Yves here. Thomas Neuburger presents a grim forecast for oil prices, and better for water supplies. The usual belief is that high oil prices beget lower oil prices because they kill the economy. The oil price peak of $147 in July 2008, which using a CPI calculator, would be about $205 today. But the big runup was from about $87 in September 2007 until then. Although our analysis shows the financial crisis to have been a derivatives crisis, those who hew to the real real estate crisis view argue that the 2008 energy price spike is what kicked the housing market over.
As for water, the technology described below sounds like potentially great news. But I thought another issue with desalination was what to do with the salt.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
Two items for this week, one ominous — it’s an ominous world these days — and one truly hopeful. Let’s start with the bad news and end with the good.
Is Crude Oil Headed for $150 in 2026?
According to the analysts at JPMorgan, crude oil is headed from today’s price in the mid-nineties to as much as $150 a barrel. That would be clearly devastating for American households, not only for the resulting price of gasoline and heating oil, but also for the price of all energy-dependent goods, which is most of them.
From OilPrice.com:
JPMorgan’s head of EMEA energy equity research, Christyan Malek, warned markets on Friday that the recent Brent price surge could continue upwards to $150 per barrel by 2026, according to a new research report.
Several catalysts went into the $150 price warning, including capacity shocks, an energy supercycle—and of course, efforts to push the world further away from fossil fuels.
Most recently, crude oil prices have surged on the back of OPEC+ production cuts, mostly led by Saudi Arabia who almost singlehanded took 1 million bpd out of the market, followed by a fuel export ban from Russia. Increased crude demand paired up with the supply restrictions, boosting crude oil prices and contributing to rising consumer prices.
For this year:
JPMorgan said in February this year that Oil prices were unlikely to reach $100 per barrel this year unless there was some major geopolitical event that rattled markets, warning that OPEC+ could add in as much as 400,000 bpd to global supplies, with Russia’s oil exports potentially recovering by the middle of this year. At the time, JPMorgan was estimating 770,000 bpd in demand growth from China—less than what the IEA and OPEC were estimating.
But:
JPMorgan now sees the global supply and demand imbalance at 1.1 million bpd in 2025, but growing to a 7.1 million bpd deficit in 2030 as robust demand continues to butt up against limited supply.
JPMorgan blames the supply imbalance on “capacity shocks, an energy supercycle,” and of course, efforts to deal with climate change. The word “Ukraine” never appears, but the Russian export ban gets a mention.
Is this likely? I’m not sure, but there are forces in the world that can’t be forced, and keeping us stuck on oil is one of them. To the extent that oil is cheap enough to power this overburdened planet for decades ahead, that’s the size of the flood of trouble we’ll face when the big dams finally break.
Do we want to face a fraction of that trouble now, in exchange for better times to come? Our betters, in their usual self-dealing way, are not giving us that choice.
Desalination System Could Produce Freshwater That’s Cheaper Than Tap Water
You read it right. That’s the news from MIT, and it’s refreshing indeed.
MIT engineers have been working on a passive system to use the sun’s energy to evaporate and capture fresh water from salt water sources, and after three iterations, they appear to have gotten it right.
MIT engineers and collaborators developed a solar-powered device that avoids salt-clogging issues of other designs.
Engineers at MIT and in China are aiming to turn seawater into drinking water with a completely passive device that is inspired by the ocean, and powered by the sun.
In a paper appearing today in the journal Joule, the team outlines the design for a new solar desalination system that takes in saltwater and heats it with natural sunlight.
The configuration of the device allows water to circulate in swirling eddies, in a manner similar to the much larger “thermohaline” circulation of the ocean. This circulation, combined with the sun’s heat, drives water to evaporate, leaving salt behind. The resulting water vapor can then be condensed and collected as pure, drinkable water. In the meantime, the leftover salt continues to circulate through and out of the device, rather than accumulating and clogging the system.
The new system has a higher water-production rate and a higher salt-rejection rate than all other passive solar desalination concepts currently being tested.
I’m especially pleased to see that it’s a passive device — no moving parts, no required energy input (read, fossil fuel) other than what we freely get from the sun.
