 Two o'clock rock here on Think Tech and on Friday means likable science and it means Ethan Allen, all those things are connected and he's with Prell, he's the chief scientist for Think Tech Hawaii and we're talking about water which is his favorite subject, we're going to call this update on water but you know what's really interesting is we're facing shortages, certainly we're facing shortages in fossil fuel. We had one guest a couple days ago that suggested in 50 years we'd be scratching for oil. We had to figure something out, it's not just not an option, it's a requirement and there's so many other things but water you know we have taken for granted especially in Hawaii where it is so cheap per gallon still but in a few years it won't be, all these forces are bearing on it in other places it's much worse so we need to have an update on water. Water is critical to life and including ours you know you can't escape that but other people in the world they'll be wars over water one of these days and we'd better get smart about it. Not for you and me Ethan but for the next generation, that's you guys, you better be thinking about this, no kidding. So one of the things that Ethan does it takes his travels all across the Pacific Ocean like Mitchner, seeing all the places that Mitchner has seen, saw rather he's gone but water is among the things he does. So what's your latest water for life as a project you're working on, what is that? So in my main water for life project funded by the National Science Foundation we work with communities across Micronesia from eastern Micronesia that is the Marshall Islands through the Federated States of Micronesia out to western Micronesia Palau and help communities build better access to good drinking water, to good high quality drinking water for their for their communities and at the same time we use water as a very effective hook to start getting people interested in science education because water has all kinds of science, there's physics in water, there's chemistry of water, there's biology of water, there's geology, hydrology, ocean science, the atmosphere, and the science of making water. Exactly. Which is going to be really important. Exactly, exactly or purifying water really is the big issue right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway so what does that program do? Is it all about science? It is it's fundamentally a science education program although as my my program officer at National Science Foundation sometimes says to me it sounds like you're doing more community development than science education. It's part of it though. It is, very much. You know I mean it had to be on the ground you have to show people and I think we need the same kind of education here actually you know it's nice in Micronesia but it's also useful right here. Well yeah and this is this is the thing I really wanted to talk about today is a related project and I got a supplemental grant from National Science Foundation to look at the sort of the nexus of food, energy, and water and if you think about it places like the Marshall Islands are very interesting they have a bunch of water surrounded by salt water right but it's not not usable water. Rising salt water. Rising salt water, that's going to affect the water table for sure. Right they have very little water table in the Marshall Islands, a very thin lens of water a foot or two deep some in most places and not very good water because it's often been washed over and that's a ship it in or do something else. But they also have abundant solar energy right it's just constantly bright and sunny there and so the question sort of is why can't they do solar power desalination right and it takes a lot of energy. Yeah they've got a lot of energy they've got a lot of solar energy. It's a lot of money. Well no that's not a lot of money. Yeah that's a trick it doesn't take a lot of money. So we worked with some folks from the University of South Pacific and from the College of the Marshall Islands and these and particularly these kids from what they call it Life Skills Academy. Life Skills Academy is sort of the Votek High School in the Marshall Islands. So the kids who can't make it into high school because their academic background isn't good enough to get them into high school and they're based really hard on the community to have people don't go to high school. Yeah exactly it's a lose-lose situation but we've got these kids now building these solar stills and I'll show you a little bit we'll show a video on this but so these are devices that use the sun's energy and you feed in salt water into them and they basically desalination they run the water cycle they basically cause evaporation condensation and then you gather up the fresh water that's condensed. So here we've got this video running and this shows the leader of the project there he's talking to the kids there and starting to build the still and I'll walk you through this. It's not a lie but you make me think of the south you know the deep south and they got stills there maybe they know a lot about desalination too. So these PVC putt frames and this housing which is just tubing really just to support the external framework you'll see so building this big long tube with these rigid supports on it made out of as I say just simple plastic housing held together with duct tape and string I mean nothing very elaborate here and then they take this plastic clear plastic sheath basically and string it over