by Chas Bonner
“There is a lot of water on Earth, but more than 97% of it is salty and over half of the remainder is frozen at the poles or in glaciers.” (“Current Thinking.” The Economist. 10/31/09)
That was an astounding statistic, knowing how much water we see, use, and waste. But how do we turn a problem into an opportunity?
Desalination has been an option for years, but it is extremely expensive, requiring massive amounts of energy. Some methods involve distillation of water and some involve reverse osmosis. No matter which, both are expensive and slow.
Two MBA students in Vancouver, B.C. have invented yet another method, which appears complicated on the surface, but is simply an ingenious method of ion exchange. Salt is essentially comprised of two elements, positively charged Sodium and negatively charged Chlorine. The new method separates the elements in salt, then causes the ions to electrically attract each other, then move out of the solution, finally leaving pure water. It is much more complicated than this simplified explanation, but it is actually no more than negative and positive ions attracting each other after being separated. One of the beauties of the process is that most power is supplied by sun and air.
Although desalination of seawater is probably still years away, with transport from the sea to areas where needed being costly, in agriculture we can at least see hope. Today, what we see is less and less water, more and more needs, and more and more battles for that water. Tomorrow we see hope becoming reality.
The only question: When is tomorrow?
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