News roundup, 2 Jan 2025

- The US job market is, by some measures, the worst it's been since 2010. While the actual unemployment rate was only 4.6% in November, a mere 50,000 net new jobs have been added per month across the entire country since May, meaning that those not currently employed find a hard time getting work. This is based on official stats, but Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell thinks this is an overestimation - and that there may in fact be a net loss in jobs. Regardless, about half the country will say it's all Biden's fault anyway...

- A Norwegian startup, Flocean, claims to have developed a desalination technology that cuts the (very considerable) energy consumption by half. According to the company, the technique takes advantage of the pressure of the ocean itself at depths of 300 to 600 metres. They plan to have a proof of concept up and running within the year.

- The BC government has conducted its first comprehensive assessment since 1997 of potentially catastrophic risks facing the province. Among other things, the report has concluded that if a 9.0 magnitude quake were to strike off the coast of Vancouver Island the province would suffer $128 billion in economic losses in addition to the deaths and injuries - and the entire property and casualty insurance industry across Canada could be threatened.

- A travel website called "The Travel" published an article that tries to claim that Canada's boycott of US travel is "backfiring" - partly because it has become more unpleasant to cross the border now that agents have more time to interrogate each person. I dunno, sounds more like the boycott will just strengthen further if that's the case. The article also claims that it's driven up the price of domestic travel in Canada, leading boycotters of the US to travel elsewhere (such as Europe). Again, though, if the demand for domestic travel is up, there's no reasonable basis to say the boycott is "backfiring" - rather, travel to the US is being replaced both by domestic and overseas travel. It reads like the author is in denial of the possibility that there's any good substitute for the US as a travel destination. However, one group who are taking a hit are snowbirds who want to sell their vacation properties in Florida.

- A police vehicle fatally hit a pedestrian in Surrey, BC on Christmas, less than a month after the last time this sort of thing happened. I daresay Surrey's police force might benefit from some driving lessons.

- Around 40 people have died in a fire at a Swiss ski resort on New Year's Eve. Officials say it could be days before all of the bodies have been identified; the cause is under identification.

- A Florida-based YouTuber is under investigation for animal abuse after posting video of the operation of a trap he had developed called the "Opossum Launcher". He had apparently lured the animal onto a makeshift catapult; it appears to have survived the incident but that's probably not the sort of thing that should be encouraged.

- In a story that sounds like it should be from Florida, a man in Brandon, Manitoba was arrested after attempting to pay a business with drugs instead of any conventional method of payment.

New desalination technique shows promise

If this works on a large scale, maybe we won't have to worry about the Yanks taking our fresh water:

The world isn’t facing a water shortage. Anyone who lives by the ocean knows that.

What we are running short of is fresh water. Only 3 per cent of the water on this planet is considered fresh water, and of that about two thirds is locked up in glaciers.

Most of the rest isn’t close to the people who need it most, with parts of Australia, India and the U.S. southwest being some of the better known water-scarce regions.

This has brought heightened attention recently to the importance of water desalination, and more specifically, lower-cost ways of removing salt from seawater that don’t require enormous amounts of heat and electricity.

On this front, a start-up from Vancouver called Saltworks Technologies has been breaking new ground with a process, explained below, called “thermo-ionic desalination.”

By way of background, most of the world’s desalination plants today separate salt by distilling seawater, but this requires an immense amount of energy to rapidly vaporize and then condense the water.

Newer desalination plants typically use a process called reverse osmosis. This is when the seawater is forced against a membrane that filters out the salt and other minerals. The approach is less energy-intensive than distillation, but the big pumps that push the water through the membrane still require lots of electricity.

How much electricity? Economist Jeff Rubin, in his book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, cites the example of Saudi Arabia’s Shuaibah 3, the world’s largest desalination plant. It can produce 880,000 cubic metres of fresh water daily. The electricity to run this facility comes from a massive oil-burning power plant.

Shuaibah 3 is just one of several large desalination facilities in Saudi Arabia that get their power from oil-fired generation stations. “The World Bank estimates that the Middle East will need roughly another 50 to 60 billion cubic feet (1.42 to 1.7 billion cubic metres) of water annually over the next 10 to 15 years to meet the region’s burgeoning water demand,” writes Rubin. “Desalinating that immense volume of water could ultimately require the use of a million barrels of oil per day.”

This is why a company like Saltworks is so important. It has figured out a new process that can cut the energy demands of a desalination plant by more than half, and in some cases by as much as 80 per cent. Ben Sparrow, the mechanical engineer who co-founded Saltworks in 2008, says a small pilot plant is already operating in Vancouver that can process 1 cubic metre of ocean water a day.

From the Star. Interesting stuff, and a lot less troublesome than pumping water over the Rockies (or blasting out gigantic trenches with nuclear bombs, as Gary Filmon supposedly advocated in his master's thesis).