There is plenty of fresh water in North America. We first need to reprocess waste water, recycle, use grey water irrigation, etc. Reclaiming water from fracking can be improved using new technology utilizing physics in a multistage filtration system.

We just need the government and industry to work together to accomplish this. Industry and municipalities will not do it on their own due to near term economics.

There is plenty of water we just need to be smart and manage it properly.

Does anyone here realize how big these pipelines would have to be? If you want to recreate the water access of a city living near a river, you're going to have to divert water on river level scales. You'd need like what? 5 10' diameter pipes coming off the missouri to go across the heartland and then into the southwest to provide for millions of people's needs.

Just completely unfeasible.

Deputy Travis Junior said:

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I've enjoyed reading your posts. You know how to dumb it down for non experts without losing the important points.

So it sounds like one of the big problems with desalination is energy consumption. Specifically, it takes a ton of it to force water through a membrane so fine that it can filter out individual molecules.

When I read that, my first thought was why not use gravity to help, and it sounds like others have had that idea too. I didn't pay for this whole report, but these two sentences in the abstract seem promising. What is the author missing? Why isn't this catching on if it's this easy and so much more energy efficient?

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19443994.2014.968905

"Thus, a low (energy)-cost seawater desalination system and methods that operate using gravity force are proposed. In this unit, the conventional high-pressure pumps are substituted by a heavy mass (water tank) to generate the pressure needed for seawater filtration (desalination using reverse osmosis membranes), resulting in a massive reduction in the energy needed (about 90%) for this process, consequently, a remarkable lowering in the cost."

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Thank you. I am not familiar with the gravity process you linked and could only get access to the abstract, but I don't see how this would work unless you were drilling into brackish water formations in areas at high elevation and then piping it to areas with much lower elevation and using the natural pressure head (with maybe smaller booster pumps) to fill the storage tanks, but it seems they would have to be really tall tanks. It is an interesting concept. I see the linked article is from 2014 so I wonder if any attempts have been made to try this.