Chapter 3 : Some Ways to Reduce the Cost of Desalination

 About 40% of the cost of desalinating water is from energy inputs. Farmers providing this energy by solar harvesting as a contribution for water entitlement would reduce desalination costs substantially. What if farmers provided the other 60% of the expense of desalination in the form of more green energy. So the coastal corporations sold that extra 60% of green energy into the energy market to fund their operations. Those coastal corporations providing the desalinated water to farmers would have their expenses covered. But then you have the added expense of pumping desalinated water hundreds of kilometers inland. Same thing. The farmers provide enough energy to pay for the piping of desalinated water to their farm. 

Farmers should pay for water with the green energy they generate on their farms. If they don’t do this, they are wasting money on their farms as sunlight bounces off their land uselessly. This must be demonstrated to them, otherwise, they will just see another sunny day outside. Farmers need to see a working example of this somewhere before they are convinced it can work. It's almost like you are trying to convince farmers to change their religion. It's going to be a struggle. Sundrop Farms in South Australia is not a close enough example even though it's successful and looking to expand. 

The water pipes contain energy in the form of moving water. Can those pipes play a part in replacing part of the electricity grid? Must the entire electricity grid consist totally of wires? Possibly not with a bit more thought and clever design. Huge savings and fire safety opportunities might be obtained from this initiative. Especially if one considers the power stored in water silos every 500 to 1000 meters along the pipeline. 

The brine from the seawater could be sold to mining companies so that they can extract minerals. There is evidence that this type of mining is possible. Again, research needs to be undertaken in this field. Hardly any has been done so far. Although a British firm called Watercycle Technologies is quite active in this space. If you could recoup royalties from the mining of brine, how much would it lower the cost of the desalination process? And how much brine would be cleaned and never go back into the sea?

Many valuable minerals can be found in seawater, such as lithium, magnesium, gold, silver, platinum, uranium, cobalt, potash, bromine (which is presently sourced from Saudi Arabian desalination plants for Redflow’s flow batteries in Queensland), etc. The mineral concentration of brine would be much greater than normal seawater. Does this change the economics of this type of mining? Though it’s not really mining, it’s more like sifting. We need to study this and, if possible, capture its value to help fund the irrigation of the Australian interior.

What we can say about mining brine instead of traditional mining is that you won't have to go to the expense of digging the minerals up. You will just have to divide them into separate components through some electrical, chemical, or physical process (centrifugation). Or a combination of the three. So instead of mining one mineral at a time, you mine multiple minerals and channel that slurry to its own heap or container, which could be on a ship waiting to sail. Plus, you won't have to transport the minerals far. They will already be near the Port/Pump City and the waiting cargo ship. So, no expense is required to transport minerals from the middle of Australia. The brine dividing and extraction process may have the potential to be automated, saving on many traditional mining costs. 

There is also promising research that brine can be used to generate electricity. Sodium batteries are proving to be a great success. And Chloride is excellent for cleaning products. Continued research on what can be done with the brine may create further cost efficiencies. In the near term, the brine not utilized through mining or electricity generation will be pumped far out to sea and distributed widely so as not to adversely affect the salinity of the sea.

In Texas, researchers have found that they can extract rare earth minerals from coal ash. Perhaps the same can be said for brine as well. Has any research been done? 

Farmers should be encouraged through generous subsidies to use drip irrigation and shade houses wherever possible. It’s not easy getting water to the inland of Australia. It needs to be applied with care. This is another cost-saving, and a business model could use drip irrigation and or shade houses as a fundamental assumption for growing some crops.

The pipes being built to distribute the water to the interior probably will grow slowly at first. The project needs to progressively prove itself. However, scale and innovation are the keys to long-term success. Initially, the extra value added to land that can now be irrigated at any time at an affordable rate means higher rates and taxes can be charged on the newly improved land. Private investment and bank finance should also be more readily forthcoming as the risk of drought is eliminated.

A Government committee led by John Alexander MP was looking at how the value added to land could be captured to fund the infrastructure needed to build a fast rail network. But then he retired, and due to the inertia within his Government, I think he gave up. The principal thought of windfall gains for surrounding land coming from improved infrastructure being taxed is well documented in his research. Though other funding possibilities exist. Countries such as Saudi Arabia would willingly contribute funds to such projects in exchange for access to the knowledge gained. Our superfunds would probably be interested once case studies emerged.