Energy & Capital again....... THIS is the Ultimate Commodity......

Energy & Capital again.......

	Column 1	Column 2
0	THIS is the Ultimate Commodity... and It's Worth Trillions
1	By Keith Kohl	Friday, April 8, 2016
2	California is in a drought, and that makes no sense at all.Why? Because it’s a coastal state. It's right next to the biggest body of water on the planet: the Pacific Ocean.In fact, there is more water than land on our planet. No one should be in a drought ever, right?This is flawed logic, of course, because all of the water on this planet can't solve a drought crisis if that water is unusable.And salty seawater is exactly that.97% of the water on Earth is ocean water that we can't use for much of anything. To make it usable, the water has to be desalinated — cleared of all that salt.But there's a bit of a dilemma...So far, desalination technology hasn’t gotten very much attention because the U.S. — along with the rest of the world — has freshwater sources called aquifers.These aquifers are deep underground and hold massive amounts of fresh water, which get filtered through layers of Earth, leaving it cleared of salt and sediment, ready to use.And this would be all well and good, no need to look into desalination at all, except...We’re depleting those aquifers entirely too quickly: ​ Here you can see that the majority of major aquifers on Earth are in depletion phases, meaning they aren’t being refilled as quickly as they need to be for sustainability.We are running out of readily usable water.Which means investment in desalination is going to have to pick up, and fast.Last month I listed all the places the U.S. government will be investing in water. Roughly $280 million will be earmarked toward the water industry by 2017.Of that, approximately $5.8 million will be going to the Bureau of Reclamation for desalination and purification research, $25 million will go to the Department of Energy to improve desalination technology, and another $20 million will be aimed right at desalination tech for energy applications.That's nearly 20% of the water budget going into desalination alone.And it's only getting more important...For the past few weeks, Luke Burgess, Christian DeHaemer, and I have been looking into ways to make you money on the increasingly troubling U.S. water crisis.Desalination will be one of the biggest interests in the sector moving forward,......