http://eponline.com/blogs/planetshed/2011/04/the-dream-of-desalinization.aspx
The article starts out: "The Dream of Desalinization The prospect of desalination is tantalizing: The Earth’s oceans, after all, hold some 36.6 sextillion gallons – that's 138 sextillion liters for metric-system folks. But each of those gallons holds roughly 130 grams of salt that has to be removed before that water can be drinkable. Removing that salt has always been expensive, prohibitively so, because of the large amounts of energy that it requires to heat the water to extract the salt from it." Unfortunately, all sources seem to be metric and the author must have miscalculated the gallons, and then reconverted wrongly to liters. My submitted comment, hopefully, it will eventually be posted: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ We all understand what "sextillion" is, but not the metric system? Really? Compared to other resources, your numbers seem off a bit. This article http://www.tos.org/oceanography/issues/issue_archive/issue_pdfs/23_2/23-2_charette.pdf estimates the total volume of the world's ocenas at 1.33 billion cubic kilometers (that's 1.33 sextillion liters) or 1/100 of your figure. Still plenty of salty water though, although your gallon figure seems off by the same amount. What's up with the hybrid units like grams per gallon? Could that be 35 g/L? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I think 1.33 Mm³ is actually preferably (and more open to physical interpretation than 1.33 ZL), but since the megameter is rarely used, that would probably confuse the author more. Given that the size of the ocean is in error by 100X, I have no idea whether to trust other figures in the article, although 35 g/L of salts is representative of ocean water.
