It looks like the paper is paywalled and not yet on scihub but i did find 38 pages of supplemental information with more details than the article.
It looks like the paper is paywalled and not yet on scihub but i did find 38 pages of supplemental information with more details than the article.
While this is a cool development I would recommend tempering expectations. The cost of tap water is exceptionally cheap and the claims made here likely take these estimates to the extremes. The economics of scale likely don’t match up.
For example, tap water in my city costs ~$0.04 per gallon, at 5 liters per hour, 0.264 gallons per liter, 24 hours per day, for 5 years is $2,312. So saying they can make it for less than the cost of tap water doesn’t mean it’s affordable.
EDIT: Forgot to convert from liters to gallons
The big one being “if it could be scaled up to a size of a suitcase”
That’s not very lofty, which makes me all the more skeptical.
“If” seems like a weird word to use for something the size of a suitcase.
Yeah, it doesn’t instill confidence. Like how small is their proof of concept, if they even have one? Assuming this isn’t all theoretical and nothing has been built.
Your tap water is expensive! Is that a typical rate? Its $551 for me for the 5l/hr for 5 years. $0.0075 per gallon. This is in UK. Its billed at £1.98/1000l.
It’s complicated, typically US rates aren’t a flat $/gallon. Most have flat fixed costs (meter fee, availability fees, etc) and then the actual volumetric rate charge is tacked on top of that. In my city the rate is additionally tiered, so the more water you use the more those later gallons cost. Most residential users fall into Tier 1 though, up to 4 CCF (Centicubic Foot or 748 gallons) per month, which is billed at $1.89 per CCF or $0.002526 per gallon.
So it’s hard to use the rates alone as there are additionally fixed rate costs (around $10 a month) and other usage is billed differently (commercial and industrial have higher flat rates as well as higher flat volumetric rate). The result is that commercial and industrial users pay higher rates than residential.
Luckily, my city also publishes raw statistics which indicates that, all things averaged together, the water costs around $0.04 per gallon.
I have family that can’t drink their tap water because it’s practically brackish (is was entirely brackish when someone pierced the aquifer boundary and created a hole that filled the underground reservoir with the nearby sea water, that lasted about 18 months, the entire community was on water that was being trucked in while a new well was discovered and drilled), their water is insanely subsidized, and still pretty expensive. The community is about 200 houses, each with access to Ocean/River inlet water, I don’t know a single one of them that wouldn’t go for this option. Their water is so heavily mineralized that filters lifetimes are hours to days. And then maybe they can allow the aquifers to refill, and maybe their houses wouldn’t be sinking as quickly…
Hey, I’m not saying this technology doesn’t have a use, and maybe if it’s stupidly expensive it will be heavily subsidized. The point I’m making is that it “likely” isn’t the solution to world wide water scarcity.
Another user commented that desalination is a grift, it’s not, the market forces just aren’t there yet to push its large scale implementation world wide. However, the idea that an upcoming technology may theoretically scale up and be the same economic scale is historically unlikely.
Historically the trajectory of this sort of technology is that it will define technology for the next 20 years (Nobel Peace Prize or more), or it will be bought up and buried by a big corporation (goodwill isn’t typically good for capitalism), or it won’t scale up as predicted and will be a major nothing burger.
5 gallons per.hour? The article says 4-6 litres - a little over a gallon.
Great point, sorry for the error!