134: Hold the Salt - Breakthrough Fresh Water Tech

[Music] on today's episode of still to be determined we're going to talk about some breakthroughs that will lead to an abundance of pretzel salt hi everybody as usual i'm sean farrell i'm a writer i write some sci-fi i write some stuff for kids and i'm also curious about technology and luckily for me my younger brother i almost said older brother for some reason and that would have been weird my younger brother is matt of undecided with matt farrell matt how you doing today i'm doing pretty well the weekend's going well how about you i'm doing okay other than humid weather moving in and such abundance that i feel like i'm swimming right now but that kind of fits in perfectly with today's discussion that's right we're going to be talking about matt's most recent episode which is about desalinization including one process that takes water straight from the air and into our waiting drinking glasses but before we get to that i want to talk about a recent comment from our most recent episode in which we discussed sand batteries and this comment from alan tupper was in direct response to my comment that sand battery technology district heating technology would be difficult to implement in our larger cities which are built around an infrastructure that does not include the ability to easily put in something like this but alan has a different take on it i appreciated his feedback alan wrote regarding your comment and having to rework cities for district heating two things come to mind first for sufficiently dense cities with large buildings a single building or a single block could be considered a district that at least breaks apart the project into manageable chunks if there are any significant shift away from cars and cities unused underground parking could be used as a storage location i really like that i really like the forward thinking the repurposing of existing spaces and it brought to mind a lot of the repurposing of sites that are going on here in new york city we have the high line which is a public park which was made out of an old highway overpass and there is also an underground park which is being built from an unused subway area so these spaces exist and if we don't use them and just allow them to decay that doesn't serve any greater purpose but reusing them in these ways does offer us some interesting ways in investing in the future so thank you alan for that just a reminder a big part of the discussion of this show and of matt's show in general comes from the comments so please jump into the comments let us know what you're thinking let us know when you agree or when you disagree or when like alan you just have a brilliant idea of your own we'd love to hear from you for today's episode we're going to be talking about matt's most recent episode this was from september 6 2002 two breakthroughs that could solve the fresh water crisis and it revolved around two different technologies one being a portable desalinization device which is effectively a large suitcase at this point but i imagine it can be ramped up in size to more industrial sizes and the other technology being a gel which is made out of readily available product so these are two technologies that could be hitting the market soon matt also referred to a third technology which is effectively a dehumidifier built into solar panels which i find fascinating in two ways one how much water can this effectively uh collect where does that water get collected how does all of that work and the other aspect of this that i found interesting is matt your response to this being well these are effectively just dehumidifiers and you didn't give them a lot of attention was it because it was basically just well there's not a lot to talk about here these are dehumidifiers yeah it was partly that and i in the video i should have pointed people to a friend of mine ben sullins he has a youtube channel he's lived with these things on his house in san diego for a couple of years and so he talked about that when he first got them and then he had like a year later like what's been like living with them and there's definitely pros and cons to them so there's it's a mixed bag as to what it is and one of the biggest biggest negatives is they are loud i was gonna say it's a dehumidifier he has a couple of them on his roof above his i think it's above his garage or an extension to his house and he said it's it's it's pretty noisy and his neighbors may not really appreciate them because of how loud they are and for the cost and the benefits that you're getting out of it for him in san diego it's kind of like um he did have a positive view on it but it's like a mixed bag and it makes more sense maybe for areas where you don't have easy access to fresh water already it might make more sense so that's kind of why i was kind of like giving just kind of glazing over it a little quick because it's like i think it's either a dedicated video talking about it or i could have just pointed people to ben sollins videos where he went to a deep explanation as to how they work and what it's like to live with them i imagine that the water you would collect out of them goes into some sort of storage cistern it's not a holding tank and then it would be used almost like gray water is that well no it's like you basically run a line into your house and have like a little tap like he installed a little tap in his kitchen that's like right next to his regular tap and it's like you can just fill in some drinking water out of that little tap so it's like so it is used as drinking water correct interesting but it's not tied into the home's water system directly it's its own isolated thing but it's in the house so you can just very quickly just fill a jar of water and have fresh drinking water so regarding the other two technologies that you talked in more depth about in your video the the portable desalinization device which you pointed out is headed toward they're in the very earliest stages of getting it to market yes i mean these are like coming out of the lab right right who do they envision as their market they both of them seem to be focusing on developing countries and areas that don't have easy access to water disaster areas things like that it seems to be where they're focusing first because these are kind of more individualized sized solutions they're not necessarily for you know i have a city of 100 000 people how do we get them fresh water it's not that kind of solution at this point they're more of a 50 bucks here's the thing you could take it to a little um village in the middle of a desert area and say here's some