the whole thing you can see it so it's a long tube now right and you see the black plastic trays inside of it they set it on a on a slate tilt and into the upper end they pour salt water which runs those four trays and then they close off the salt water evaporates out of those trays condenses on the clear plastic settles to the bottom and at the end of the day you can pull fresh water out of it even if you had dirty filthy salt water going in you get absolutely clean pure for to maintain it I mean do you have a build-up of you have to empty the salt water itself out you know periodically and rinse it you know that kind of stuff but nonetheless basically you see you were talking at the expense of it how much is that PVC pipe that bit of hosing old duct tape and the plastic sheathing on the cost yeah and now they get where they get how do they take the energy from the the solar and make this process happen you put that device out in the sun you just leave it outside just leave it outside yeah there's no expense at all you don't need panels or anything like that no that's it's a how much capacity you know can I live off that thing that basically that device they showed there you put about six or eight gallons of salt water into it in the morning seawater and you can take about a half a gallon of nice clean fresh water out at the end of the day so if you had two of those you could live off of that so you probably need a couple of those or a bigger version of it can I put things in perspective because before the show began you gave me this infographic right she a Loch Ness isn't it so Loch Ness has some stats for us on exactly how much water it takes to do this and that and although the print may be a little small for me maybe you can help people by telling them how much water it takes to do this and that well so it's funny you know we think how much water you really need you need roughly half a gallon or a gallon a day to drink basically it doesn't sound like very much you probably should be drinking probably should be drinking more particularly in a hot climate probably a couple gallons a day would be really a better guess still not a lot of water but what people don't appreciate often is how much water is used in making other things so for instance this is like energy yeah how much energy do we use to really create have make a cow right you know make a cow that we eat or right or that gives milk it's a lot of energy right exactly so one of my favorite current examples is if you have a nice glass of wine that represents 32 gallons of water that one glass of wine your glass of orange juice maybe only 25 gallons why so much well because you've got a water the grapes you've got to wash things off you've got to process it you've got to clean the bottles I mean there's a bunch of water that's the fresh clean water are you but you're not knitting out for what's left as you know used water drain drainage water great great all that water has been used and has been we get some of it back really not lost for a while but you're talking about the fresh water we use you know the first stage of these processes right but I mean water never goes away the water molecules that you and I are drinking today that are in that bottle the water you're drinking are the same water molecules that were here in the age of the dinosaurs and dinosaurs drank those same somebody drank that water many people tell me who it was I'd like to know I want to remain clean on this I might have been somebody I don't like no but I mean literally dinosaurs were drinking that same water and cockroaches before the dinosaurs and I like the dinosaurs the cockroaches I'm sure so you know the water is just sort of goes around and that's the beauty that actually solar still design really shows you that nice thing that is you put salt water in the salt water evaporates off of out of the pan condenses on the clear plastic dribbles around the sides collects in the bottom and your you've got nice clean freshwater and doesn't matter what was in that salt water with it there could be heavy metals there could be pesticides there could be bugs and all kinds of marvelous isn't it but none of that evaporates out you don't have to filter it you have to process it you don't have to heat it up or anything it's the purest posses H2O exact that's only thing that evaporates out it's only then condenses are you missing something I mean water off water from the spring right water that they advertise this really good bottle water is not just H2O no there are all kinds of other there are small minerals and this right there are small amounts of other things indeed if you get very very pure water doesn't really taste very good to most people if you if you try to drink distilled water it tastes sort of exceedingly bland most people you want a little bit a few little salts a few little odds and ends a thing you'll come up with a little little envelope a little a little pouch or something and you pour these you know granules in there and whoa it tastes great well I mean by the time actually of course the water has run around in this in this plastic sheath that's probably all actually got a little salt spilling some of the earlier ocean water in it and so it's gonna not be absolutely pure actually just one numbers so one of my favorite statsman's well let me sit like I said 32 gallons for a glass of wine 70 gallons sorry 700 gallons to make a t-shirt 2,000 gallons to make a pound of beef or a set of tires that's