Iran Faces Water Crisis

[Marina Schwarz + 1,576]

Iran is facing a severe water crisis: all water could be gone in 50 years, according to some local researchers. Compared with this, the oil export problem is nothing. It sounds really scary.

[John Foote + 1,135]

The water issue is far more than Iran. Most of the Middle East has this issue, and only copious amounts of energy to power desalination plants keeps Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, U.A.E, going. The safety stock for some cities is measured in days, not even a week.

[NickW + 2,714]

1 hour ago, Marina Schwarz said:

Iran is facing a severe water crisis: all water could be gone in 50 years, according to some local researchers. Compared with this, the oil export problem is nothing. It sounds really scary.

Exactly the same with KSA - they pi$$ed all their fossil water up the wall growing wheat in the 1980 / 90's when they could have bought up the EU wheat mountains at record low prices. 

There was another area I got partly involved in when I worked for Aramco. 

In comparison to the UK, the UK has 250 times the renewable water (rainfall resource) than KSA for a population 2.5x bigger. Yet despite this KSA consumes 3x the amount of water per head of population than the UK. 

Try to talk to Saudi's about water conservation its the same old answer - Allah will provide 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

40 minutes ago, NickW said:

Try to talk to Saudi's about water conservation its the same old answer - Allah will provide 

Except when Allah gives up.

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

When you figure that one VLCC hauls 2 million barrels, which is 84 million gallons (US), and it runs empty on the return trip from North America to the Middle East, that is a lot of water.  Considering the vast amounts flowing off the mountains of Eastern US and Canada, to have a tanker drop into any of the major rivers, the St. Lawrence, the Saguenay, the Churchill, the Hudson, and "fill 'er up!,"  hey, if the Iranians were reasonable people (the Leadership), instead of ranting about the Great Satan and building nuclear bombs, they could have lots of water. But no, you have these loonies running things and now no water.  Oh, well. 

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

1 hour ago, Jan van Eck said:

When you figure that one VLCC hauls 2 million barrels, which is 84 million gallons (US), and it runs empty on the return trip from North America to the Middle East, that is a lot of water.  Considering the vast amounts flowing off the mountains of Eastern US and Canada, to have a tanker drop into any of the major rivers, the St. Lawrence, the Saguenay, the Churchill, the Hudson, and "fill 'er up!,"  hey, if the Iranians were reasonable people (the Leadership), instead of ranting about the Great Satan and building nuclear bombs, they could have lots of water. But no, you have these loonies running things and now no water.  Oh, well. 

Loonies 

[NickW + 2,714]

1 hour ago, Jan van Eck said:

When you figure that one VLCC hauls 2 million barrels, which is 84 million gallons (US), and it runs empty on the return trip from North America to the Middle East, that is a lot of water.  Considering the vast amounts flowing off the mountains of Eastern US and Canada, to have a tanker drop into any of the major rivers, the St. Lawrence, the Saguenay, the Churchill, the Hudson, and "fill 'er up!,"  hey, if the Iranians were reasonable people (the Leadership), instead of ranting about the Great Satan and building nuclear bombs, they could have lots of water. But no, you have these loonies running things and now no water.  Oh, well. 

Not sure the economics would add up. I would suspect the energy cost of transferring a m3 of water from say Europe to the Persian gulf would be far higher than the energy used to desalinate a m3 drawn out of the Persian Gulf. 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

30 minutes ago, NickW said:

Not sure the economics would add up. I would suspect the energy cost of transferring a m3 of water from say Europe to the Persian gulf would be far higher than the energy used to desalinate a m3 drawn out of the Persian Gulf. 

The one-way trip is 160,000 gallons of bunker fuel.  But that includes the ship itself, which otherwise goes back empty.  If the differential between full and empty is 50%, just for argument, then for 80,000 gallons of fuel, you have 84 million gallons of water.  Can you get 1,000 gallons of fresh water in desalination for one gallon of fuel?  I dunno; you tell me. Not through an evaporation process, I would think, just guessing. Through an osmosis process? 

Hauling bulk water with a boat otherwise travelling empty sounds like a plausible project to me. What are the numbers on distillation?  

