Harnessing unicorn farts is the answer.

Denver has 30 MGD (millions of gallons per day) of recycled water treatment capacity (soon to be increased to 45 MGD). It treats water from one of your sewage treatment plants and dumps it into your drinking water reservoirs. Denver wouldn't resort to recycling water unless the water demand of the city did not exceed what can be provided by those mountain streams. Sounds like Denver is in a water stressed area.

Denver has three other convention drinking water treatment plants that treats river water. Each of those plants are between 250 to 300 MGD. So somewhere around 3% of Denver's water is currently recycled. You can read about the conventional treatment process here:

http://www.denverwater.org/WaterQual...atmentProcess/

This process is designed to move turbidity (particles that make the water cloudy, probably very little from those mountain streams) and microorganisms. It won't remove salts and dissolved organics that might be part of fracking fluids. The fracking fluids can be removed from water, but it might make the water 4 or more time expensive to treat.

Your tent style water purification system requires distillation. For the little amount of water that is required for a camper or two, solar energy can provide the needed energy. To distill 900 MGD or so would require a tremendous amount of energy and be prohibitively expensive.

Your statement about the earth being a closed system with respect to water is correct. But it is a matter of the amount of fresh water available at a given location. Of the total amount of water in the world only ~0.007% of it is in lakes and streams and ground water supplies that are easily accessible for human use. Growing population, the lack of water where people live, and increasing pollution levels, and changing precipitation patterns due to climate change all put additional stress on water supplies. It's a monumental problem on a global scale.

Which is why we need to be far more conscious and careful of our water resource ... not more daring and potentially abusive.

Have you ever drunk from a clean, clear spring, Mr. cdcox? Or a rock-bottom, mountain creek in the early spring? It tastes pretty darn good and it's good for you, too. I'm thinking that whoever had the pure, clean, natural water idea had a pretty good one.

FAX

I'm really glad that they remove the turbidity from my recycled sewer water.

The recycled water plant has a lot more steps in the treatment process. It takes effluent from the sewer plant, treats it, an dumps it into the drinking water reservoir. I think the regular treatment plants are located between the reservoir and your faucet. So water that is flushed down the toilet is treated by three different treatment plants before you drink it again: the sewage treatment plant, the recycle plant and the drinking water plant.

Fracking has been going on in the oil fields since the the '70's, nothing new.

I was being a bit sarcastic when I made my previous post. I have no doubt that energy companies will meet the absolute minimums when it comes to the environment. They are out to maximize profits. I'm not an idiot. If the groundwater gets contaminated, oh well... they don't live there.

Interesting stuff.

Maybe this is normal, but I learned something odd a while back. I was at a conference in the mountains, and one of the things we did was a boat tour of a lake. (It was an outdoor recreation conference.) The local guide said that swimming isn't allowed in the lake because it's part of Denver's water supply. I guess I wouldn't have thought that a few swimmers would really make a difference next to all of the dirt and rocks and raccoons washing crayfish and stuff.

There is no way you can guarantee that prices would fall and it's most particularly relevant that it would be used state side.

Whoa.

You're talking Fusion. Fusion is this close? If Fusion were to be realized, not only would the world's energy problems be solved in less than a decade after implementation, all transportation would almost immediately be converted to electric and for the most part, the world would be free of human pollution.

Also, that energy source would be used to power starships and the push toward the speed of light could begin.

It's seriously that close? I've never heard that before.

You keep hiding behind the absolutist language of a guarantee.

Where that specific oil ends up being consumed doesn't matter as long as it expands the supply in the global market.

It seems to me that whether it is used domestically, or internationally is irrelevant. It's all about the net import or export when measuring trade deficits, and that's a pretty important factor as well. If we can make more money by exporting our oil than we can by using it domestically, then why not export it? That situation implies that the oil we are exporting is worth more than the oil we are importing. If that is true, why wouldn't we sell oil for more than we spend to buy it?

Okay.

Nuclear power works for me, but even then, it would be a massive and costly conversion from fossil fuel vehicle power to EV.

The treatment of the water you drink is pretty complex. In most cases, you are actually drinking your (and everyone else's) "dirty" water.

Oh stop it.