about the same thing but one of my favorite stats in this is that they give you some some messages by saving water in this and they point out that if for a year each day during the course of a year you forego a glass of milk which takes like 52 gallons or 65 gallons to make a glass of milk and instead drink a glass of beer instead of that milk over the course of a year you will save this planet over 15,000 gallons of water you'll save 15,000 wonderful I know I tell my wife we'll have beer in the house forever it's gonna say get get the kids off of a lot of knowledge I'm doing beer early why is that why is beer so cheap in terms of the input of water well because beer all you're really doing is the water to grow the hops and things and then the water put in to make the hops for the milk you've got to raise the water for the grass water to raise the cow then water to sterilize the milk and pressurize it you know I mean there's a bunch of water used in the in the process every every step of the process is making milk you know I compared this to energy because you know people make the same kind of analysis for energy how much to raise a cow but you know what it's kind of the same thing because what the difference between water that's fresh and beautiful and water that is not so fresh and beautiful is it costs energy to make it fresh and beautiful again it's there as you said but you have to put some effort energy in to recreating the original purity right I mean if that's what you're looking for yeah yeah exactly and I mean nature does it for us all the time the water cycle in nature right water constantly evaporating out of the ocean pure pure H2O through the atmosphere condensing into clouds of course when it condenses it's condensing typically around a little speck of dust a salt crystal something like that so it's no no longer quite pure and then it falls and as soon as it hits a surface then of course it picks up whatever's on that surface any dust any salt any minerals that are soluble and begins to get polluted again right away basically so it's you know but then eventually it finds its way back down into the water table into a lake or a stream then into the ocean then evaporates out again and it just goes on and on forever well the more pollution that we put in the water seems to me the more energy we have to you know invest in clean water exactly I remember when I first heard about Lake Baikal you know Lake Baikal in Siberia one fifth of all the liquid freshwater on earth is in that one place fantastic yes and you know I I mean for a long time for well millennia this was a huge and beautiful source of fresh water but recently and I don't mean more than 10 15 years it's it's had some factories along the coast along the shore and it's not so pure anymore and it's a real tragedy that this huge source of pure water that serves all of Siberia that part of Russia that part of the world is now under attack so I mean I think it all plays it's symbolic all places all freshwater sources are under attack in one way or the other humankind is taken over the planet in every corner and so we have to figure out ways to you know preserve conserve and ultimately reprocess it right and that to me is the beauty of what I showed you there at the start of the video here is a simple cheap low-tech way any anyone can basically make those deals you once you've seen that design you realize oh yeah there's nothing to that right I could I can scratch up some sheet of plastic some something to hold that plastic out into a tubular shape something to make a tray for the middle of it and then I've got it I mean as long as you got some sunlight here's that that's the best kind of technology yeah it's it's not high-tech reverse osmosis kind of stuff although and later on we can talk a little bit about some very exciting developments in that in that line too one one short reference though I remember we did several shows with them this is a local company that went out into the developing world with a device that included just regular plumbing equipment sort of like you know the device we're talking about although it had one valve that was patented and the idea was with regular plumbing pipes they could run water that was you know contaminated on somebody's roof and use a solar old-fashioned solar panel to heat it and and that you get clear water clean water and and this was unavailable in many places in the world but it was only a few pipes that's all it was really no moving parts except this valve which was you know didn't require any maintenance and they saved a lot of lives I think by providing fresh water where fresh water was not available I'm not sure if they're still in business but it was a wonderful idea it was really a community contribution by them they're very interesting things going on still with that kind of technology Dean Dean came in me anything to you sir us first the founder of us first robotics competition yeah guy who invented the syringe pumps basically segway right segway right so hi segway we're gonna take a break we're gonna take a segway we'll be right back you'll see Aloha I'm Kirsten Baumgart Turner and I'm fortunate to be able to host sustainable Hawaii at think tech Hawaii calm I hope you'll join in with us every Tuesday from 12 noon to 1 p.m. to see the interesting people we have to share with you their information Aloha Aloha my name is Josh green I serve a senator from the Big Island on the Kona side and I'm also an emergency room