Desalination In California

Desalination is a great way to help people. Many areas do not have fresh water resources such as rivers and lakes. Taking out the salt from seawater will provide lots of people. This is needed where there is not a lot of natural drinking water. “People are building the Carlsbad desalination project. When it is completed, the huge plant will turn as many as 56 million gallons of seawater each day into drinking

California should not desalinate Ocean water because it costs lots of money. This is true because in the article, “California tries one solution to water problems — treating seawater,” on page one it says, “The project is expected to cost $1 billion.” Also on page 2 it says, “San Diego County agreed to pay for 48,000 acre-feet of water from the plant every year whether it needs the water or not. It is doing so to ensure a guaranteed long-term supply. The water will cost $2,257 per acre-foot, about double the price of the authority’s most expensive supply now.” Lastly it on page 3 it says, “We believe in being innovative and open-minded when it comes to tackling the water crisis,” mayoral spokeswoman Marie Lloyd said. “At the same time, we do

Desalination is the removal of salt and impurities from groundwater or seawater to produce fresh drinking water. Desalination is a secure water source that doesn’t depend on rainfall and has become a significant water source that has been strengthened through its decrease in production costs and related technological improvements. The process of Desalination is another means of securing Western Australia’s future water supply. Western Australia has two main plants, Perth Seawater Desalination Plant and Southern Seawater Desalination Plant, both of these plants deliver water to the Integrated Water Supply Scheme which supplies water to over 2 million people in Perth, parts of the South West, parts of the Agricultural region and the Kalgoorlie-Boulder

Another argument opposing desalination is the environmental concerns. Many believe that since ocean water is being extracted, marine life will be disturbed. Therefore, affecting the entire ecosystem: “With the majority of desalination plants extracting water directly through open water intakes in the ocean, there is a direct impact on marine life. Fish and other marine organisms are killed on the intake screens (impingement); organisms small enough to pass through, such as plankton, fish eggs, and larvae, are killed during processing of the salt water (entrainment). The impacts on the marine environment, even for a single desalination plant, may be subject to daily, seasonal, annual, and even decadal variation, and are likely to be species- and site-specific” (Cooley).

Our rivers are running dry faster than we expected. As we look for a solution to the scarcity of water, we are relying on the most abundant resource that is available on Earth — the ocean. To make the salty sea waters usable, scientists have developed desalination plants; a method that uses reverse osmosis and is already being implemented in places like California. However, as with any possible solution, the desalination process has its downfalls. Critics of the desalination project argue that it is more expensive than other potential methods and that the amount of energy required will only aid climate change. Those who support this method would argue that although it is currently expensive, new, cheaper filters will be developed in the

The earth seems is drying up in certain areas of the world at the moment. We have already seen some of the hottest summers on record in the last decade. Summer 2016 was the hottest summer on record since the records were started back in 1880 (Doyle, 2016). The effects of this heat have manifested themselves as drought in areas of the western United States. One of those areas happens to be our home of Southern California. Water resources have slowly declined and conservation has been the key tool to battle the decline. In an effort to find new ways of conserving or creating fresh water supplies, technology has been called upon. The need for technology that can help us meet our fresh water demands becomes more important every day. One of the technologies that has gotten a lot of attention recently is desalination. In fact a large scale desalination plant was just opened in Carlsbad, Ca. The facility is capable of delivering 50 million gallons per day (MGD) (Bienkowski, 2015). Despite this impressive achievement the plant still only accounts for 8% of the total water demand in San Diego County (CDP, 2016). In this paper I will explain the process of desalination, identify a promising new technology, and provide a comparison of technologies.

California’s water supply derives from multiple sources that comprise of surface water, ground water, recycled water, and desalinated seawater. These sources are either imported or are procured locally. Due to California entering its fifth consecutive drought year and global climate change looking to exacerbate drought conditions in the upcoming years, many water managers and environmentalists in the state are considering a new sustainable method that converts recycled water into drinking water. Direct Potable Reuse (DPR) is the emerging water supply method that may not only be drought resistant process, but may also provide high quality drinking water to many water districts in arid regions such as California. DPR would provide flexibility

Due to the industrial revolution and the increasing in the world population, which leads to water scarcity of potable water and water for industrial applications. To cover the increasing demand of water we have to treat the polluted or saline water using the separation techniques to produce the potable and industrial water. This process it’s called, Water Desalination. Water Desalination is the process that treats the raw water by removing the suspended solids from the water. Sustain or the feed water sources may incorporate briny water or brackish water, seawater, ground water from wells, surface water (rivers and streams), wastewater, industrial feed and process waters. Desalination of seawater has the ability to produce enough amount of

Desalination has been used for thousands of years - Greek sailors boiled water to evaporate fresh water away from the salt and Romans used clay filters to trap salt. Today's sophisticated methods still generally use the concepts of distillation or filtration. The process of desalinating sea water to make it drinkable has a long and rich history. However, the first large-scale modern desalination process to appear was multi-stage flash distillation (MSF) during the mid-20th century in the USA (1955). Furthermore, although multi-effect distillation (MED) had been discovered and had the potential to be more efficient than MSF, it took a while longer to make the MED process efficient on an industrial scale and this did not occur until 1959 when

Base on the assessment of all the five factors, the seawater desalination plant is necessarily built in Point Lowly to sever the Olympic Dam Mine. Even if there are still some risks of the seawater desalination plant construction as below:

Given that the ocean holds 97.2% of Earth’s near-surface water, desalinization of seawater is the first option that comes to my mind that could be viable. Especially in arid and semi-arid areas including the Middle East, Persian Gulf, North Africa, Caribbean islands and etc., seawater desalination facilities can be “vital for economic development.” It can provide reliable and high-quality water supply to hot, dry, and increasingly populous regions and allow for local control of water resources at the same time. San Diego County is one of these regions, where county government decided to build a massive desalination facility that will be using the reverse osmosis with a cost of $1 billion. When it’s done, it is expected to produce 54 million

There are many ways to desalinate water to make them drinkable and they are proven and effective, and a few of them are reverse osmosis, multi- stage flash distillation and freezing. Reverse osmosis is when pressure is put on the water and forces the water through a membrane so that the water and salt separate, it has been proven effective in creating fresh sources of drinking water that can deliver the health benefits people need. When properly designed, desalination plants can then create drinkable water that is of high quality. This process can be used on different types of water, including brackish (low salinity) water and seawater [Science Direct].

However, the process of desalination is not easy to do on a large scale in underdeveloped areas due to the cost of the energy input, as well as taking into account the environmental issues alongside it. Desalination is a difficult process to do inland, partly for accessing the water, which would have to be obtained from aquifers (Elsaid et al., 2012) and partly for having to dispose of the brine. Therefore, it is a process which is mainly found in coastal areas.

The modern techniques in water desalination include nuclear cleaning, change of state distillation, and reverse osmosis. This paper focuses on the most energy efficient technology available for each method, as this diminishes cost.

Desalination plants, are a poor route to go, if we are trying to reach an efficient and cost effective way to end the California drought. They have considered a couple of solutions that would have a similar outcome, but some residents do not agree with the other alternatives, such as waste water recycling because they do not like the idea of reusing water. We should choose to go another route other than a desalination plant because they are very expensive to run, there is no good location for one, and the process has a mass amount of carbon emissions. The desalination plants do have their benefits, but are not worth the risk.