Hello, friends,

I hope you’ve all had a relaxing Easter.  I know I did.  Well, mostly - aside from, you know, threats from our regime figurehead to pretty much blow the nation of Iran up.  The regime keeps using the phrase “the stone age” to describe what they’re going to do, and while I don’t think that means they will ultimately use nuclear weapons, the truth is that the weapons we have are enough to do incalculable damage to Iran; and Iran’s weapons are enough to do incalculable damage to our allies in the area.

So why am I opening an article about desalination with the doom-and-gloom of our so-called President’s desire to commit war crimes?

Because even with today’s technology desalination is a major component of life in the Middle-East, and with a little investment it can allow for massive relief to both Human and animal water resources in many parts of the world.  And Donald Trump’s threats to eliminate Iran’s power plants would shut down Iran’s desalination, leading to them retaliating against our allies in a similar fashion, leading to a lot of dead people.

So since this technology is so important, let’s talk about it!

Simply put, desalination is the process of transforming salt water into fresh water.  To hyper-simplify:  “De” for “taking out,” and “Salination” for “saltiness.”

As to how it works, well, I’m not an expert, but Practical Engineering has a video about it, and there’s a whole Wikipedia page about it if you’re more a reading-type.  There are a few different methods, but the two main ways are thermal-based distillation and reverse-osmosis.  Both are quite technical, and I’m giving a surface-level overview  

Thermal-based distillation is basically boiling the water until it evaporates, then collecting the steam and recondensing it back into water.  Since some of the salt doesn’t evaporate with the water, distillation leaves the salt behind and the steam is fresh water.  Sounds simple enough, right?  You can pretty much do this in your kitchen.

Reverse-osmosis desalination takes salty water and pushes it through a reverse-osmosis filter, a membrane which lets water - but not salt - go through, leaving fresh water to come out the other side.  Again, that sounds simple, right?  Maybe this one can’t be done in a kitchen, but it’s easy to picture.

There are numerous challenges to these processes, of course.

Again, I’m not an expert, so these are just some quick, overview-type problems without getting too technical.

First off, you need access to salt water.  That pretty much means that you need to build these plants on the shoreline, unless you’ve either got a site with brackwish water to use, or you plan to pipe the salt water somewhere else.  That limits their deployability to coastal areas, and means that sometimes even if you have some spare coastal space to use to desalinate water, you might have a hard time getting that water where it’s needed without extra infrastructure.  In fact, the water taken in to desalinate has to be at least somewhat clean - if there’s, say, an oil spill in the area, the plant can’t filter that appropriately.

All in all, that means these only have limited use-cases.   

Second, you need to maintain them.  The reverse-osmosis filters need to be purged and/or replaced regularly or they clog up and stop working; the salt left behind by distillation needs to be disposed of somehow, especially if it isn’t all usable as road salt or table salt; all of these things can lead to contaminated water entering the environment and doing harm.  Then there’s the fact that salt can cause corrosion of piles and plumbing, meaning that you’re regularly rehabilitating the buildings themselves.

So maintenance costs are a factor that need to be considered.

But perhaps most importantly of all is that all of these processes require a high amount of electricity input.  You’re either constantly burning fuel to boil water to distill it, or you’re burning fuel to generate pressure to push water through an osmosis filter.

In other words, you need a lot of power plants.

And these are the same power plants that Trump is threatening to bomb in Iran.  See how we make circles, here?

That depends on the country and region.  Wikipedia has a handy article called “Desalination By Country.”  This provides detail on facilities, sure, but it doesn’t really spell out dependence.  Priyanka Shankar of Al Jazeera has an article entitled “How targeting of desalination plants could disrupt water supply in the Gulf,” dated March 8th, 2026.  She cites a research paper by the Arab Center Washington DC.

The numbers are both inspiring and chilling.

To name a few:  Kuwait gets 90% of its water from desalination; Oman gets 86%, and Saudi Arabia gets 70%.  

These numbers are inspiring because it’s demonstrating Humanity’s ability to essentially turn poison into life.  They are chilling because if these facilities or their affiliated power plants were to be eliminated in an Iranian reprisal, there is little if anything these countries’ civilians could do to quench their thirsts.

With the world’s climate changing and getting warmer, we’re going to need more water, not less.  Michael Booth of the Colorado Sun points out that this years’ winter snowpack is at record lows.  That could possibly (I don’t know the specific hydrology) have impacts on the Colorado River which flows south towards Arizona, Southern California, and Mexico.

If California and Mexico (Arizona is landlocked) build more desalination plants on their shorelines and can bolster their resilience in the face of climate change, that’s great news for everyone.

Assuming the nightmare-world that is 2026 passes without a massive man-made disaster on its record, the future of Desalination is actually quite promising.

For starters, there are new methods being invented all the time.  I won’t pretend to be knowledgeable about it, but thermophoresis might be able to treat hyper-brackish water that would otherwise be more like waste than anything.  Microbial desalination, where microbes, uhhh…I don’t understand how that one works, okay, but it’s a real thing we’re experimenting with.  Electrodialysis might make it possible to remove carbononic acid from water, making it drinkable and allowing us to clean the oceans up a bit since they’re a big carbon sink.

Are all of these going to pan out?  Are they all going to have a tremendous impact, or just smaller work-around-the-edges?  I don’t know.  That’s why we need to invest in research.

Then there are advances in power generation.  This is where I wanted to link to The Progressive Cafe’s article on Thorium power, but it didn’t transfer when we left Substack and moved to Beehiiv.  So the bad news is you’ll have to settle for a Wiki link for now; the good news is I have an article to re-write and re-release!  Solar is also having a major moment, even if much of that moment is outside of the United States as the US embraces a regressive energy policy under the Trump regime.

Better power generation lowers the dollar-value cost of purifying seawater, satisfying Capitalism’s insane demands that everything turn some kind of profit.  It’s a lot easier to argue, “This energy facility combined with this water purification facility won’t cost much more than just digging up ground-water” than it is to say, “We can make water, but it’s really expensive compared to current methods.”

Anyway, I’ve talked your ear off long enough!  Thanks for reading!