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as We Know full and well here in California our planet is facing a freshwater crisis so the need for innovative solutions is greater than
ever there are dozens of different approaches to tackle this issue but what if I told you
there was a new way to get fresh water from the ocean that is so elegant in its Simplicity and
so obvious that it's a wonder why no one has thought of it before and guess what it's not
desalination it's a new Twist on atmospheric water harvesting and today we're going to talk
about how it works and why it might be the next big thing I'm Ricky and this is Two Bit da Vinci
today almost 2 billion people worldwide that's 26 of the global population live without safely
managed drinking water and we're currently facing the worst Mega drought in the last 1200 years here
in California now yes the recent rains here in 2023 have mitigated a lot of that but this cycle
will eventually continue in the future now if you live anywhere on the Southwest coast I know
you felt this too but you've probably also felt that if you live in some parts of Brazil a country
known for the Amazon the world's largest tropical rainforest yet the Earth is almost covered in
water so what is the problem well there are two sides to this issue the first is that most of the
Earth's water is in the oceans as salt water which isn't drinkable there is an estimated 1.38 billion
square kilometers of water on Earth but only 2.5 percent of that is fresh water and almost 71
percent of that fresh water is Frozen in glaciers at the polar ice caps leaving only 29.2 percent
some 10 cubic kilometers of fresh liquid drinking water however over 99 of that liquid freshwater
is locked in underground reservoirs inaccessible to us leaving only 0.92 percent of liquid water
in rivers and lakes for us to actually drink this means we only have .0067 percent of the
total water on Earth available for consumption slightly less if you discount polluted Waters
but even though this percentage is quite small it still represents about 22 300 cubic miles or 93
000 cubic kilometers of fresh liquid easily accessible drinking water or roughly 25
quadrillion gallons that's a lot of water to put this in perspective the average person consumes
a little over 79 gallons of water per day at home so the entire world population consumes around 228
trillion gallons of water per year so in total in a whole year we use less than one percent of
the total available water supply at any given moment and remember this is a renewable source
that replenishes itself through the water cycle so there's plenty of water to go around even after
accounting for population growth which brings me to the second issue population distribution you
see the problem isn't that there isn't enough fresh water on Earth the problem is that water
isn't always where it needs to be because of the way the population is distributed on earth
a good 2.3 billion people almost 30 percent of the population lives in water stressed
countries according to the UN we even see the same distribution problem within countries I mean look
at the U.S places like California and Arizona House millions of people yet they're among the
driest states in the country water management and recycling in places like Las Vegas have proven to
be successful and cut cutting down water usage but this strategy is inherently limited by how
much water is available to begin with and isn't sustainable in the long term as the population
grows take Las Vegas as an example the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority
John Ensminger was once quoted saying that this neon city is one of the most water efficient
cities in the world and that the city beat the odds by cutting its overall water use by 26
percent while also adding 750 000 people to its population since 2002 which is commendable but
it's obvious that it hasn't been enough since about 10 percent of Las Vegas water comes from
groundwater aquifers and most of them are running dry but before we get into that let me tell you
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me and you for supporting the show so besides water management we must find additional sources
of water Israel is probably the world's best example of pulling this off by combining Smart
Water Management and education with desalination they've turned a water stress nation into a water
of surplus exporter in less than 20 years so the question is why aren't desalination plants
everywhere this is exactly what I asked myself about 10 months ago when I made this video that
I strongly recommend you watch at after this one links in the description in short the problem is
desalination is very expensive and it produces a concentrated salt water solution called brine
that is usually pumped back into the ocean where it can wreak havoc by altering local salinity and
temperature on the ocean floor this raises several important questions like why aren't salt companies
or lithium mining companies partnering with D cell companies to extract valuable minerals from the
brine why is the brine treated as waste and not a resource I did a bit of research and the answer is
as always cost although it is possible to extract valuable minerals and compounds like sodium
hydroxide and hydrogen chloride which are widely used in hundreds of Industries not to mention in
most toilet cleaners and in nearly all caustic drain cleaners and oven degreasers it's more
expensive than traditional production methods as long as there are cheaper alternatives out there
there will be little demand for brine byproducts that said researchers from MIT have been working
