article published by news.bbc.co.uk May 30 - 2003
Commentary By Joseph Ellsworth CTO of XDOBS.COM LLC
© XDOBS.COM LLC All Rights Reserved.
The problem described by the “Middle East
water wars” does not appear to be fully mature but the risk will
increase as a result of rapidly increasing populations placing greater demands
on finite water resources. Unfortunately the changing global climate
is fairly likely to cause an increase in both the number and severity of
droughts in regions that where already experiencing water scarcity could
increase this risk. This
could accelerate the time of water conflicts.
Water scarcity represents a real problem because if you take a person
who normally civilized and make that person thirsty enough they will willingly
fight or steal to obtain that water. The same thing holds true if a parent sees
water or food needed to keep their children alive. There are always exceptions but as a
group, humans have a strong drive to survive and to ensure the survival of our
children which when stressed in the wrong can strip away thousands of year’s
worth of civilization.
When this drive for survival is multiplied by millions of people then
regional wars become distinct possibility as the drive for critical water
resources overwhelms normal inclination towards laws and negotiation. And as
water becomes more scare even generous civilizations that would normally
negotiate to share water will instead risk a war rather than share the water
which would guarantee a loss of life or local famine. As a result if water resources
become scarce enough war to obtain access or to preserve access to water resources
will be a natural result.
As the world priorities shift as a result of increasingly scarce water
resources it will mandate a change in way water is valued to what is the social,
economic cost if the water is missing.
A wise policy will be for senior
policy makers most interested in avoiding wars to look at the cost of war and
then spend some significant fraction of that on a solution that will prevent
crisis from elevating to war.
War for any purpose is an incredibly expensive both financially and in
the human toll. The 911 disaster in
As the people in the
We in the USA can invest however much we want in homeland security
which is a lot since the last budget increase was over 40 billion and it will
help but it will be equally essential that we invest in preventing the war that
will spawn an new generation of well organized and well trained attackers.
To allow war to occur when simple financial investments can prevent it
from occurring is a travesty in policy by senior officials. It would represent a failure of
organizations like UN to preserve the peace when it is entirely possible to
avert the situation.
Citizens of all countries
should be pressuring their governments to shift resources and assets as
necessary to prevent this escalation of risk because if the water wars do occur
they could easily impact all of us from an increase in terrorism on one side to
a dramatic decrease in production from OPEC which would drive rapidly inflating
energy costs on the other.
A2WH uses solar thermal energy to extract liquid water from the
humidity which is found in all air. The patent pending A2WH technology
allows it to produce large volumes of water from relatively small amounts of
land while requiring no source water, no grid electricity and no fuel. The sun evaporates 2.7 billion gallons of
water from world’s oceans every second so extracting water from air using
solar energy represents the ultimate renewable resource.
The XDOBS patent pending A2WH technology
is capable of being installed in mass and it will work extremely well in the
A2WH ability to be installed on desolate desert land makes it a immediately feasible solution much more deployable and
defensible than those which require premium ocean side real-estate. Its ability to operate without grid electricity
or fuel means that it is immune to the oil shortages and fluctuating energy
prices which could be essential when planning to eliminate escalating tensions. The fact that A2WH was designed specifically
to be built using commodity products such as aluminum and acrylic plastics
means that unlike Photovoltaic (PV) systems it can scale up adequately to
address the emerging crises without spikes in price that PV has already
encountered as a result of high purity silicon shortages.
All throughout the
The Middle East areas hit hardest by water shortages receive over 2,500
megawatts of energy every square
mile which equates 23,309,893 KWh (Kilowatt hours) of energy from the sun every day . We use that free energy to harvest
water directly from the air. Every square mile of A2WH installed
will produce approximately 4,000 gallons of safe potable water every day or 1.5
million gallons per year.
The World Health organization indicates that
people can survive on about 6 gallons per day long term so 4,000 gallons per
day is enough to provide for 666 people with survival water.
Famine is also risk but the “Eden”
project in Nigeria has provide a good example of using drought hardy edible
plants as a way to minimize this risk but countries thought that region should
be making extensive efforts to spread these desert hardy plants as wide as possible
in their local country now.
We ultimately need to provide a minimum of
an additional 20 gallons per day per person to support basic food production
which totals 26 gallons per day so our 4,000 gallons per acre of land can support
and help feed 152 people. This works quite favorably in countries
which have a lot of desolate land since it only requires 6,600 acres to produce
enough water to support a million people.
Increase it to 9,000 acres
per million and they would even have enough surplus for an occasional shower.
When dealing with larger cities type scales
the A2WH technology can produce
the 250 billion gallons per year using only 290 square miles of land. This is enough water to support a
major desert city like
The same country and people who would fight
to the death to protect their water resources would be quite likely to offer
long term leases on land to install the A2WH units to help out their neighbors especially
if they understand that this would prevent the need for those neighbors to
invade them and take their water by force.
Each relationship is different but if I was
a small wealthy country I may well invest the capital needed to install the
A2WH units for my neighbor country if I thought it would prevent a war. In addition if I did install these
units I could sell the resulting water to my neighbor at a premium while at the
same time ensuring that if they did invade it would destroy the A2WH units that
are producing the water they need. This would provide an incredible disincentive
for them to attack my country since if they did attack they may well end up
with less water.
Even a short war will impose incredible
costs and human suffering so it is much cheaper to invest up front in the A2WH
units to eliminate the need for a water war.