[T]he researchers calculated that if each stage were scaled up to a square meter, it would produce up to 5 liters of drinking water per hour, and that the system could desalinate water without accumulating salt for several years. Given this extended lifetime, and the fact that the system is entirely passive, requiring no electricity to run, the team estimates that the overall cost of running the system would be cheaper than what it costs to produce tap water in the United States.
Human water needs are roughly three to four liters per day. A one-square-meter device producing five liters per hour could supply up to twenty-five people for years without needing maintenance. That’s very good news.
My only concern: The design, when it’s all worked out, should belong to the public, not Wall Street ghouls who think water’s their ticket to wealth.
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‘Desalination System Could Produce Freshwater That’s Cheaper Than Tap Water’
I hope so but this sounds awfully like how they once said that nuclear power would produce so much electricity that it would be too cheap to meter. My hope would be that it be the basis of a unit for each household to meet their water needs and not so dependent on water grids but my inner cynic says to wait until it is in actual mass production.
The desalination device looks super interesting, so I looked it up. You can find the scientific publication here:
https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(23)00360-4
Good news on water but reading the original Joule paper still leaves me questioning what happens to the rejected salt inventory. Dispersed, mass-scale desalination will require social engineering that accompanies the tech, in order to avoid the unintended consequence of salting the Earth. Treatment of plastics and low recycling rates suggests a steep learning curve
> what happens to the rejected salt inventory.
>> our TSMD provides a promising solution to treat the hypersaline byproduct of seawater desalination.
It looks efficient enough to count as a treatment option for byproduct, which not only allows more desalinated water, but concentrates the volume of the waste. That makes it easier to transport.
I’ll guess that if it scales, they’ll just tube it out to sea. That’s passive transport, further driven by density differences. The resultant brine pools have their own issues, but for firemonkeys, ‘out of sight, out of mind’ kicks the watercan down the road.
It still requires a high-tech membrane, but given that, it can function downscale. So it may provide for city-level desalination, but does provide for going off-grid from the water barons.
p.s. Odum’s Maximum Power Principle says ‘During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency.’ Power intake is selected over efficiency. The saline gradient can drive hydraulic electric generation, to some degree.
Steve H., did you mean to say: “So it may NOT provide for city-level desalination, but does provide for going off-grid from the water barons.”
?
Nope, said it as I meant it. It’s been proven at small scale, with the experiment, but so have a lot of great technologies. Scaling up presents unknown technical issues in the face of the question, who pays?
Technologies that don’t scale well can still be useful. For example, solar was being used by military in the field to keep communications and laptops charged off-grid, well before solar was competitive at large scale. The competitive advantage of real time satellite imagery and analysis over the poorer mfers was extreme and worth the cost.
Likewise, lentils and potatoes are continuous harvest crops, and less subject to administrative control than wheat.
(ed. I could’ve capitalized May and Does, would’ve been clearer.)
Yeah, no doubt possible but demonstrate ecological impacts of pumping it out to sea: (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0011916421005932) Brine can conceivably be used for inland superfood cultivation (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40899-023-00887-2) but long-term risks may loom larger than the latest whizz-bang MIT press release lets on. Small scale? No doubt it works. Scaling up? Big questions
dilution ain’t the solution and hoping for large scale melting of glaciers is ghoulish in its consequences – how about ceasing polluting what we got and extracting what we supposedly need for certain useless industries – but that ain’t progress in most folks mind –
Bit concentrates the volume of the waste. That makes it easier to transport.
What dose one do with the waste, which Is very saline water?
Transport it to where?
A lot of fresh water from melting icecaps and glaciers are desalinating the seas, no? Maybe the scale of making fresh water is so big that it matters, but seas rising a meter or two should take a lot of salt just to get seas back to former saturation.
Label me cynical but when I see Wall Street banks forecasting a massive swing in the price of a commodity (or a stock price) they are doing for a reason… so they make money. So either they are trying to entice energy hedge funds to start aggressively trading to drive the price up and generate commissions for their trading desks, or the hedgies have sort of asked them to do it to support a trade.
And, of course, who will remember this ‘forecast’ in two or three years?
I have seen this movie way too many times to place any credence in it.