on an economically viable product mix to make brine a good and competitive source of certain
industrial chemicals so fingers crossed we still have a big challenge to face if there's not enough
surface water not enough rain and we're draining all of our underwater aquifers dry where do we
get fresh water for the millions of people that live on coastal cities without desalinating the
oceans the answer as it turns out is all around us we condense it out of thin air this is called
atmospheric water harvesting or generation AWG for short now a small disclaimer I already made
a video about this a while ago where I explain a couple of details in certain Technologies and
how companies like tsunami Works can help you disconnect from the water utility grid with
their water condensers the bigger units being able to pump out roughly 330 gallons of fresh
drinking water per day that's enough for a family of four I'm hoping we can get our hands on one of
these and if we do we'll definitely make a video about it but we're talking about an investment of
fifty thousand dollars for the bigger unit that will last around 20 years producing 330 gallons
of water per day and that's just a lot of money furthermore considering that the average U.S
household paid a little under fifty dollars a month on their water bill although it's closer
to 100 here in California this means it would take roughly 40 to 80 years for the investment to break
even and that's without counting the insane amount of electricity these things consume which is close
to 11 kilowatts but if you're thinking sure but a dependable and clean water supply is priceless
to that I would say you're right but there is some bad news because some of these units might
not generate the stated 330 gallons of water per day depending on humidity levels and the exact
climate where you live this is because this system works by Cooling and compressing the air until it
reaches its dew point basically the point at which the air becomes saturated with water
vapor and is forced to condense out but it only works efficiently if you have really humid air
the problem is relative humidity which is how much water vapor is in the air and compared to how much
it can hold it's the same Principle as a sponge if the sponge is wet as in containing a lot of the
water that it can hold you'll have no trouble bring water out of it but the sponge is just
lightly damp like in low relative humidity you can squish all you want but very few drops of water
will actually come out so essentially the success of a atmospheric water harvesting system is tied
to how humid the air is and we can't exactly control that or can we a team of researchers
from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign led by Dr Praveen Kumar afifa Rahman and francino
Dominguez just had the most amazing idea of how to work around all the inherent challenges of
atmospheric water harvesting by using the ocean Dr Kumar and his team's idea to capture and condense
humidity not from the dry air you'll find Inland but rather from the very humid air directly above
the ocean's surface you see water will naturally evaporate from and condense on the surface of any
body of water and if it's big enough it'll come close to reaching an equilibrium where
air contains nearly as much water vapor as it can hold at any given temperature this basically means
that the air directly above the ocean surface has almost a hundred percent relative humidity which
is basically why you sweat evaporates more slowly when you're at the beach this makes this ocean
Vapor ideal for atmospheric water harvesting their design uses a large Tower as an air collector to
capture humid air from the ocean's surface and pump it to a ground-based condenser that uses
energy to turn vapor into liquid water and then pump to condensed fresh water which will already
be drinkable to your house with this simple but powerful idea in mind the team of researchers set
out to find out exactly how much potential there was behind harvesting Oceanic water vapor where
would the best places to put it be and how much water could they really Harvest they proposed
building an offshore collector Tower 110 meters tall and 200 meters wide they wanted to make it
really high to take advantage of higher horizontal wind speeds at Greater Heights which increases the
flux of moisture through the tower to find out exactly how much Vapor this surface could capture
they ran very detailed computer simulations using hourly atmospheric climate data like temperature
pressure humidity and wind speed over the oceans of the world focusing on 14 key Coastal locations
near large water stress populations like Los Angeles Barcelona Tripoli Mecca and Perth among
others so I'd love to geek out about all the calculations these guys have done to figure
out exactly how much water they could produce because that's the kind of calculations I love
doing when I make these videos but the reality is that'll get a little bit too complicated so
I'll just break down some of the key takeaways below here's what they found across all 14 sites
around the world and averaging the last 30 years of historical data each one meter wide 200 meter
tall vertical strip of ocean Vapor Tower surface has the potential to capture between 0.6 and 1.45
million liters of water per day so the proposed 200 meter wide structure would be able to scoop
up 120 to 290 million liters of water per day which is about 32 to 76 million gallons per day
that's enough water for 400 000 to 900 000 people so to put that into perspective the LA Aqueduct
one of the biggest in the world receives around 524 million gallons of fresh water per day so
10 of these units could single-handedly cover LA's entire water demand and most likely have
