Costly Desalinated Water Looms In Our Future
By James Donahue
The problem of providing enough potable drinking water to supply the needs of an overpopulated and polluted world has been an unspoken world crisis for some time. Wars both large and small have been fought in many parts of the world over water rights. A changing climate brought on by global warming is bringing droughts in populated areas that are intensifying this dilemma and bringing it to public awareness.
When our fresh water sources become polluted from all the industrial activies going on in the world, and with drought conditions sweeping populated areas that once experienced adequate rainfall, what will be left for us to drink?
There is a solution. There is a process of separating salt from seawater called desalination that makes it drinkable, but it has been costly and subsequently slow to catch on. World navies, especially submarines and other ships that remain at sea for months at a time, have used desalination for years. As the water crisis grows, however, the existence of large desalination plants has grown more and more common, especially in other parts of the world. A plant capable of desalinizing 25 million gallons of water a day opened in Tampa, Florida, in December, 2007, a plant twice that size has been built near San Diego in Southern California, and the State of Texas currently has over 100 small plants up and running.
The world’s largest desalination plant, capable of producing 300 million cubic meters of fresh water per year, is now operating in the United Arab Emirates, and another super sized new desalination plant is planned for Southern Australia to ease the crisis caused by a serious drought in that part of the world. There are about 1,500 such plants now operating in the world and the number is growing.
The down-side of this story is that in addition to generating more costly water for consumers, the process of desalination also produces greenhouse gasses. The process utilizes distillation of the water through heating, which separates the water from salt and other elements. The same technique can be used on brackish and polluted groundwaters inland, thus providing drinkable water in areas where potable water is not available in ground aquifers.
The good news is that new technology is being developed that is already making the process of desalination less costly to operate, and reducing the amount of greenhouse gasses produced.
In the State of California, which has been stricken with extreme drought conditions, researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a "mini-mobile-modular" (M3) smart water desalination and filtration system that can not only test local water sources but give information needed to design a larger desalination plant to meet regional needs.
Yoram Cohen, the lead researcher on the UCLA team, noted that in one recent field study in the San Joaquin Valley the mobile system used an accelerated chemical demineralization process and recovered 65 percent of the agricultural drainage water fed into it as potable drinking water.
Cohen said this drain water was nearly saturated with calcium sulfate salts but accomplished an adequate filtration with just one reverse osmosis stage.
In other words, California researchers appear to be on the verge of producing an affordable water purification system for home and small community use. In fact a new company in the United Kingdom, Desolenator, claims to be on the verge of marketing a small-scale, portable solar-powered water purification device that can convert up to 15 liters of clean water per day. The inventor and CEO, William Janssen, claims this device will sell for about $450 and last for up to 20 years.
Because we foolishly failed to protect our fresh water sources it is now becoming costly to get a pure drink of water. Most of us are already buying drinking water from reverse osmosis systems rather than take a chance with tap water. Because of the work of contemporary researchers we may have plenty of drinking water at our disposal. We must expect, however, to pay for what we consume.
By James Donahue
The problem of providing enough potable drinking water to supply the needs of an overpopulated and polluted world has been an unspoken world crisis for some time. Wars both large and small have been fought in many parts of the world over water rights. A changing climate brought on by global warming is bringing droughts in populated areas that are intensifying this dilemma and bringing it to public awareness.
When our fresh water sources become polluted from all the industrial activies going on in the world, and with drought conditions sweeping populated areas that once experienced adequate rainfall, what will be left for us to drink?
There is a solution. There is a process of separating salt from seawater called desalination that makes it drinkable, but it has been costly and subsequently slow to catch on. World navies, especially submarines and other ships that remain at sea for months at a time, have used desalination for years. As the water crisis grows, however, the existence of large desalination plants has grown more and more common, especially in other parts of the world. A plant capable of desalinizing 25 million gallons of water a day opened in Tampa, Florida, in December, 2007, a plant twice that size has been built near San Diego in Southern California, and the State of Texas currently has over 100 small plants up and running.
The world’s largest desalination plant, capable of producing 300 million cubic meters of fresh water per year, is now operating in the United Arab Emirates, and another super sized new desalination plant is planned for Southern Australia to ease the crisis caused by a serious drought in that part of the world. There are about 1,500 such plants now operating in the world and the number is growing.
The down-side of this story is that in addition to generating more costly water for consumers, the process of desalination also produces greenhouse gasses. The process utilizes distillation of the water through heating, which separates the water from salt and other elements. The same technique can be used on brackish and polluted groundwaters inland, thus providing drinkable water in areas where potable water is not available in ground aquifers.
The good news is that new technology is being developed that is already making the process of desalination less costly to operate, and reducing the amount of greenhouse gasses produced.
In the State of California, which has been stricken with extreme drought conditions, researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a "mini-mobile-modular" (M3) smart water desalination and filtration system that can not only test local water sources but give information needed to design a larger desalination plant to meet regional needs.
Yoram Cohen, the lead researcher on the UCLA team, noted that in one recent field study in the San Joaquin Valley the mobile system used an accelerated chemical demineralization process and recovered 65 percent of the agricultural drainage water fed into it as potable drinking water.
Cohen said this drain water was nearly saturated with calcium sulfate salts but accomplished an adequate filtration with just one reverse osmosis stage.
In other words, California researchers appear to be on the verge of producing an affordable water purification system for home and small community use. In fact a new company in the United Kingdom, Desolenator, claims to be on the verge of marketing a small-scale, portable solar-powered water purification device that can convert up to 15 liters of clean water per day. The inventor and CEO, William Janssen, claims this device will sell for about $450 and last for up to 20 years.
Because we foolishly failed to protect our fresh water sources it is now becoming costly to get a pure drink of water. Most of us are already buying drinking water from reverse osmosis systems rather than take a chance with tap water. Because of the work of contemporary researchers we may have plenty of drinking water at our disposal. We must expect, however, to pay for what we consume.