Seventy one percent of our planet's surface is

covered in water. Three hundred and thirty two

point five million cubic miles of it.

Three hundred and sixty six billion billion

gallons. That's over forty eight billion gallons

of water for every person on Earth.

But today, one out of three people don't have

access to safe drinking water.

Some projections will show by 2050, more than

half our population will be living in

water-stressed areas. That's over four billion

people. These aren't just issues in developing

countries. Something you hear about elsewhere.

These are things that are happening in our

communities all the time. Worried and angry about

lead contamination. The military in remote parts

of Puerto Rico. And that's the result of many

things. But one of them is that ninety six point

five percent of that water is found in our

oceans. It's saturated with salt and undrinkable.

And most of the earth's freshwater is locked away

in glaciers or deep underground.

Less than 1 percent of it is available to us.

When you dig a little bit and look under the

surface, even here in the United States, we have

large numbers of people that don't have access to

safe, clean drinking water.

So why can't we just take all that seawater,

filter out the salt and have a nearly unlimited

supply of clean, drinkable water?

Desalination broadly is the process of removing

salts from water.

It's been practice for years.

In fact, it's a natural process.

It occurs when the sun heats the ocean and fresh

water evaporates off and it falls again as

rainfall. If you mix salt into water, it

dissolves. And if you could watch microscopically

while you did that, you'd see that the water is

actually breaking apart the salt into charged

particles that chemically interact with the

water. So salt water is a chemically new

solution. It's not just water with some salt

grains floating around in it.

And that's why desalination is a fundamentally

tricky process. The two main types of

desalination are thermal desalination and reverse

osmosis. Thermal desalination is the oldest form

of desalination.

It's essentially boiling water and then capturing

the steam and turning that into freshwater.

But in the 60s, we were able to develop reverse

osmosis processes at UCLA and these have now

started to dominate the market.

So one of the chief differences between the two

is reverse osmosis doesn't use heat, doesn't boil

anything. You're really just pressurizing the

water to a tremendous amount and you're forcing

it through a membrane where it doesn't want to

go. It wants to stay with the salt.

But with this high pressure, it is forced to

separate from the salt.

Broadly speaking, what you want to look at for

desalination is where's my freshwater coming from

and do I have enough of it? And if I don't have

enough of it, do I need to augment supply?

Desalination then starts to become a very

attractive or interesting option.

Which is why the vast majority of desalination

efforts right now are happening in places like

the Middle East and North Africa.

Rich with fossil fuels, but also experiencing

extreme water scarcity.

Just two countries, Saudi Arabia and UAE, they

produce one fourth of the desalination water that

is produced currently on this planet.

Concerns about desalination fall broadly into

three categories: the amount of energy required,

how much it costs, and its environmental impacts.

There are some that really see it as a key

solution. There are others that push back and

argue that it's very energy intensive.

It's very expensive.

It has impacts on the marine environment and that

we should pursue alternatives first.

It requires a tremendous amount of energy to

basically break up that bond between the water

and salt. Ocean water desal can be twenty five

times as energy intensive as other freshwater

approaches. Historically, the impediment for sea

water desalination being more abundant or popular

in North America has been cost.

It has been cost prohibitive historically.

The Cloud Lewis Carlsbad desalination plant

outside of San Diego is the largest of its kind

in the Western Hemisphere and has been operating

since 2015, producing 50 million gallons of clean

water a day. It's in San Diego County because of

its dry, arid climate.

The county has historically imported nearly all

of its water from the Colorado River and Northern

California. In San Diego, in Carlsbad example,

they are spending twice as much for seawater

desalination as they do on imported water.

Now, they were looking at it and saying, well, at

some point in the future, the costs will be

comparable. And I think some folks point it to

the fact that, well, when that's the case, then

that's probably when you should build it.

Today, desalinated water in Carlsbad costs

approximately twice as much as imported water.

You're comparing apples and oranges because that

imported water is coming from systems that were

built half a century ago where all the capital

investment has been paid off.

Standing down for 5 or 10 years, hoping there's

some major breakthrough in the technology is not

going to materially reduce the cost of building

infrastructure. That's not unique to desal and

water. It's true of all public infrastructure.

We have a huge deficit.

We need to start building not just water, but

transportation and housing.

Now, not 5 or 10 years from now.

The Carlsbad Plant is operated as a

public/private partnership with the Carlsbad

Seawater desalination plant.

In the proposed Huntington beach seawater

desalination plant, we're proposing a

public/private partnership where the plant is 100

percent privately financed and then we enter into

a longterm, fixed-price water purchase agreement

with the public water agency.

Essentially, we're recovering our investment over

time through the sale of water.

There's an infrastructure deficit in the United

States. There's certainly an infrastructure

deficit in California.

And you can't expect local, state and federal

government to pay for all of it.

The private sector is going to have to invest

private dollars. And I think there's a huge

opportunity in water in a way that both protects

the ratepayers and also allows for the investment

of private capital beyond the environmental costs

of producing the energy needed to power these

plants. Another concern arises because they're

not just outputting clean desalinated water.

They're also producing huge amounts of hyper

salty water, called brine, as a byproduct.

Seawater desalination plants that use reverse

osmosis typically operate at a 50 percent

efficiency in that if you take in two gallons of

seawater, you're going to produce one gallon of

fresh water and one gallon of hyper saline brine.