physician my program here on think tech is called health care in Hawaii I'll have guests that should be interesting to you twice a month we'll talk about issues that range from mental health care to drug addiction to our health care system and any challenges that we face here in Hawaii we hope you'll join us again thanks for supporting think tech hello I'm Marianne Sasaki welcome to think tech Hawaii where some of the most interesting conversations in Honolulu go on I have a show on Wednesdays from one to two called life in the law where we discuss legal issues politics governmental topics and a whole host of issues I hope you'll join me one thing I went back we're back after that really lovely segue you wanted to say something more about Dean came in and segues right so he's also now beyond the segue has developed this machine he calls a slingshot and it's a it's a device size of maybe two or three refrigerators a bunch of piping basically nothing really revolutionary but a very clever heat exchange system in it and basically with a using about the power it takes to run a standard hairdryer it can produce a thousand gallons of fresh water a day if you feed it seawater basically wow so it's really an incredibly energy efficient machine because you should be able to do that with solar power or whatever that kind of technology is going to make somebody rich well again Dean came in he is rich he is rich but he doesn't really need the money he's actually trying what he's trying to do is get enough of these machines around the world so that he can afford to produce them en masse and produce them cheaply enough that they'll hopefully only cost a few thousand dollars each and then yeah basically any little remote Pacific Island can probably get one and something to have a thousand gallons a day for not for an island of a couple hundred people is plenty of water you know yeah this is really this is the kind of thing we have to do now exactly we have to you know it'd be terrible to see people dying of thirst she's thirst leads to disease and all kinds of problems and quality of life there is on that list I sent you this morning they point out something like every seven seconds in the world a child is dying from some water-related illness yeah I mean the cost the economic cost of water-related illnesses are astronomical many cases around the world water scarcity is causing far more deaths than wars and and we'll continue to do that the technology is so important and profitable now we spoke before the show about who is it graphene yes graphene if you don't know about graphene it's time you looked up graphene graphene is a what is it it's a layer of carbon atoms right one atom thick and it recently discovered and people are trying to commercialize it now why because it makes for a way better battery so you're going to see maybe not in our lifetimes but you're going to see graphene batteries everywhere and it's really going to change you know we were waiting for some extraordinary development of battery technology it's here and it'll get rolled out and you know it's a sort of nanotechnology kind of thing very much possibilities are unlimited but you mentioned to me that graphene is not the only thing we deal with we are going to deal with that's one layer thick there's also this perforine a membrane that's one what one atom thick one molecule one molecule right basically and it basically is a sort of a specially structured graphene sheet that has pores built into it that are just the right size that they allow water molecules to slip through very easily but because of the properties it doesn't allow the charged salt molecules of the sodium or chloride to go through and so because it's so thin literally they say compared to a traditional membrane if you're graphene if you're purple if you're graphing membrane or a stick of the sheet of paper a standard ultra-thin membrane would be a stick of a ring of paper standard standard today's membrane so I mean that that's the difference is 1 to 500 so and this means it's drawn the whole together and industrial uses exactly and plus you don't need much pressure to push the water through the water flows very easily and that means it doesn't foul up and all the contaminants can be washed off of it very easily because they're not being jammed into it so it lasts longer it's cheaper for San Diego they just put in I like ten billion dollars in your big reverse also some machines yeah I'll be able to use these filters and probably cut their energy use by okay so San Diego is not yet lost no no in fact they could use this yeah they're probably looking at it right now and then I mean the big place where this is going to come into play is in China China has committed in China needs desperately to do desalination China has this huge population on the coast very limited water supplies particularly the north part of the country they're way behind what where they projected they would be on doing desalination and they desperately need to be doing this now to get enough water to run their industries to keep their economy going to keep their population healthy and so they're also and yeah it's interesting that one of our defense contractors are the people who came up with this yeah well sure you know I controls the water as a huge strategic advantage oh yeah and the Marshall Islands will benefit by it and you know as you described them right what about Hawaii what about Red Hill what about you know all we are going to have