[Sebastian Meana + 278]

16 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

The one-way trip is 160,000 gallons of bunker fuel.  But that includes the ship itself, which otherwise goes back empty.  If the differential between full and empty is 50%, just for argument, then for 80,000 gallons of fuel, you have 84 million gallons of water.  Can you get 1,000 gallons of fresh water in desalination for one gallon of fuel?  I dunno; you tell me. Not through an evaporation process, I would think, just guessing. Through an osmosis process? 

Hauling bulk water with a boat otherwise travelling empty sounds like a plausible project to me. What are the numbers on distillation?  

8 to 15KWh per Cubic Metre for mutli-effect distillation with thermal power, which is around one liter of fuel, so, yeah, depends also on your power source, if you know how to make nuclear bombs then you know how to make nuclear reactors and if you know how to make nuclear reactors then likely you know how to make a desalination plant. Supposing you can use waste heat from the condenser, in an average sized reactor you have around 1500-2000MWth of wasted thermal powed to use.

The cost of desalination plant is around 1,000,000 U$S per 1000M3

[NickW + 2,714]

18 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

The one-way trip is 160,000 gallons of bunker fuel.  But that includes the ship itself, which otherwise goes back empty.  If the differential between full and empty is 50%, just for argument, then for 80,000 gallons of fuel, you have 84 million gallons of water.  Can you get 1,000 gallons of fresh water in desalination for one gallon of fuel?  I dunno; you tell me. Not through an evaporation process, I would think, just guessing. Through an osmosis process? 

Hauling bulk water with a boat otherwise travelling empty sounds like a plausible project to me. What are the numbers on distillation?  

Large scale Osmosis is typically 3-6 Kwh of electricity per m3 of potable water (6kwh for top notch potable water <250mg/L TDS) 

The comparison would be how much extra HFO you have to burn to transport 1000kg of water from say South Wales (Milford Haven) to Ras Tanura. I bet its more than 6kwh eqivalent. 

Other costs to take account of are processing costs. After filling an oil tank with water that water will need some form of processing to remove the oil sheen - something like a centrifugal force separator which strips the oil off the top of the water column. 

I suspect once it was plausible however the fall in the cost of reverse osmosis has made it cheaper to just pull water out of the Read Sea / Persian Gulf and do it. In addition this has an element of security that importing water from half way across the plant does not. 

[NickW + 2,714]

2 hours ago, Sebastian Meana said:

8 to 15KWh per Cubic Metre for mutli-effect distillation with thermal power, which is around one liter of fuel, so, yeah, depends also on your power source, if you know how to make nuclear bombs then you know how to make nuclear reactors and if you know how to make nuclear reactors then likely you know how to make a desalination plant. Supposing you can use waste heat from the condenser, in an average sized reactor you have around 1500-2000MWth of wasted thermal powed to use.

The cost of desalination plant is around 1,000,000 U$S per 1000M3

Thats effectively what the Saudis propose to do with all that waste heat from the proposed nuclear reactors should they ever get built. 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

27 minutes ago, NickW said:

Thats effectively what the Saudis propose to do with all that waste heat from the proposed nuclear reactors should they ever get built. 

Instead of spending 80 billion chasing after Elon Musk and his utterly bankrupt dreams, toss some coin at a decent nuke park, get off oil electric power, and have at it in the desalination department.  It is becoming apparent that freshwater will be the most valuable commodity in the greater Middle East, not oil. And the remaining oil can be used to make plastics and medicines instead of being burnt off.

[ronwagn + 6,290]

Go with Osmosis or Solar or natural gas that is often flared.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/flaring-wastes-3-5-percent-of-the-world-s-natural-gas/

Water Conservation https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s6vxrBPC_8XYQgSNK7-UuNbqsdDKflhXPDeswYFKDt0/edit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants

Dangers of Nuclear Plants and Storage of Radioactive Waste https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Jp7yumkT6T1tEAdC4jb1K6LvO45rtoHwFbRcl08rrS4/edit

Edited August 11, 2018 by ronwagn
added reference

[NickW + 2,714]

10 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

Instead of spending 80 billion chasing after Elon Musk and his utterly bankrupt dreams, toss some coin at a decent nuke park, get off oil electric power, and have at it in the desalination department.  It is becoming apparent that freshwater will be the most valuable commodity in the greater Middle East, not oil. And the remaining oil can be used to make plastics and medicines instead of being burnt off.

Why spend that money assuring your Countries future when you can piss it up the wall on funding terrorism, illegal wars (Syria and Yemen), and building moats to turn Qatar into an Island!