🧠The most confident person in the room is the one who understands the least about what is being discussed. It has a name, and it has nothing to do with neurons. I take desalination as the example: RO versus ARBOK.
In 1995 in Pittsburgh a man named Wheeler robbed two banks in broad daylight. He had rubbed lemon juice on his face: lemon juice is invisible ink, so the cameras would not see him. He tested the idea with a Polaroid, got a blurry picture, and decided it worked. When the police showed him the security footage, he was sincerely outraged: “But I was wearing the juice!”
The psychologist David Dunning read this story, and in 1999, together with Justin Kruger, he ran a series of experiments. The paper was called “Unskilled and Unaware of It” and won an Ig Nobel Prize. The point is simple and unpleasant. The ability to do something and the ability to judge how well you do it are one and the same skill. Participants in the bottom quartile on logic, grammar and sense of humor scored on average at the 12th percentile and rated themselves at the 62nd. No scale, no way to measure your own error.
And here is what follows from this, which the videos keep quiet about. You cannot prove anything to a person who lacks the level. Not because he is stubborn. Showing him figures, measurements and tables is pointless: he is unable to digest what is said. To him it is noise. He does not see that he is being persuaded, and he is sure he is right. Remember this as you read on.
Now the myth. Videos explain that such people “lack neural connections.” That is untrue. There is no disease here, and “stupidity” is the wrong word. It is a missing measuring instrument, and every one of us suffers from it in any field where we are beginners. A separate irony: experts, on the contrary, underestimate themselves, because what they know seems obvious to them.
Now, about water.
When I say that an ARBOK unit uses about 0.72 kWh per cubic meter, and that the physical limit for such a process is around 30 Wh per cubic meter, which we managed to reach in the laboratory, not on paper but on equipment, some readers answer with the same phrase: “that cannot be” or the even more popular “it’s too good to be true.” It sounds pretentious, but it is not an argument, it is a symptom: plain fear of the new, based on a weak grasp of physical processes outside the accepted dogmas. Imagine what it was like for the Wright brothers when a machine heavier than air flew its first 30 seconds… They were told too that they were frauds and that this “cannot be.” It turned out that it can.
This person has no scale. He does not know that in deep vacuum water boils at 7–10 °C, and that in our real case of work in Central Europe in November 2023 the water boiled at night at -5 C. He does not know that to get steam you do not have to heat the water, that there are no pumps because the water enters the chamber under vacuum by gravity; no pressure of 50–80 bar, which demands a special pipe design; and no membrane through which the water must be forced and which leaves about 60% of the salt behind, still to be removed and dumped back into the sea. For the apologist of membrane technology nothing else exists; for him desalination is a membrane, a pile of energy, a pile of chemistry, and pressure, and no other options exist in his picture of the world. So everything that does not fit is declared fake. Yes, yes: the Vatican admitted that the Earth revolves around the Sun only in 1993… And how many people sat in prisons or were burned at the stake amid gleeful whooping that a heretic had been burned.
Well, let us speak the language of numbers.
Reverse osmosis was invented for other tasks, and it ended up in desalination because it happened to be at hand. Its wide use for seawater is a civilizational mistake, and the planet itself presents the bill. Today there are more than 22,000 desalination plants in the world. They produce about 135 million m³ of fresh water a day and roughly 140 million m³ of brine. There is more brine than water. This is not a side effect, it is the essence of the technology: of every 100 tons of seawater taken in, 50–70 tons go back into the sea. And once again you will be told, with a clever look, that “brine is not toxic and not dangerous.”
What is in this brine? A salt concentration of 8–10%. This is the brine from a jar of pickles, more than twice as salty as the sea. It is heavier than water, spreads over the bottom, displaces oxygen and suffocates everything alive: corals, plankton, crustaceans, fish. The Persian Gulf has become almost one and a half times saltier over recent decades. Stories that “brine dissolves and is harmless” are fairy tales of the Vienna Woods. Anyone who believes it is welcome to pour a shot of brine into his own eye and then give us a lecture on toxicity and harm. If you are a diver, I ask you to visit the places where brine is discharged into the sea, and you will see a graveyard and no life, as in the Dead Sea. Fishing villages are ruined and emptied when RO plants are built nearby. People protest, and they are right to. And look for satellite images of the places where RO plants operate: on Google Maps you will find nothing. Such images are taken in a special format and with filters. The faint-hearted had better not look.
Now a comparison that anyone can check.