a surplus this table shows the numbers for the other locations along with the number of units
we need to cover the entire City's demand Italy had the lowest potential in the tyranian sea near
Rome with only 0.3 million liters per meter of tower per day but even there it would only
require nine Towers to cover demand one of the key findings was that unlike water sources and
arid places that tend to dry up even more during Rising temperatures these higher temperatures
actually increase yield in the ocean water vapor Towers since it increases the evaporation rate
so this is a great long-term solution that'll work even better if scientists worst case scenarios are
ultimately realized so one thing I thought about when deploying structures like this is what the
impact would be on the environment well these 200 meter collectors disrupt the normal water
cycle by tapping the water at the source will they impact local or global weather patterns
and what about sea life and other considerations well the team thought of this too because based
on their calculations and predictions this wouldn't really have too much of an impact in
fact if we built collectors across all 14 study locations they would extract 780 billion liters
of water annually but that would only amount to .0015 percent of the total amount of water that
evaporates off the ocean each year the next thing on your mind is probably cost how much will the
system cost to install maintain and run how long will they last once the infrastructure is in place
thankfully Kumar and his team thought of this and did some Financial feasibility studies as
well they assumed the cost of 500 million to build the water infrastructure that will serve 500 000
users and 100 million for a renewable power plant with solar and wind the system should last roughly
30 years for an annual cost per beneficiary of 67 so what this means is that the entire construction
project will only cost you as an end user sixty seven dollars per year or about five dollars per
month operation and maintenance costs for the lifetime of this project will contribute 78.3
percent of the total cost and will run you another 174 dollars annually so the total cost to your
annual water bill will be in the amount of around 241 dollars per year or twenty dollars per month
that's less than half the national average and a quarter of the California average after 30 years
you'll have saved a minimum of around 11 000 and a maximum of almost thirty thousand dollars so to
summarize this is cheaper than conventional water much cheaper than desalination on its best day it
doesn't hurt the environment in any meaningful way and if you power with solar and wind it would be
totally renewable if scalable without putting extra stress on our traditional Water Supplies
of course there are still a ton of questions regarding how exactly the tower will suck up and
pump the air why do they draw the air ducts over water why don't we pipe them to shore underwater
the cold water could condense The Vapor inside the pipe allowing for us to forego the entire
condensation unit what condensation system is best suited for it what efficiency are we looking at
and how much of the vapor will actually be able to condense out of the air despite the many questions
the moment I read about this which is published in Nature's magazine scientific report just two
months ago I immediately knew these guys were onto something this is exactly the type of idea
that really gets me excited about the future this is just a theoretical paper and all the technical
details still have to be ironed out before it's actually implemented as far as how long this might
actually take to reach final production there's no reason to think that it'll take all that long
the technology is nothing new in fact it's just a clever reimagining of air water generation systems
that are already being built today by companies like tsunami works but by building them out on
the ocean we can take advantage of the fact that there is a layer of very humid air right over our
oceans and that is a resource that is continually being replenished as the sun comes up every day
this is one of those ideas that I love and I think it could really be a slam dunk so
if you're an ambitious or clever inventor or entrepreneur or engineer maybe this is one of
those projects that you might want to pick up on because yes today we do have water and water is
still relatively cheap that's what makes funding these kinds of projects difficult but there will
come a day when the water will slowly dry up more and more and the prices for water will
go up we've seen this happen with natural gas natural gas in America at least was seen as
such a cheap commodity that most homes use it for cooking for heating for clothes drying all
sorts of applications but as the war on Ukraine and other Global considerations have changed
that Dynamic and raised natural gas prices we're rethinking that and that same thing will happen
with water yes it's not too late right now but the best thing we can do is invest before it is
too late build these now and when the water prices go up and the water aquifers start drying out we
could turn these systems on it's best not to wait till it is too late to invest in this and that's
why we need need some cleverness and some people with vision who can see into the future and build
these systems before we absolutely have to and I think there's going to be a huge opportunity for
that all right that is a look at this video If You Like Water topics I think you'll like this video
as well that we've made so check it out until next week I'm Ricky and this is stupid DaVinci