here's how you can get some fresh safe drinking water that's more what they seem to be focused on right now the amount of drinking water you can get from one of these portable desalinization devices as you mentioned is limited and it would require like 12 hours of running you mentioned it can be run from a small portable solar panel so effectively okay if you've got enough sunlight you've got a one of these devices you could have enough drinking water for was it one person for one day yeah i was kind of i ran through some numbers just kind of give a sense of how much water it produces and like if you had one of these things you can produce enough water for a person or two to have enough drinking water over the course of a day but that kind of shows you why you may not scale to hundreds of thousands of people yeah because they're more individualized i'm trying to envision like getting these to where they're needed suddenly it looks like you've got a cargo plane full of a thousand of these and i'm just wondering about total cost total cost as it scales up to like transporting these things like is this something that is envisioned and you may not know the answer to this are they looking at this as something that governments would have on hand for emergency situations this is something that they envision being taken and given to people by organizations that would be paying the costs or they expecting these to be things that somebody might be able to go and purchase on their own from some site well the like the um the one that's the gel they do envision a time where you could in the future go to your local drug store and pick up some of these right gel packs so this is something that they do envision being mass market for whoever wants to get their hands on it i have a feeling and this is just me speculating that like for the suitcase one that they would probably be starting on what you just described as to like foundations that are buying large quantities of these or governments that are buying them for disaster areas or recovery you know having them on hand i have a feeling that's probably where they would most likely start because that would be an easy way to kind of get seed money to scale things up quickly and then slowly branch out into more commercialized you and i can go to the home depot and pick one up right kind of a kind of a scenario but it seems to be like that's kind of where it looks like it's starting but that's based on my speculation i don't i don't have a exact i couldn't find exact details on that that meshes with a lot of the comments around this video including this one from the northern light who wrote i honestly think that power the powerless option would be amazing for regions hit by natural disasters floods hurricanes etc where the local water system has been compromised and may take weeks to get back online having a few dozen shipping containers set up in a way to produce semi-large volumes of refillable drinking water would be literally a lifesaver so i think that for the most part the way that this hits me and many of the other people watching the video was this would be a short-term solution not a large term one of the things that you talked about regarding the portable version of the desalinization device is that one of the negatives is brine and the creation of brine as a result of all this i want to loop back to something you've talked about in the past brine in and of itself is not a bad thing is it no no it's what we do with it yeah because we're going to be creating a lot of it doing this yeah and some of the things you've talked about in the past around brine did involve large-scale desalinization so it was yes creation of multiple pools and allowing the water to move from one section to another eventually desalinization taking place as a result of just the natural process of evaporation is that correct yeah it by the way it's desalination there's no z i'm going to keep adding a z because like zoro i like to leave my mark yeah it's it's there's different ways like what you were talking about the different pools that's lithium extraction how they concentrate the brine down to get the lithium and the other salts out there's like the solar dome that's being built in the neon project in saudi arabia where it's basically going to have massive amounts of brine left over from the way it produces fresh water but they have plans which are i don't see unconfirmed if they can actually pull this off but using the leftover brine for industrial processes because there are leftover salts and things like that that could be used like lithium if there's lithium in there there's other kinds of salts that could be used for industrial processes so there are other use cases for the leftovers that could be commercialized and used elsewhere the question is is there enough of a market to take all that leftover material to actually use it all or are we still going to have leftover stuff we have nothing to do with that's the big question about some of this stuff a little fun fact about the neom project which matt has a video on roughly maybe was it nine months ago or so yeah it was almost a year ago yeah and we had a conversation at that time about it and i have begun seeing social media ads for really neom they have a twitter handle and they are out there with really good-looking videos that look like something from inception of a linear city being put together magically on its own they do not include any images of the artificial moon flying over on drones and for new listeners who have no idea what i'm talking about i recommend you go back through matt's videos and find the neon video because i didn't just pull that little detail out of my fiction writing hat that's the real plan yep also from the comments i wanted to share this from daedalus dream journal who writes these are technologies that definitely have a place in the future especially in water stressed areas 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 so there's another case of somebody pointing out not every not one tool for every job this is another case of somebody pointing out okay you've got your you know gel pack or something in your home that's providing you with a certain measure of drinkable water how are you repurposing water that's already been reused and recycling water that's been used that's like the gray water solution of collecting things like bath water and then using that to water your lawn or or having the ability to have somewhat used water but it's not it's not contaminated to be able to repurpose around your house and i'm wondering have you seen in your plans for building your own home has that come