This is a cool idea. However it strikes me as obvious—as in, there are a lot of very smart people already looking for solutions like this so I expect it has been explored before. Did you search for existing literature? I did very briefly but didn’t come up with anything useful.
Large scale evaporation is already done in lithium mining, for example. Perhaps some related studies have been done there.
I also expect the are potential issues besides the geopolitical ones highlighted here.
What effects would this have on the coastline ecosystem—for example, due to concentration of salt over a large area?
What materials could be used for the wicks? If it’s a natural material I guess it would decompose into a salty mush.
Not to mention, complex environmental systems are… Complex! How hard is it to be reasonably sure an experiment like this would actually have the intended positive effects? Rather than causing localized flooding due to unexpected concentration of the rainfall, for example.
Final note—you state several figures related to cost (megajoules of energy for pumping, cost to generate a megajoule with solar etc.). I don’t have a reason to doubt these but generally you should provide sources along with numbers so that people can independently verify them.
Evaporating into the ‘wild’ isn’t profitable, so it’s understandable that no one sought this route—I only expect a government to fund it, because they’d see returns in taxes regardless of which farm got rain. There’s also a loooong history of simple solutions going unnoticed for decades; I mentioned a few when Julia Wise argued the same on the EA Forum cross-post.
Another example of “simple-and-ignored” to add to the mix: last year, a mathematician was in a class on Knot Theory, and the teacher mentioned that “the Conway 11-Knot is unsolved”… she took a look at it, thought about it intermittently for a few days, and came back to her teacher saying “What about doing it this way?” She was right—Quanta magazine wrote her up! It turned out, EVERYONE had missed a simple solution, after writing it up in journals, grad students struggling in vain hope, Conway himself miffed, for FIFTY years. Yup. Simple is invisible, sometimes.
Geopolitical issues are only certain regions. Others, like California, are begging for evaporators! Australia? It’s all just one contiguous desert, and they were trying cludgier water pipeline projects decades ago. Southeast India, too. And if Libya only received a quarter of the rain they threw into the air, it’d still be good for them.
Lithium ponds are doing a separation; they are intentionally not evaporating as fast as possible as much as possible. A better area of industry to look at: spray & contact cooling. When machines or air-flows are hot, we create a lot of wet surface area, and we measure the evaporation from those surfaces. By having hundreds of yarns per square yard, hanging in parallel, you expose the air to hundreds of times more surface area than a pond does. And, the air-flow moves among the strands, while ponds create a layer of 100% humidity that buffers further evaporation. When industry wants to cool things, they use wet surface area, and a dense array of threads maximizes that surface area.
For salt, I already mentioned: you either have to drip it across the wide ocean, to avoid over-salting the water (the halocline is an invisible barrier to life)… OR, you pile it into a vast pyramid. That pyramid could be a tourist attraction, considering how many folks visit salt flats to ride kite buggies or burn art pieces while on drugs. To prevent salt leeching into the surrounding landscape, you first pick a large rock outcropping—granite is best. Then, surround with more rock to form a foundational retaining wall, gravity-style. Fill the basin with a layer of sand, two inches. Hire all of Elong Mush’s workforce, to blast the sand-bed with THERMAL LANCES (which will need a welding torch to ignite… wtf?!?), melting it into a contiguous glass bottom. Repeat a few times for good measure. Spew brine on top and let it evaporate into a salt-flat piling for decades. Bonus: because you hired all of Elong’s bruhs, his empire collapses and the world wakes to sanity!
Flash floods are when a hot & humid ‘atmospheric river’ of some 100km wide, 2km thick, thousands of km long, bashes head-long into mountains or a cold front, like a long locomotive piling-up at a painted tunnel! Evaporating from rows of yarn into the air from the shoreline is a steady addition, which is accelerated only when the air is drier and warmer… the exact same times you don’t have to worry about a flood. To give you a sense of how much ‘water per area per day’ we would be adding, for agricultural purposes: you can get good grasslands on 300mm/yr, or just 1mm per day… and evaporate would be spread mostly evenly, with hotter summer months seeing perhaps triple − 3mm, or an eight of an inch. It’s a drizzle, but it would come in the hot, dry months, when the plants need it most.
For wicks, that’s not really an engineering problem. Fiberglass is inert, and it wouldn’t be disturbed; salt accumulation is just flushed with higher water levels ⇒ higher flow rates. And, desal megajoules are on wikipedia; though be wary, because the most energy-efficient method also has the most capital-expense, such that the final cost of water is far above the “1cent per Megajoule” cost of energy, above. “1cent per Megajoule” is near the good end of solar concentrators—Morocco’s is about that much, on-site, if I recall. Being in the desert, I expect solar would be on the cheaper end. [[That translates to 3.6cents per kWh, btw, and by the time it gets transmitted with losses, with profit and transmission-capital expenses, folks usually pay triple.]]
