“Reporting to the country’s top legislature on Sunday, Li highlighted key achievements under the Yellow River Protection Law, which took effect on April 1, 2023, following its adoption in October 2022.

For the second consecutive year, the quality of the Yellow River’s main course has met Grade II standards, the vice-chairman said. China uses a five-tier quality system for surface water, with Grade I being the highest.

Li also pointed to a significant increase in vegetation coverage in the basin, with 84.9 percent of the area showing positive trends. Over the past two decades, the basin’s ‘green line’ has shifted westward by about 300 kilometers.

In 2023, nine provincial-level regions along the Yellow River completed afforestation efforts covering 1.7 million hectares. Additionally, around 16,000 square kilometers of areas affected by water loss and soil erosion were treated.

Progress has also been made in pollution control, water conservation and energy transition. For example, in a campaign to address violations involving solid waste, nearly 118 million metric tons of trash were cleared from 4,084 locations.

Li noted that water consumption per unit of GDP and unit of industrial value added in the nine provincial regions of the basin decreased by 22.8 percent and 40.9 percent, respectively, from 2018 to 2023.”

From China Daily.

“Equatic’s process works like this: first, it pumps sea water into an electrolyser, a machine that uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which in Equatic’s case is run on clean electricity such as wind, solar or hydro. This converts the seawater to hydrogen gas, oxygen gas, an acid stream and an alkaline slurry of calcium and magnesium-based materials. The alkaline slurry is exposed to air, pulling out CO2 and trapping it, then discharged into the sea. A last step is to neutralise the acid waste stream using rocks (in order to avoid ocean acidification) before this is discharged into the sea too.

The CO2 captured by Equatic ends up in the ocean as dissolved bicarbonate ions and solid mineral carbonates, forms in which the CO2 is immobilised for 10,000 years and billions of years respectively, the company says. ‘In electrochemical methods that convert CO2 into a stable carbon like solid carbonates, the CO2 is locked away permanently,’ agrees Chen. ‘Unless that carbonate is heated to a high temperature of around 900C (1,200K), that CO2 will not be re-released.'”

From BBC.

“Algeria plans to spend $5.4 billion boosting what are already Africa’s largest desalination facilities, as climate change piles pressure on the OPEC member’s water supplies.

Five new plants due to start operating this year will hike the amount of drinking water the nation will have the capacity to produce from the Mediterranean to 3.7 million cubic meters per day from 2.2 million, according to Lotfi Zennadi, chief executive officer of state-owned Algerian Energy Co. Six more installations are planned by 2030, he said.”

From Bloomberg.

“MIT engineers have built a new desalination system that runs with the rhythms of the sun.

The solar-powered system removes salt from water at a pace that closely follows changes in solar energy. As sunlight increases through the day, the system ramps up its desalting process and automatically adjusts to any sudden variation in sunlight, for example by dialing down in response to a passing cloud or revving up as the skies clear.

Because the system can quickly react to subtle changes in sunlight, it maximizes the utility of solar energy, producing large quantities of clean water despite variations in sunlight throughout the day. In contrast to other solar-driven desalination designs, the MIT system requires no extra batteries for energy storage, nor a supplemental power supply, such as from the grid.

The engineers tested a community-scale prototype on groundwater wells in New Mexico over six months, working in variable weather conditions and water types. The system harnessed on average over 94 percent of the electrical energy generated from the system’s solar panels to produce up to 5,000 liters of water per day despite large swings in weather and available sunlight.”

From MIT News.