CHAPTER 5

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Water is essential to life itself. However, clean and safe drinking water is only sometimes readily available. Aside from the air we breathe, access to clean, fresh water is the second most crucial element for our survival. It is so vital that Maslow ranked “WATER” as the second most basic Physiological Need for human beings.

Fresh water is necessary for every human's drinking, cooking, and sanitation requirements. However, when water becomes contaminated, it can harm communities, ecosystems, and wildlife instead of sustaining them. In the face of adverse environmental impacts and lifelong health issues, we should ask ourselves, “What is the water quality?” and “What is its availability?”

Improving water quality and availability remains a challenge that humans have attempted to grapple with for many millennia. Even before birth and long after our lifetimes, water security is a pressing issue and worth investing our time in fresh water.

One of the main challenges we face to ensure water quality is pollution. One key strategy is to focus on reducing pollution at its source, from implementing regulations to limit industrial waste from the manufacturing sector, promoting sustainable agricultural practices to mitigate petrochemical runoff from farming, and investing in upgrades to critical infrastructure. These measures are pivotal for improving water quality and preventing contaminants from entering the water supply. Whether natural or induced by human beings, cooperation among governments, communities, and individuals is required to tackle pollution.

Preventing pollution in the first place helps maintain water quality, but implementing effective water treatment methods will also be needed hand-in-hand. These strategies can help prevent contaminants from entering the water supply and remove impurities, making the water safe for human consumption. But as we strive for improvements, exploring additional possibilities for ramping up production and ensuring water availability for a sustainable future is where the real opportunity lies.

Desalination, in particular, holds promise for the future. It converts seawater or brackish water into potable water by removing salt and other minerals. Desalination offers a potential solution for providing a reliable and sustainable source of drinking water, especially in arid regions where freshwater is scarce, or to supplement total freshwater demand globally. Continued investment in research and development of desalination technologies is essential to ensure abundant access to clean water. Similar to how we should farm the sun and the wind more to source our energy and improve air quality, we should also farm freshwater from the ocean to increase total water quantity!

As mentioned in the last chapter, the growing shift towards renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power has been significant and is expected to continue. However, concerns have arisen about the intermittent nature of these energy sources, raising questions about their reliability and stability as primary energy sources when we want energy on demand. After all, if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing, how can we expect to reduce the use of fossil fuels? So, this is where energy storage comes into question, and further investment is needed, but could salt be connected to all of this?

Desalination promises to source more clean water, but it requires considering what we do with the leftover salt. Moreover, discharging brine water back into the ocean can adversely affect marine ecosystems by increasing salinity and depleting oxygen levels. Let's do something with all the leftover salt.

One promising technology for energy storage is the use of salt in batteries. Salt-based batteries would be ideal when we consider what to do with all the leftover salt from desalinating ocean water. Repurposing the leftover salt into batteries to store excess energy from solar and wind power is that it reduces further dependency on fossil fuels as well. When the sun isn’t shining, or the wind isn’t powering the wind turbines, we have more readily available energy on demand because we store the excess electricity like grain in a silo. 

Ensuring cleaner air and water also means approaching the conversation about how we decide to source our energy and energy storage. Through ongoing research and development, batteries have the potential to revolutionize how we store and utilize energy, offering a cleaner, more dependable, and cost-effective alternative to fossil fuels. The interconnectedness of how we improve our air, water, and energy sourcing and storing will require an interdisciplinary approach from many fields to build a better working model. But there’s another sector to consider. Do you recall learning about the Agricultural Revolution?