<p>California is currently experiencing a severe water shortage due to extreme drought conditions. <b>Desalination</b> is a powerful technology that some think can <b>alleviate the fresh water scarcities</b>. Although recent advancements have made it less expensive and reduced its energy usage, desalination is still quite costly.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">Construction is currently under way on a desalination plant and pipeline in <b>Carlsbad, CA</b>. Using state-of-the-art <b>reverse osmosis filtering</b> technology, the <b>$1 billion project</b> will provide <b>50 million gallons</b> of fresh water to San Diego residents, according to NBC News.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently offered to help California implement water conservation and desalination techniques which were pioneered by his country's scientists.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">"California, I hear, has a big water problem," Netanyahu said in an interview on Bloomberg TV. <b>"We in Israel don’t have a water problem.</b> We use technology to solve it, in recycling, in desalination, in deep drip irrigation and so on. And these technologies could be used by the state of California to eliminate its chronic drought problem."<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">Over the last 65 years, Israel's rainfall has shrunk by 50%. During that same period, Israel's population grew to become ten times its original size. However, the country does not have a water problem because it uses desalination to provide about one-quarter or the country's fresh water supplies. <b>75% of Israel's sewage is also recycled</b>, and more than <b>50% of water used in Israeli agriculture comes from treated sewage</b>.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">In China, the state news media has recently announced that a coastal desalination plant is planned to provide a large portion of the drinking water used in Beijing, according to the New York Times. The Chinese plant is planned to be completed by 2019 and is expected to supply 1 million tons of fresh water each day, roughly one-third of the water consumption of Beijing's 22 million people.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">However, the technology is not without its costs. The San Clemente, CA-based <b>Surfrider Foundation has opposed several desalination projects</b>, including Carlsbad. Sucking up large amounts of seawater inevitably <b>kills fish and other sea creatures</b> as water passes through intake screens, according to NBC News.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">"Our general position is there is just <b>a lot more that can be done on both the conservation side and the water recycling side</b> before you get to [desalination] and we feel, in a lot of cases, that we haven't really explored all of those options," Rick Wilson, the organization's coastal management coordinator, told NBC News.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">In the early 1990s, during another drought, a $34 million desalination plant was built in Santa Barbara, CA. The plant was permitted and constructed in two years, but then rain returned to the state and filled California’s reservoirs to the point where it was not economically feasible to bring the plant online. While there are talks of investing further capital to restart the project, this situation begs a larger question: how much should we really invest in this technology?<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">At the same time that water scarcity increasingly becomes more of an issue in California and elsewhere, desalination technologies continue to become cheaper and more efficient. Will more of these expensive facilities be built in the US to provide fresh water to residents and farmers? Stay tuned to AndNowUKnow as we continue to follow this technology as it develops.</p><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">
