Recovery of materials and fresh water supply using renewable energy

摘要

Growing population, progressively increasing lifestyle and related demand creates pressure on the huge but finite global resources. The water-energy-food nexus implicitly includes also materials both fuels and non-fuels. Besides water, food and energy demand, the demand for materials is in fact also steadily growing. Pressure on materials resources is often directly translated into pressure on land use, massively utilized already for food and energy production, fresh water, fuels supply, etc. New technologies will make our life even easier and more comfortable but inevitably the pressure on resources will rise also in scenarios with high renewable energy sources (RES) penetration. Direct utilization of RES at the harvesting locations for the production of materials could be an option also to avoid huge energy transmission and storage infrastructures, as well as benefit of overall higher efficiency. One way can be the use of RES to extract brines and salts from sea water. The produced materials could then be stored and transported to land for further processing possibly using RES sources as well.