Membranes. RO has them: they foul, lose 20–40% of output, are replaced every few years, about 2 million spent elements a year go to landfill, and membrane wear puts microplastic into the sea. ARBOK has none at all. None in principle.
Reagents. RO uses 16 different chemicals: chlorine, coagulants, acids, caustic, antiscalants. ARBOK uses zero.
Pre-treatment and post-treatment. For RO this is the biggest part of the plant: sand, anthracite, carbon, ultraviolet, and at the outlet also remineralization, because the water “eats” the pipes. In ARBOK the water enters by itself and evaporates quickly without heating, and the steam, visible as it forms, condenses straight into drinking water, with no added minerals; its level at the outlet is below 10 ppm. The water has drinking-water status with high consumer parameters and meets WHO standards. Bacteria, protozoa and viruses are destroyed instantly, bursting in the vacuum like soap bubbles, and the process is finished by a hypertonic salt crisis. Microplastic, sand and other particles larger than 30 nm remain in the dry residue together with the salt and can be separated.
Building. RO is a giant plant. ARBOK is 20-foot containers standing on asphalt in the open air or in the simplest hangar; 2 operators without high qualification serve 25–30 units.
Energy. RO uses 5–15 times more, and the denser the brine, the higher the pressure, so it cannot process its own “tail.” For ARBOK the strength of the brine does not matter: 0.1% or 35%, as in the Dead Sea, the energy consumption is the same.
Fines. For brine discharge RO pays about €0.9 per cubic meter. ARBOK has no discharge and no fines.
Secondary waste. For RO it is the main product of “production.” For ARBOK there is none: 100% of the water taken in is processed, leaving clean drinking water and dry salt. RO brine is our raw material. In all the brine the world pours into the sea in a year lie water, salt, magnesium, bromine, iodine, potassium and lithium worth more than $500 billion. Every year. The industry built 22,000 plants to get water, and not one to get what is dissolved in it.
Water recovery. In RO only 30–40% of the intake becomes drinking water. In ARBOK it is 100%.
Cost. A cubic meter from RO costs $2.5–4 in the US and €7.5–12 in the EU. In ARBOK it is $0.1.
Hidden subsidy. The tender price of RO is €1.1–1.5 per cubic meter against a real cost of €7.5–12. The gap of €6–11 is paid by someone else. With ARBOK the price equals the cost.
Payback. For RO it is 15 years, and often never. For ARBOK it is 5–7 years.
And one last thing about “green.” A technology that burns electricity to force water through a film, pours chlorine and coagulants into the sea, buries millions of membranes in landfill and kills the seabed will never be green. Only one that leaves no waste at the outlet can be green. That is why RO is a corpse nobody remembered to bury. It still walks by inertia, because it has already been built, and its defenders look like that robber: they are covered in juice too.
But desalination is only one example. The same vacuum, at the same ambient temperature, works on any liquid waste. The ARBOK catalog has a whole “Chemistry” section: hazardous liquid waste, pharma solvents, perchloroethylene from dry cleaning, acid regeneration, landfill leachate, oily water, lead-acid batteries. Take one direction, ARBOK-Insineration. Today 70–80% of industrial waste is liquid and there is nowhere to burn it: all of America has 11 furnaces for 34,000 shippers, a queue, a price of $400–4,000 per ton, a ton of solvent gives 1.75 t of COâ‚‚ when burned, and aqueous waste is simply pumped into the ground, the same ground from which 50% of Americans drink. An ARBOK unit stands in the producer’s own yard: water returns at 99.98%, solvents and oils go back to the shop, salts, metals and acids go to sale. No combustion, no dioxins, no stack. The effect from this one direction alone is $12–17 billion a year for producers, and from RO brine, more than $500 billion. This is the same planet that pays for other people’s mistakes.
Why can all this be listed for hours, yet not everyone will be convinced? Here again is the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it is not an insult. To see that a technology is better, you need a scale by which to measure it. If there is no scale, a table of 16 reagents against zero is just a set of numbers, and 0.72 kWh is “something out of fairy tales.” This is neither malice nor stupidity. It is a ceiling above which the person cannot see.
So it is better to follow the old wisdom: do not argue with an idiot, because from the outside it is not always clear which of you is which. You cannot explain it to him, and you do not need to. Only two are to be pitied here. Our nature, which keeps being flooded with brine. And the customer, who is put on the RO needle: buy membranes, buy chemicals, buy energy, every year, without end. Yet one can do without all of it, and take the energy from solar panels. So who is “green” here?
I do not argue with those who stayed under this ceiling. We simply build a new technology and implement others.