shortages to our aquifer is not doing that well one of the beauties here is of course UH just got their new EPSCOR grant from National Science Foundation this is a big grant to improve the whole research infrastructure and for five years and 20 million dollars they are gonna actually find out how much water we actually have on a lot of how much fresh water which no one knows that we how many employees as a statement we have we can find that out today all I'm not sure we can all we know right now about water here we can tell you pretty actually how much water we pump out of the ground but we don't know how much water goes in the ground we don't know how much water is sitting in the ground especially because it's porous you know your lava rock is part of the porous parts that are impermeable and no one quite knows how big those porous reservoirs are you find this out yes they're now these guys are gonna be mapping this modeling it and really we'll be able after five years we hope to give a really good much more accurate estimate on it you people say now oh we've got enough water for the next 30 years what do you want do you want to be sitting here 29 years from now one like huh is tomorrow the big day yeah suddenly all the seats are dry so let's let's work hard tonight right try to fix it by the morning yeah no so we should know we should know you know how much water there is and we should be you know every home should be putting these same old kinds of home simple solar stills in you know so you know you can be you off the grid for water for least your key drinking water you know it's very interesting that we have this conversation because the same thing is happening in energy you know it used to be still is mostly is a it's a centralized system right where you have a utility company is sending out energy in various right produces and distributes it now they call distributed energy you can do it yourself yeah and I think more and more it's inevitable more and more people can do that and same thing with water right and it's great I mean and you see this in the electric grid now is a distributed grid here and that's great much more resilient it's much less prone to single point failures single point failures don't mean as much because you've got multiple sources of input now yeah same thing with water systems people should wherever possible now it's not always possible when you're living in a high-rise building clearly you sort of got to rely on that the building's water system which is hooked in the municipal system but again even there there are things to do they can set up catchment systems so at least you're not using good clean pure city water to water the shrubs in the yard right you're using this rainwater and don't have to process it that's water you're saving there are a thousand ways to save water and we need to make that much higher in people's consciousness you bet and you know the problem as in energy is going to be people don't like change they have assumed all these years that the lights would always be on that the although the prices were high they weren't going to get much higher we never any special bills to pay the same thing with water we have good clean water and it would always be there not true and it's not it's not our fault individually even as a community it's just the way things are happening in the civilized right so I was talking a few months ago with some people from southwest of England and they said it was just a couple of years ago they started getting in their communities water bills before that water was free that there was enough water around basically the city the community provided water to all of its residents at no charge and finally they sort of like oh hey like this this stuff is costing us money to get this out get it clean get it to the people we need to start making them pay for that yeah get used to it yeah but you know just like energy the cost of new grid equipment the cost of all that technology that will make it more resilient as you say and give us a more reliable system better quality power which we need for our better quality you know appliances and computer equipment same thing with water we're gonna have to go and buy this equipment and some of this could be high-tech and the more high-tech the more you know the more water it can produce but the more it takes to make the more water extra run more power involved yeah it's not going to be cheap and I think people have to get used to the fact that right now it's cheap but coming you know coming soon it'll be more and more expensive because that technology doesn't come free yeah I mean you watched what happened with the price of oil right it used to be low low low and suddenly it spiked right up back in the 70s think think of water right now as being the pre-70s oil you know and we're coming to that arrow and suddenly that spike is gonna hit yeah okay well the lesson of the show I think is number one drink beer but not too much and you have to be you know the right age for that you know let's not get carried away we're not recommending that anybody not qualified to drink beer should be there we go and to don't drink petroleum it's no good for you absolutely and three be prepared for shortages in water and an increase in cost of water going forward but cheer up Ethan will have the technology he'll help us out we'll have regular updates on the status of water in Hawaii thank you so much Ethan thank you Jay I've been talking to you as always