☼ Wide Blue Ocean - Water and Carbon Dioxide Issues

News

A major complaint about desalination is that the energy required has a cross product of carbon dioxide.

Our technology produces less than 3 kg of CO₂ for each kilolitre of fresh water produced if all the energy comes from least CO₂ efficient power plant in Victoria. The CO₂ production to provide tap water in Melbourne is estimated at 1.15 kg per kilolitre.

We fell that this CO₂ production is offset by the plants that the water can keep alive. A typical tree that has a wet weight of 3 tons will produce about 3 tons of CO₂ if its dies suddenly. People wonder how a 3 ton tree can produce 3 tons of CO₂ but we can explain it with basic chemistry.

A tree is mostly made up of Oxygen, Hydrogen and Carbon. About 30% of of the trees weight will be water. The rest is mostly molecules made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and trace elements. As those molecule break down, they produce O2, CO₂, N₂ and H₂O which are directly release into the atmosphere. The rest is released as solid material that contains most of the rest of the compounds.

As the molecule of a tree break down, most of the carbon binds with oxygen in the air. Molecular chemistry tells is that 12 grams of carbon that goes through that transformation will produce 44 grams of CO₂ as 12 grams of carbon comes from the tree and 32 grams comes from oxygen in the air.

There are trees in the Carlton Gardens that weigh about 160 tons and will produce 160 tons of CO₂ if they die rapidly from a lack of water. We feel that producing 3 kg of CO₂ to produce a ton of water to keep a 140 year old tree alive seems to be a good trade off.