this time. Just thought this was worth mentioning, in case you're like me and wondering when you can get one to replace your RODI filter.
How is the water separated from the gel? Does the water just run off? Would you deploy the gel in large sheets that let air pass over it? I really wish you would have addressed the functional aspects of how the gel is to be used.
I'm curious about whether that gel could also be used for indoor dehumidification.
Probably wouldn't remove enough moisture to make a big difference.
I’m originally from the Philippines Islands .. there are some difficulties providing fresh drinking water to everyone .. watching this makes me wonder on a family home basis .. would MIT’s ICP work with rain capture as well as sea water?? .. there are plenty of sources of rain water and I have family in the Philippines that provides filtered well water for drinking and cooking to hotels and restaurants .. but with the ICP on a larger platform (200-500ga per day) so closet sized instead of suitcase sized .. it might also be an inexpensive way to provide potable water to households that get their potable water from other sources (ie: stores, distributors, filters) ..
where can such equipment (MIT water filtration device) be purchased? pls advise. tnx.
Swales and water retention are the long term solutions. Look up some desert reforestation projects. It all starts with slowing/capturing water and letting it soak into the ground. This can be done other places too, if you have wells that have dried up, this is for you!
How do ypu do that?
couldnt the brine be dried, and the left over salts used in power storage?
I’m unclear on how the water is extracted from the gel, ie after it pulls water out of the air, how do you get the water out of the gel? I noticed some reference to temperature, but it wasn’t clear to me.
Is the brine not a good source of sodium for Na-ion batteries? How much effect would the runoff have over time if it's returned to to ocean or great lakes? wouldn't residual liquid replenish the water and dilute the salt content?
I love your attitude towards new inventions and technology - optimistic and yet critically thoughtful.
One potential use for brine is as ice melt for winter roads (after dried).
When you filter water with an ICP, do you then put the water in a jug...galo?
So the gel can be stored (?) in an emergency kit such that in case of a remote land/water emergency or plane crash, people can break out something that can produce decent qty. of safe water???
What will taking more moisture out of already arid air do at scale? 6 liters a day would add up quickly when there's an entire village or city using it. I think that it might be better in a coastal area, instead of desalination, pull water from the air. Many people already use dehumidifiers in their houses.
Weaving the sponsor into the related subject, GIFTED! More puns/humour please!
Very interesting Matt. Perhaps the saline output should be thought of as a potential source. There are so many contaminants of sea water that could be recovered if they are concentrated.
Even Salt itself is a useful product when dried out although the volumes produced to recover sufficient water would be in excess of our needs and maybe utilise too much energy, it is an interesting possibility. When we view the vast areas of drying seawater to produce commercial masses of edible salt (seen for example in the north of western Australia) there is the possibility to utilise one of these techniques as a primary stage to pre-concentrate the seawater and recover some potable water at the same time..
As someone who lives in the Mojave desert, I would love to get my hands on that awesome Gel. Is it available to buy yet?
Wait, can the gel be used as an indoor dehumidifier?
I live in Mississippi. Just walk outside and take a deep breath and your good for the day.
What happens to the air/moisture content and the precipitation in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, if 38m people in California start to pull moisture out of the air with this gel or with one of those source panels?
can the brine just be transferred somewhere to process it into regular table salt?
Could the brine be added back to the discharge from waster water treatment plants, basically matching the salinity of the discharge to that of the ocean?
Lol LARQ. I supported them through their kickstarter and got 4 bottles. They all got red rings of death. They replaced them and had problems with those. It wasn't until they redesigned the caps that they problems seemed to go away. Another problem just showed up to take its place. The metal inside the cap was corroding underneath the paint and caused paintchips to get into the water, which I assume is because the cap is made of aluminum and the bottle is made of stainless steel. End of the story was they wouldn't warranty it since it was out of warranty (1 year lol) even tho every bottle will eventually have this problem, and they basically told me that wasn't why its chipping.
could brine not be further refined to salt and used in sodium ion battery production?
How much of the saline discharge lithium fluoride? Might it be used in a small reactor to provide power for the process of desalinization?
Here's an idea. Put a thin layer of that gel on the back of a solar panel to collect water at night and release it during the day when the panels heat up. This would not only produce some water but would also cool the panels making them more efficient.
How does the gel work could you paint your roof and it fills your tanks or ?
The gel sounds amazing but I didn't quite get what it was doing. Is it like a sponge for the air? Then you heat it and it drops the water? sounds like the first steps to one of those Dune Stillsuits 😎