It's a fixed volume of salt that I'm trying to

remove. So whether I put it in half a gallon of

water or a tenth of a gallon of water, it's still

going to be there and it's going gonna be much

more concentrated. As desalination efforts grow,

it's not clear what should be done with these

huge amounts of brine.

Globally right now, we're producing over 37

billion gallons a day.

Most brine is in one way or another emptied back

into the ocean. But because it has a much higher

salt concentration than regular seawater, it has

the potential to, among other things, sink to the

sea floor and wreck havoc on the plants and

animals found there. In addition, because these

facilities are taking in millions of gallons of

seawater a day, the intake itself could destroy

local marine life. But Poseidon Water, which

operates the Carlsbad plant, says the regulations

in California provide sufficient environmental

protection. Numerous studies have been done in

California and around the world that show that

level of salinity increase will not harm marine

life. And you're also providing drinking water to

people in need. But a recent study published in

2018 showed that we're producing even more brine

than we thought. For every liter of desalinated

water, we produce 1.5

liters of brine.

In other words, overall, we are producing more

brine than we produce desalinated water.

And while some places like California have robust

regulations regarding brine in place, it's not

clear that as a whole the industry is taking its

disposal seriously enough.

Currently, we are disposing of brine in a way

which we use to dispose of industrial waste water

about 40-50 years ago.

So if desalination uses a huge amount of energy,

is very expensive compared to other options, and

in the end we're producing more potentially

harmful brine than clean water, why do we

continue to pursue it?

Desalination has its drawbacks, but one of the

benefits is that it's a fairly stable and known

process particular for dealing with ocean water.

You can be confident that it will supply you

water when you need it. Reliability is the key.

Water scarcity is a complex, difficult problem.

Climate change is affecting everything and

introducing growing uncertainty.

Weather is variable, but if you have a

desalination plant, energy, and sea water, you

can reliably get clean water.

But desalination undeniably uses a large amount

of energy. And for some, it's just fundamentally

difficult to advocate for a technology that would

be adding to our ever growing energy needs.

I think when we start to look into these

water-scarce worlds, we start to think about well

energy provides us services.

It heats our homes, it lights our offices and

buildings. And if we think of energy as a service

that could give us water for some context, you

know, the average person in the U.S.

uses about a hundred gallons of water per day.

If I were to produce that hundred gallons per day

with ocean water desal, that would be the same

electricity consumption that my home would

require over an hour. So to kind of put things in

context, I think we start to think about our

energy resources and where do I invest it?

How important is water?

It is the most basic element of life.

And people go out and they buy a venti Starbucks

every day and spend more on that than they do for

a month's supply of desalinated water.

And they don't realize it. It's clear that

desalination alone is not going to fix the

world's water problems.

Up in some places where you're just water rich,

desalination probably won't make the most sense.

Poseidon Water as a company does not believe that

seawater desalination is a panacea.

We can't just build one or two or 10 and really

solve our water challenges.

Desalination is not the solution to water

scarcity. It's one of the options to narrow the

gap between water supply and demand.

But for some communities around the world, it's

already making an enormous local impact.

It's currently a pretty small fraction of the

water supply globally and probably will remain

so. There are, though, communities for which it

is a fairly significant contribution.

It can be quite important at the local level.

Desalination is one tool of many.

And for it to have maximum impact, it must be

implemented alongside other techniques.

Israel maybe provides a good example where they

have invested quite a bit in seawater

desalination, but they also made investments in

efficiency such that their water use on a per

person basis is far lower than we see here in

California or in many, many parts of the United

States. So they did those things first, so that

they aren't wasting that very expensive water.

That then delayed their need to build a plant.

And when they built it, they could build it a bit

smaller than they would have.

So there's a cost, a real cost savings there to

the community. I would almost look at it as a

safe bet, you know, to hedge your risks.

A desalination plant is your low risk option in

your portfolio. Kind of expensive, maybe, but

it's going to deliver. I think we do the cheaper,

less environmentally damaging things first.

That seawater desalination is an option.

In some communities, they don't have other

options. Others, though, do have other options.

They can use water more efficiently, which can

save water, save energy, can have less

environmental impact.

And while most attention is given to seawater

desalination, a similar process can be used for

treating many other sources of water like

wastewater. The volume of waste water, if it's

all collected and recycled, that is almost

equivalent to five times the volume of water that

passes through Niagara Falls each year.

And if we look at the desalinated the water, the

desalinated water, which we produce globally, on

an annual basis is almost equal to half of the

volume of the water that passes through Niagara

Falls. We don't want to lose sight of other sorts

of desal, brackish water, which is, you can think

of brackish water is it's not as salty as ocean

water, but it's saltier than freshwater.

It's that whole space between and there the

energy requirements are substantially less simply

because there's less salt. So less salt, less

stuff to remove, less energy.

Desalination is an important tool in the fight

against water scarcity.

Its reliability is becoming ever more important,

but it's not a cure-all and other techniques

should always be implemented alongside it.

Desalination is already vital for many

water-scarce communities around the world.

And as climate change continues to transform our

planet, the balance between concerns about energy

use and the ability to reliably get clean water

is going to evolve. How exactly desalination will

fit into the future of clean water is yet to be

seen.