Yes, It’s a pump and dump operation. We’re now in the pump phase. When the fools buy, it’ll be time to dump. Wall street has already bought. They’ll be slowing dumping.
Like you, too many times I have seen them forecast higher prices for select stocks and a few months later the prices fall.
My cynical comment number two… water desalination.
First, I feel here we go again we can use technology to solve a basic, but gargantuan problem. Going from the lab to the wild of the real world is challenge one. Challenge two is scale-up. Reading the paper we have no sense of what the cost to produce these devices at scale is, which is very different that a lab setting. And, how sensitive the devices are to dropping, being kicked, etc.
Then, if they are for individual home use for the mere basics of drinking and cooking how do you get the feedstock water to them???
Presumably small-scale units would be useful for seaside villages, whereas industrial-sized facilities would supply urban water systems (and create large areas of high salinity). One hopes it works out, but as a child I read those “electricity too cheap to meter” predictions in real time.
They’re projecting this to be promising technology based on 180 hours of operation on a small scale. There is no mention of corrosion problem. High salt content and high temperature almost always results in huge corrosion problems. Materials of construction will be expensive!
They can come back after a two to three year operation of a large pilot plant.
It looks like they want to pawn off this loser to the public sector.
quick read suggests TRL3; however, there unanswered (yet) is if efficiency can be maintained at scale, and whether it is commercializable. Probably ten years before it appears on market, and then, outside of charitable foundation usage, it has to succeed in the market (or not). Perhaps in 20 years it might have a few percent of the global water market, with bottle water companies attempting all throughout to buy the technology and kill it.
Promising, but hopium to consider a short term solution to anything other than getting the researchers startup venture capital (kudos for them!).
>> The prototype frames were 3D printed using nylon 7500 (WeNext Technology).
>> The key components of the first stage include a solar absorber, a PTFE membrane, an aluminum plate, an evaporation side frame, and a condensation side frame. Teflon tapes enclosed the PTFE membrane with the nylon frame for sealing.
Outside of the PTFE membrane, I can have this made locally in a week.
PTFE is a super-common material that has been around for many decades and is used in a very wide variety of popular products (non-stick pans, rain jackets, even dental floss that you can buy at your local pharmacy): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene
I haven’t read the details so I don’t know if there’s something special about the membrane they used. If there is, then manufacturing would need to be geared up for it. If there isn’t, then it should be relatively easy to get rolls of it.
Examples of rolls of PTFE filter membranes you can buy right now: https://scientificfilters.com/roll-stock-membranes/ptfe
Hopeful, but I’m not sure how Neuberger gets to 1 m sq servicing 25 humans. The device produces up to 5 liters/hr, presumably at high noon. On the back of my envelope, the mean sine of 5 yields about 3.2 l/hr, or about 38 l. between sunrise and sunset–enough for about 10 people, on a sunny day.
California recently approved a new desalination plant in southern Orange County that will return brine to the ocean a couple of miles offshore. While it won’t have capacity to meet all needs of the coastal towns that will participate (including mine), it will be significant (20-30% if my memory is correct).
Re: rising demand and limited supply of crude oil:
“:JPMorgan blames the supply imbalance on “capacity shocks, an energy supercycle,” and of course, efforts to deal with climate change. The word “Ukraine” never appears, but the Russian export ban gets a mention.”
What about the “sanctions” on Venezuela, Iran (and Russia) ? Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. I would think that if the economic siege warfare was lifted, the “supply imbalance” would be drastically mitigated.
Artificial limitations on supply will of course keep prices high, and who benefits from that?
Well , who benefits from slowing the rate of carbon skyflooding and its attendant rate of global warming?
That’s who benefits from artificial limitations on the supply of oil keeping the prices high.
On the one hand, people want to “fight global warming”. On the other hand, people object to raising oil prices high enough to where they punish the use of oil that creates global warming. Will people decide to get their minds straight and consistent and start practicing singlethink?
Unfortunately, the oligarchy is not interested in fighting climate change, habitat destruction, increasing emissions of toxic materials, species collapse etc. etc. So I don’t see any genuine solutions to our environmental crises unless some very radical changes occur in the legal/political/economic/financial structures.
