There's a fundamental energy demand for removing salt from seawater and creating drinkable water that can't be avoided. Hence, desalination is fundamentally tied to the price of energy. These costs can easily bankrupt cities that try to rely on desalination to meet demand (for example, California droughts cause hydropower to go offline right when water demand is highest). Using fossil fuels to power desalination in the global warming era is also a really bad idea.
It might work in certain locales (lots of sunshine plus solar panels, perhaps), but the costs will always be high, and it's going to be very uneconomical for agricultural-scale needs.
People seem to always forget about nuclear. Pairing nuclear plants with desalination is perfect because you also need water in most nuclear reactor designs.
That doesn't solve the problem of what to do with the salt and other chemicals removed via desalinization. You're left with literally toxic brine that has to be dumped somewhere, at the expense of the ecosystems you dump in.
There are solutions besides straight up dumping the brine. Technology is evolving to handle this as desalination becomes more common. Of course the easiest thing is dumping it so some regulation may be required.
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There's a fundamental energy demand for removing salt from seawater and creating drinkable water that can't be avoided. Hence, desalination is fundamentally tied to the price of energy. These costs can easily bankrupt cities that try to rely on desalination to meet demand (for example, California droughts cause hydropower to go offline right when water demand is highest). Using fossil fuels to power desalination in the global warming era is also a really bad idea.
It might work in certain locales (lots of sunshine plus solar panels, perhaps), but the costs will always be high, and it's going to be very uneconomical for agricultural-scale needs.
People seem to always forget about nuclear. Pairing nuclear plants with desalination is perfect because you also need water in most nuclear reactor designs.
That doesn't solve the problem of what to do with the salt and other chemicals removed via desalinization. You're left with literally toxic brine that has to be dumped somewhere, at the expense of the ecosystems you dump in.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/slaking-the-world...
There are solutions besides straight up dumping the brine. Technology is evolving to handle this as desalination becomes more common. Of course the easiest thing is dumping it so some regulation may be required.