I suggest that many people ought to consider that they are trying to survive in a place not meant for so many humans. Sorry you don’t like winter. Boo hoo for you. You were warned about the drought and heat and you think high technology will save you. How about you quit driving and try some drip irrigation. Learn to live with the heat and lack of water or move to the Midwest and learn to live with a different type of heat but have water. Quit throwing unfeasible ideas and my tax payment at a solution that won’t occur until after you pass away. Move. Or live without.
“A place not meant for so many humans”; in other words, the entire planet.
Pretty much.
How feasible would undersea pipelines be? Large pipes could have compressible air bags attached to them and you could control the depth they hovered at by controlling the pressure in the bags, Not sure if water would still seek it’s own level over 5000 miles and passing the equator.
You already have the alternative of towing icebergs.
You are going to use oversized floaties to provide buoyancy for millions of tonnes of water?
When moving agricultural volumes of water you have just two practical and cost effective mechanisms, evaporation and gravity.
You wouldn’t need air bags. Fresh water is less dense than salt water. The pipes will float on their own if left to their own devices. Make them heavy enough to be just a little buoyant, and then hang cement blocks from the pipe that rest on the seafloor to keep it at a stable height.
Still, it’s an expensive proposition.
The salt water is heavier than the fresh water, you would have the weight of the pipe, but the weight differential would be small.
Actually, I read once a suggestion to fill large plastic bladders with fresh water and tow them on the ocean (if the bladder is filled with fresh water, it will float) from places with plenty of fresh water to places without it.
I don’t think you could move enough water to be cost effective. Possibly isolated communities could utilize the technology.
Sooner or later people are going to have to learn that we cannot replicate New England in a desert for millions of people no matter how many cockamamie technological solutions they dream up. The Southwest is already a zombie corpse feeding on the rest of the country. Kill it now. Give the rest of the country better lives for their children.
Does that sound cruel? I assure you, it’s much more merciful than the alternative when the nights get to be 110.
That sounds like the exact opposite of recycling.
Never mind.
Yes, fresh water will float on salt water, but on the basis of that you can’t ignore the other numbers cause they are really, really big and impose severe practical limitations.
Volumes of water, in the old hogsheads and roods measures used stateside, are measured in acre feet. This is a volume with dimensions of a chain by a furlong by a foot = 43,560 cubic feet and weighs 1,214 tons.
Apparently an acre foot, which is about 7,758 hogsheads for the hardliners, is the planned annual water usage of a suburban family household in the US.
So you take a bladder, fill it with an acre foot of water, tow it from where it is to where it’s needed and you now have enough for the needs of one family for a year. And you still need to lift 1,200MT of water from sea level.
That’s the equation for potable water for domestic consumption, not industrial, let alone agricultural volumes.
The numbers stack up quickly: The Sydney metropolitan area received 1.547m of rain between Jan and Jun 2022
| 12,368.2 | sq km | |
|---|---|---|
| = | 3,056,248 | acres |
| 1.547 | m | |
| 5.075 | feet | |
| = | 15,510,459 | acre feet |
| = | 18,829,696,740 | ton |
Lake Mead has a capacity of 28 million acre feet and is currently a bit over 9 million acre feet. Which represents a bloody lot of bladders.
Residential water usage is about 60 gallons per person per day:
Los Angeles metro area is about 13M people, so 780M gallons per day. Assume you want to meet half of their needs with ocean-borne bladder-water, so you’d need to tow in 390M gallons of water per day, or 62.6M cubic feet.
A ship like a ULCC crude carrier can hold 3.7M barrels of liquid, or 20.8M cubic feet. So you’d need three water carriers of this size coming into the port of LA every single day.
According to this PDF, the charter cost for an oil tanker is about $86,000 per day. Presumably this doesn’t include port fees, or the actual cost to purchase the water from whomever is selling it. If you get your water from Alaska, it’s gonna take about ten days to get to LA. Let’s call that $1M dollars per boatload of water.
So $1M buys you about 20M cubic feet of water. $1 buys you 20 cubic feet. $5 buys you 100 cubic feet (CCF). But that only gets untreated water delivered to the port of Los Angeles. Presumably the city will now need to treat it and distribute it, and so will tack on their usual per-CCF cost. My own city (not LA) charges between $2.30 and $8.40 per CCF, depending on how much water you’re using. Figure the average is about $5. This means that ocean bladder-water ends up costing end users about twice as much as their normal supply.
And that only helps people on the coast, where those boats/bladders can reach. People in Phoenix/Flagstaff are still thirsty.
People like a lot of things. We may well not be able to have all of them.
Most people like having housing that’s not underwater or on fire even more than they like being able to get tasteless peaches in January.
The problem is that the people who want tasteless peaches in January are not the ones who will have their houses underwater or on fire.
Some of them are. I think the problem is more that people aren’t making connections.
It’s been proposed a lot earlier than that. See Jules Verne’s novel The Invasion of the Sea (the last published during his lifetime – 1905), which is based on the work of French military officer/engineer François Élie Roudaire from the 1880s
People who propose transcontinental water transfer across significant inclines really underestimate the costs involved.
One very small example I know about is a large mint farm that was put into sagebrush country up past some of my relatives farms. (Great smell when visiting, no so sure if you had to live with it for months.)
They got their water from a large river about 2 miles away and a few hundred feet lower. Their electric bill was big. They eventually had to switch to less water demanding crops.
You want to send water from the Great Lakes or Mississippi across the Rockies to Nevada? Good luck with that.
The Ogallala Aquifer exemplifies the economics of this. Once you start pumping from 400+ feet down, the numbers can be really bad. Some parts of N. Texas are no longer irrigated from the aquifer since it makes no economic sense. And that’s water right under your feet. No need to transport it a thousand miles.
And comparing this to oil/gas pipelines is farfetched. The upper size of an interstate high pressure gas pipeline is 48". That would irrigate a few square miles of farmland.