It’s more convenient and profitable to blame victims, engage in massive GreenWash PR and marketing and make 100s of billions in subsidies, tax breaks, and monopoly/oligopoly price-gouging.
San Diego and Persian Gulf States already do desalination at mass scale. They pipe the brine offshore, with negative consequences at the pipe outlet. That cat is already out of the bag.
Price including infrastructure and especially the energy needed has always been the problem. Often it is not having enough water all the time as often there is enough money much of the time.
Having smaller, cheaper, less energy intensive especially used as a supplement in dry/wet places like California would be life changing with much of the downsides mitigated by the right tactics.
Of course, the current greed, corrupt, and generalized stupidity is likely to make this a technology a weaponized, profitable destroyer of community and nature, everywhere. I still think that it has the potential of being a great good.
Would we still need this water tech if we weren’t polluting our water at the current rate? how long does it take for toxins to depart?
Yes, the “forever chemicals” microplastics and all…
Yet another problem to solved by monetization using Big Finance. We get cleaner air and go deeper into debt. Thus, the people who created the mess get to profit by it.
I believe the answer is yes. Combine droughts with completely unjustifiable over-consumption of water (hello golf courses and alfalfa farming in the desert), and you have this kind of situation where desalination is needed.
If this tech works outside the lab, and scales (important ifs), I would think that anywhere currently desalinating its water with reverse osmosis could use this for a lower-energy method of desalination.
Personally, I live on a boat, and much of my water supply comes from rain, which involves some effort to collect and store. While reverse osmosis desalinators are available for boats, they are pricey and use a lot of power (for someone generating electricity with solar in a limited space). The no-power-requirements of this are quite interesting to me and I’m now reading the full, 56 page study that Palm&Needle helpfully included a link to in a comment above.
If the externalities of fossil fuels were added in, the price would be many times $150 a barrel.
If America defected from the Global Trade System, then America could GreenWall Protectionize itself. And behind that Big Beautiful Green Wall of Protection, America could impose a Hansen Fee-Dividend on coal, natural gas and oil big enough to price in all those externalities. And the dividend going back to every legal resident of America would “go farther” if spent on things made without coal, gas or oil than with them. Or at least “less” of them as against “more” of them. At least that is Hansen’s happy hope about how the dividend would work and be used.
It would be a ” carrot and tire iron” approach.
But it would have no hope of even beginning to work without a Big Beautiful Green Wall of Protection.
National Greenism in One Country.
I suppose that one good piece of news is that the Chinese also have the blueprints, which could put something of a leash in the actions of the rich in the US.
Not sure though, especially with IP laws in the US being what they are. Some corporations are going to try to milk this one for sure.
There’s always going to be the challenges associated with scaling a new technology up and deployment. Often there are undiscovered challenges in the mass production.
Let’s hope though that this will mean fewer people in the world will have water shortages. More importantly than mere hope, is that there is R&D money and capital money to overcome any challenges. Given how critical the flow of water is in China, that’s the most likely source of seed money.
Yeah, I wondered some of the same things as you, so I put together a few bits from the article, the paper itself, and a little bit of extra digging where I found that the Evelyn Wang in this study was head of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and was nominated by Biden and confirmed by the senate in December 2022 to be director of US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.
—
Lenan Zhang, a research scientist in MIT’s Device Research Laboratory.
Zhang’s study co-authors include MIT graduate student Yang Zhong and Evelyn Wang, the Ford Professor of Engineering, along with Jintong Gao, Jinfang You, Zhanyu Ye, Ruzhu Wang, and Zhenyuan Xu of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.
Funding for the research at Shanghai Jiao Tong University was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China.
Author contributions
Z.X., L.Z., and E.N.W. conceived the initial idea. J.G. and Z.X. developed the experimental device. J.G. and J.Y. conducted the experiments. J.G. and L.Z. performed numerical simulation. Z.X., J.G., L.Z., and E.N.W. analyzed the results. L.Z. and J.G. wrote the manuscript with input from all authors. Z.X., E.N.W., and R.W. supervised the research. All authors discussed the results and approved the final version of the manuscript.
Declaration of interests
The authors have applied for a patent related to the design of this solar distiller. [Emphasis mine]
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The funding for the MIT side of this project is not mentioned in either of the articles.