This is a cool idea. However it strikes me as obvious—as in, there are a lot of very smart people already looking for solutions like this so I expect it has been explored before. Did you search for existing literature? I did very briefly but didn’t come up with anything useful.
Large scale evaporation is already done in lithium mining, for example. Perhaps some related studies have been done there.
I also expect the are potential issues besides the geopolitical ones highlighted here.
What effects would this have on the coastline ecosystem—for example, due to concentration of salt over a large area?
What materials could be used for the wicks? If it’s a natural material I guess it would decompose into a salty mush.
Not to mention, complex environmental systems are… Complex! How hard is it to be reasonably sure an experiment like this would actually have the intended positive effects? Rather than causing localized flooding due to unexpected concentration of the rainfall, for example.
Final note—you state several figures related to cost (megajoules of energy for pumping, cost to generate a megajoule with solar etc.). I don’t have a reason to doubt these but generally you should provide sources along with numbers so that people can independently verify them.
Evaporating into the ‘wild’ isn’t profitable, so it’s understandable that no one sought this route—I only expect a government to fund it, because they’d see returns in taxes regardless of which farm got rain. There’s also a loooong history of simple solutions going unnoticed for decades; I mentioned a few when Julia Wise argued the same on the EA Forum cross-post.
Another example of “simple-and-ignored” to add to the mix: last year, a mathematician was in a class on Knot Theory, and the teacher mentioned that “the Conway 11-Knot is unsolved”… she took a look at it, thought about it intermittently for a few days, and came back to her teacher saying “What about doing it this way?” She was right—Quanta magazine wrote her up! It turned out, EVERYONE had missed a simple solution, after writing it up in journals, grad students struggling in vain hope, Conway himself miffed, for FIFTY years. Yup. Simple is invisible, sometimes.
Geopolitical issues are only certain regions. Others, like California, are begging for evaporators! Australia? It’s all just one contiguous desert, and they were trying cludgier water pipeline projects decades ago. Southeast India, too. And if Libya only received a quarter of the rain they threw into the air, it’d still be good for them.
Lithium ponds are doing a separation; they are intentionally not evaporating as fast as possible as much as possible. A better area of industry to look at: spray & contact cooling. When machines or air-flows are hot, we create a lot of wet surface area, and we measure the evaporation from those surfaces. By having hundreds of yarns per square yard, hanging in parallel, you expose the air to hundreds of times more surface area than a pond does. And, the air-flow moves among the strands, while ponds create a layer of 100% humidity that buffers further evaporation. When industry wants to cool things, they use wet surface area, and a dense array of threads maximizes that surface area.
For salt, I already mentioned: you either have to drip it across the wide ocean, to avoid over-salting the water (the halocline is an invisible barrier to life)… OR, you pile it into a vast pyramid. That pyramid could be a tourist attraction, considering how many folks visit salt flats to ride kite buggies or burn art pieces while on drugs. To prevent salt leeching into the surrounding landscape, you first pick a large rock outcropping—granite is best. Then, surround with more rock to form a foundational retaining wall, gravity-style. Fill the basin with a layer of sand, two inches. Hire all of Elong Mush’s workforce, to blast the sand-bed with THERMAL LANCES (which will need a welding torch to ignite… wtf?!?), melting it into a contiguous glass bottom. Repeat a few times for good measure. Spew brine on top and let it evaporate into a salt-flat piling for decades. Bonus: because you hired all of Elong’s bruhs, his empire collapses and the world wakes to sanity!
Flash floods are when a hot & humid ‘atmospheric river’ of some 100km wide, 2km thick, thousands of km long, bashes head-long into mountains or a cold front, like a long locomotive piling-up at a painted tunnel! Evaporating from rows of yarn into the air from the shoreline is a steady addition, which is accelerated only when the air is drier and warmer… the exact same times you don’t have to worry about a flood. To give you a sense of how much ‘water per area per day’ we would be adding, for agricultural purposes: you can get good grasslands on 300mm/yr, or just 1mm per day… and evaporate would be spread mostly evenly, with hotter summer months seeing perhaps triple − 3mm, or an eight of an inch. It’s a drizzle, but it would come in the hot, dry months, when the plants need it most.
For wicks, that’s not really an engineering problem. Fiberglass is inert, and it wouldn’t be disturbed; salt accumulation is just flushed with higher water levels ⇒ higher flow rates. And, desal megajoules are on wikipedia; though be wary, because the most energy-efficient method also has the most capital-expense, such that the final cost of water is far above the “1cent per Megajoule” cost of energy, above. “1cent per Megajoule” is near the good end of solar concentrators—Morocco’s is about that much, on-site, if I recall. Being in the desert, I expect solar would be on the cheaper end. [[That translates to 3.6cents per kWh, btw, and by the time it gets transmitted with losses, with profit and transmission-capital expenses, folks usually pay triple.]]
I hope that helps clear-up some details!