Modern Desalinating Sea Water

With the Pacific Ocean lining the California coast line some may ask why can’t sea water be filtered and used as a source of free water. This is actually an alternative that has been researched and even put into use in places such as the Netherlands, Aruba, the Middle East and even right here in the U.S. This process is called desalinating seawater. Saltwater in its pure form cannot be used for drinking water and is deadly to plants, however if it goes through the process of desalinating it can be used. With California desperate for water Carlsbad, California decided to construct a desalinating plant. An article on NBCNEWS website states that the plant can produce “50 million gallons of freshwater a day from the sea and pour it into a water system that serves 3.1 million people”

Should California start to desalinate Ocean water? California should not start to desalinate ocean water

With the water crisis being seen around the world, even right here in the United States, we need to explore other options to supply fresh water to the residents. One State, in particular, that raises concern is the state of California. An alternative method to supply water to residents could be the process of desalination. Desalination is when fresh water is made by using either seawater or brackish and eliminating the minerals and salts as a way to make the water safe for human and agriculture uses ( Kesieme et al., 2013). In recent years, we have seen an increase the in the number of desalination plants around the United States (fig 1). However, is the process of desalination the answer for the water crisis going on in California? As a

If residents and corporations throughout the United States continue to frivolously waste water and refuse to make painless changes and upgrades around their homes, it will continue to increase in cost to people across the United States. For example, as a result of the water shortage crisis currently afflicting the southwestern United States, the city of San Diego, California, is currently constructing a desalination plant, located in Carlsbad, California. The idea of a desalination plant is to collect undrinkable saltwater from the ocean and, using reverse osmosis and other filtering techniques, remove the salt to produce clean, potable water (Barnett). However, there are many downsides to relying on desalination practices to provide for a city the size of San Diego. First and foremost, it is considerably more expensive to produce clean drinking water from saltwater as opposed to using regular surface water or groundwater. The act of filtering the water alone can be twice as expensive as traditional filtration methods. In addition, desalination plants consume much more energy than traditional treatment plants, mostly due to the fact that the filtration methods are much more involved. Desalination consumes twice as much power as recycled plants, and four times as much as pumping groundwater (Newell, Roohk and Reardon). For example, the Carlsbad plant alone will require the same amount of electricity as is used to power 125,000 homes in California. However, the biggest

-Article 1- Ghaffour, N., M. Missimer, T., & L. Amy, G. (2013). Desalination (Technical review and evaluation of the economics of water desalination: Current and future challenges for better water supply sustainability) (Vol. 309, pp. 197-207). Thuwal.

The first method, distillation, is the process of heating water to its boiling point, collecting the steam, and condensing the purified water vapor. The process is usually repeated a few times to ensure success in purification (Ocean Water Desalination). Distillation uses the property of higher boiling points in salts than in pure water. Possible contaminants that require removal for safe water consumption could include bacteria, lead, mercury, sodium, and chlorine. After boiling the water, water vapor moves through a series of tubes to a separate container where the heat source is removed, and the water is able to condense, now purified. Some strengths of distillation include the removal of heavy metals such as arsenic, lead and mercury, the removal of hardening agents such as calcium and phosphorus, and the removal of bacteria from water by heating. This elimination of bacteria is especially helpful in developing countries due to the increased risk of contamination because of unsanitary conditions. In this process, consideration needs to be given for adequate resources and infrastructure to deliver purified water to the general population of underdeveloped areas. A few disadvantages exist in that distillation does not remove chlorine and is relatively ineffective as the input is about five times the output (Water Treatment Alternatives -

Water desalination is very important for us because it give us access to fresh and clean water. Also, water desalination is useful because we use it in many ways. For example, trees spraying , human consuming , municipalities, water glasses , hotels and resort. But also for industrial applications like power plants , oil and gas , chemical factories , requiring specific process water for their

Distillation is perhaps the one water treatment technology that most completely reduces the widest range of drinking water contaminants. Without safe water or sanitation, people are trapped in a cycle of poverty and disease. Across the developing world, millions of women are wasting precious time collecting dirty water, children are dying from preventable diarrheal diseases, and communities have open sewers running through them. Salt water is desalinated to produce fresh water suitable for human consumption or irrigation. Salt water makes a person thirstier and eventually would make you suffer from dehydration. 2.5 billion People in the world do not have access to adequate sanitation, one in three of the world’s population. Using desalination can help lower this number by a ton because it can open these people to a cleaner and more sanitized life. There are varying degrees of salinity in water, which affects the difficulty and expense of treatment, and the level of saline is typically measured in parts per million (ppm). The U.S. Geological Survey provides an outline of what constitutes saline water: 1,000 ppm – 3,000 ppm is low salinity, 3,000 ppm – 10,000 ppm is moderate salinity, and 10,000 ppm – 35,000 ppm is high salinity. Water that contains saline levels less than 1,000 ppm is generally considered fresh water, and is safe to drink and use for household and agricultural purposes. For a reference point, typical ocean water contains about 35,000

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 innovative ways to extract clean drinkable water from seawater but currently water desalination plants are the best option purely for the reason that they can effectively and reliably meet our extensive volume demands of water. From the research conducted water desalination plants can be used to eliminate any water shortages in the near future with todays technology but is hindered by its cost. However, this is a problem which is slowly being reduced by new innovative methods being used to tweak or create new ways to desalinate

Despite the very harsh climatic condition in Israel, this area has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years. During this long period of time, many strategies and tools have been developed to cope with it. These include for example gravitational irrigation in Jericho in the ancient times, aqueducts in the Roman period or desalination plants in these days. Only thanks to this adaptation, the society in this region has been able to survive until

If the process involves in a reversible thermodynamics process, any methods of seawater desalination will have a higher efficiency according to thermodynamics principle. Seawater desalination turns saline water into drinking water. (Lachish, U)

Approximately 72% of the earth is covered in water, however, of that amount, 97% is undrinkable because of the saline content. Theoretically, the ability to make that portion drinkable would mean creating a renewable source of fresh water-- a concept that, if executed properly would mean the end of water insecurity worldwide. The first record of desalination technology being used came from the writings of Aristotle, a Greek philosopher who lived during the fourth century BC. Ancient Romans used evaporation to remove the salt from water to make it potable. Since then, desalination has become much more sophisticated, but the latest technology being used is still decades old ("A Short History Of Desalination - Abengoa"). Although

The last resort to fixing the water crisis is desalination. “For agriculture, desalination is so far out of the range of cost that no one really even thinks about it. But over time, we will see more and more desalination in those places with no other options, as we see in many Middle East and Gulf state countries," (Gleick, 2015). Desalination is a process that removes salt and minerals from saline water. The most popular methods used in desalination are multi-stage flash distillation, which uses heat to evaporate water, leaving the salt behind, and which accounted for 84% of desalination in 2004; and reverse osmosis desalination, which is less energy intensive but still requires a great deal of energy to pump water through filtration membranes. Forward

Desalination is the process of using seawater or brackish groundwater and converting to fresh water by removing the dissolved salts to allow the water to be suitable for human and agricultural purposes (Kesieme et al., 2013). The purpose of this process is a response to help meet the growing demand in water usage and protects the regional water supplies against the negative effects of climate change. However, consideration will need to be taken on the cost to maintain this expensive technology as well as the amount of energy required to operate the machine which will cause an increase in greenhouse gas emissions and an increase in water prices. The process of desalinating seawater provides a continuous amount of high quality water without significantly affecting the natural freshwater ecosystems. However, there are still concerns regarding the potential negative effects it has environmentally and economically.