The A2WH (Air to water harvest) solution
produces liquid water during the worst droughts. It has no adverse environmental impact
and takes advantage of the free solar energy resource
A2WH can use land that is undesirable for other purposes which keeps
cost low. If the land is carefully chosen to be
uphill from the city electricity can even be recaptured from the energy of the
generated water running down hill. It can be installed in smaller chunks which minimizes the needs for long pipelines and it can
not be impacted by industrial contaminants in the water which are always a risk
with desalination.
In the past extracting liquid water from the air has been very expensive but with XDOBS patent pending solar thermal approach has made it competitive with other water sources such as Coastal Desalination and due to it’s immunity from oil prices it will out perform most of these sources over time.
Any war is horribly expensive and any war in the
Now obviously this is the worst case situation and senior diplomats
from many countries will work tirelessly to avoid the escalation but they will
be working against fundamental survival drives. The best way to keep the situation
under control is to identify the likely shortage locations and invest aggressively
to ensure adequate water.
One of the traditional solutions is to drill an ever increasing number
of wells but in these dry countries
the aqua quivers have very slow recovery capability so more wells will only accelerate
the point of aqua quiver collapse. This is made even worse by the higher
risk of more long term droughts which make less surface water available while
at the same time reducing the aqua quiver recovery rates. These combined will actually escalate the
tensions and risk of war so it is essential than any solution be sustainable indefinitely
even during 10 to 15 year droughts. The A2WH technology is the only one
we are aware of that has this ability other than coastal desalination plants
which may also be
a good choice.
The XDOBS A2WH solution has a patent pending enhancement for use in
areas where there is a regular source of salt water or other contaminated water
sources. This generally
allows us to produce 7 times as much water per acre of
A2WH installation. We still have to arrange for the disposal
of the concentrated salt brine but there are a number of viable options for
tackling this issue. There is
a second patent pending enhancement for ocean side use that doesn’t have
any brine disposal issues and still increases efficiently several times but
increases risk of severe weather damage marginally. This combination keeps the benefits
of the XDOBS A2WH units such as no need for using the power grid while
competing quite favorably with any other technology for production of fresh
water from salt or brackish water.
The problem with coastal refineries is that they require some of the
areas premium real-estate right on the edge of the ocean. As a result of being on the beach, all
the water they produce must be pumped up hill, They consume
large amounts of electricity which will only get more expensive and their
filters can be fouled by industrial chemicals which are found in increasing
concentrations especially in heavily industrialized areas.
The Desalination plants must generally be installed in large 100
million+ increments to be cost effective; they have uncertain environmental
effects as is demonstrated in 250 million dollar
A large number of cities are not located adjacent to the ocean where they can easily access the salt water and even if the could build a pipeline they would still have a problem disposing of the waste products like concentrated brine.
The problem with using nuclear power plants to power the coastal desalination plants is that the long term cost is unclear. The problem of spent fuel storage is so extreme that it is commonly being stored on location in a manner that would never be approved by EPA for long term storage. Every state fights nuclear storage on their land and the time scale involved makes budgets impossible to predict.
The problem with using Oil to power
the coastal water purification systems is that it produces relatively expensive
electricity and the plants use a lot of electricity. In addition the supply of oil isn’t
a sure thing even in the
· Water Hot spots - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/world/03/world_forum/water/html/default.stm
· Water Conflict Chronology - http://www.worldwater.org/conflictIntro.htm
·
·
ZNet |Bolivia | The
Second Water War in
· The coming water wars - http://www.mcgill.ca/reporter/33/02/water/
· Tide of Sentiment Shifts in Water War - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/14/AR2006011400820.html
· Water Conflicts - http://www.rainwaterharvesting.org/Conflicts/Conflicts.htm
· Water Conflict Chronology - http://www.worldwater.org/conflictIntro.htm
· The Cauvery Water War: - http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/staff/pelkey/cauvery.htm
·
War on the Water Front
· As the thirst for bottled water grows, a battle is brewing over precious resources--and profits - http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1139827,00.html
·
climate change and water wars - http://www.oilempire.us/water.html
·
· Financial Toll From 9/11 'Depends on What You Count' - http://www.lifeway.com/lwc/article_main_page/0,1703,A%253D154989%2526M%253D50011,00.html
·
Economic Costs to the United States Stemming
From the 9/11 Attacks - http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/aug02/homeland.asp
·
· Silicon Shortage Stalls Solar - http://www.wired.com/news/planet/0,2782,67013,00.html
·
The problem with high purity
silicon may have a more profound impact than immediately apparent. There are several problems
maturing like increasing chronic shortages of water in the
We at XDOBS have tried to do our part by inventing products like A2WH that harvests water from air using Solar Thermal heat energy. We anticipated the silicon shortage impact on PV so we designed specifically use bulk products like Aluminum. As a result we can scale without risk of resource shortages causing price spikes.
If global warming does trigger the number of droughts world wide that experts are predicting it will take all of our production plus any that can be produced by the PV people and even then it may not be enough to avoid wide spread human suffering. Increasingly short sThe Water war fears have reached a level where even highly placed UN people are talking about it and nobody is putting good solutions on the table. It is in the best interest of the USA to deploy technology as rapidly as possible to eliminate the war risk factors wherever possible and PV can play a key part in that deployment but only if the prices can come down with massively larger deployment.
On one side I hope the Silicon refinery people like Homan never do figure out how to produce more at a lower price and my understanding is that it is a pretty significant hurdle due to the purity requirements. This obviously keeps PV from being able to effectively compete in our markets but on the other hand the world is poised with a set of maturing problems that could drive a renaissance in renewable energy that would result in dramatic reductions of greenhouse gas emissions and we will need the PV guys at full stride to help make this happen.