into the discussion or have you seen options around that that have been available on the market yeah i talked to my um general contractor about great water systems rain water harvesting systems and what it would take to integrate that into my house build and i opted not to do it at this point because of the cost it was simply came down to cost the house building a house at this time point at this point in time is very expensive and so it's like i had to you know cross some things off my wish list and that was one of the things that got crossed off which was great water harvesting and rain water harvesting although i am planning to add rain water harvesting as a project that i'll do myself in the future but i had to take grey water off because it adds a lot of complications to how you have to plumb the house and how you collect it and where you collect it and it was just it was just suddenly it was like oh this already expensive project is getting even more expensive and i can't afford that so i had to kill something the nice thing about rainwater harvesting is that it has for a long time been a thing that can be an add-on so this is not easy to do yeah it's not going to be it's not going to be something that would be outside of the realm of possibilities and i mean you want to go back to some of the earliest forms of it just think about the old west the barrel at the bottom of a gutter as simple as that people would collect rain water in that fashion simply to be able to use that water in whatever kinds of gardening or farming projects that they were doing so even if matt just has a wooden barrel at the bottom of a gutter he's trying his best yep there was also this comment from mk who wrote hey matt i think you should do more interviews with the researchers of these projects i think you give them a spotlight have great conversations on your channel 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 you have had many interviews i wondered about this one in particular did you make any attempts to reach out to any of the developers of these texts to be able to have a conversation we are typically making that part of our process we have now for the past i don't know four or five months like typically when we see these we immediately reach out to them see if we can arrange something we weren't able to do it for this one and it is what it is so it's like i'm not gonna not talk about a topic because i can't get a hold of the researcher but if i can i do try to include them like i talked to uh casper about his you know the the that molecule he created for collecting solar energy it's like i reached out to him i've been doing interviews recently with other researchers in things like nuclear fusion and other areas of interest of mine so it's like i am trying to make the interview with the researchers and scientists a common practice right in my video production so expect to see more and more of it on the channel do you have any right now that you'd be willing to tease about a couple of topics where you do have interviews coming up the one i'm most excited about is nuclear fusion i've been talking to several different nuclear fusion companies like helion general fusion and a few others they're all taking very different takes attacks at trying to solve the nuclear fusion electricity conundrum we're in and they're all kind of privatized companies that are all in this mad dash saying we got it in the next you know five to ten years we got this and i was talking i've been talking to all of them like how are you so confident why are you so confident and what is what makes your way you're doing it so special and so there's gonna be a video coming out i'm not exactly sure when yet but there's gonna be some interviews some uh stuff around that coming out in the next few weeks and months sounds good just to wrap up this conversation around the water collection process that you've talked about one thing that went unsaid in your video and i can't help but just wonder how do you squeeze the water out of that gel okay what do you do this is i released the video and then started seeing comments come in i was just like doing a jungle picard face palm like i should have talked about how you get the water back out so when i said it doesn't take power to collect the water i should have been very explicit and said it doesn't take elect doesn't necessarily take electricity to get the water out but it does take power in the form of heat so it does take heat you apply heat to the gel and it becomes hydrophobic and the water comes out so it's like you basically heat it get the water out let it cool off set it out it just absorbs the water from the air heat it again get more water out so it's like you go through this process of basically wringing it out with heat so you can have a device you could have a device that almost might look like a coffee maker where it could be a gel pack goes in the top heats up and then water comes down into a carafe of some sort right so it technically does take power i just want to make that clear it doesn't necessarily take electricity because there is ways we generate heat that there's waste heat that can be used to be applied to extracting the water from this right so it's like there's there's different things we could do to make it super energy efficient via solar just leaving something out in the sun yes yeah but potentially it's like there's different ways we could we could extract the water out of the material so it's i should have been i should have been crystal clear on that in the video and i was not so on that on that point i apologize so listeners what do you think about desalinating and sucking water out of the air do you think that these can all be part of the solution no pun intended let us know in the comments as you've already heard the comments are a huge part of the discussion here we appreciate your weighing in and if you'd like to support us further you can view us on apple google spotify wherever it was you found this podcast you can go back there and you can talk about it and say you liked us unless you didn't in which case ignore everything i just said and if you'd like to more directly support us you can go to still tbd.fm click on the become a supporter button and you can throw a few coins at us we appreciate the bruises and you can also click join right here on youtube and become a member that way all of that really does help support the show thank you so much for listening watching for submitting your comments and for recommending us to your friends and we'll talk to you next time [Music] you

2022-09-19 10:47

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