Water, hold the salt - The global market for desalination is expected to more than double by 2032.
Patrick Sisson
11/11/24 2:19PM
"In 1961, President John F. Kennedy presided over the opening of a new industrial facility promising to use the latest scientific achievements to benefit mankind. This, he said at the opening ceremony, was “a work that in many ways is more important than any other scientific enterprise in which this country is now engaged.”
"You’d be forgiven for thinking this marked a milestone in the space race. But no — the speech celebrated the opening of a new desalination plant in the Gulf Coast city of Freeport, Texas. The Southwest had been suffering from a punishing drought that led to wide-scale water rationing, and Kennedy’s appearance at the inauguration of the Saline Water Conversion Plant was an early capstone for the US Office of Saline Water. The office, established in 1955, poured millions into the cause of harnessing saltwater for residential, agricultural, and commercial use.
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"More than 60 years later, desalination has become a multibillion-dollar global enterprise.Just 3% of the world’s water supply is fresh, with the vast majority of that trapped in ice caps and glaciers or found underground. …
"Desalination technology has gotten more efficient over time, but it’s still an expensive and energy-consuming way to get freshwater. Historically, desalination involved energy-intensive thermal processes that boiled seawater to separate the steam from solids. The procedure has been around for centuries; as secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson ordered that the government print guides to desalination on the back of permits for 18th-century sailing ships. In 1959, UCLA researchers Sidney Loeb and Srinivasa Sourirajan created the process used in most plants today: reverse osmosis, which forces highly pressurized seawater through a series of pumps and membranes to filter out freshwater. Loeb, who patented a membrane he developed for $14,000, spawned a multibillion-dollar industry.
"The average projected cost of creating a cubic meter of freshwater has gone from roughly $1.10 in 2000 to nearly $0.50 today, GWI data shows. Jay Lund, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis, estimated that the cost has dropped about 90% in the last 50 years. But energy remains a key variable cost of desalination. It’s the most energy-intensive means of delivering drinking water, making up anywhere from a third to over half of the total cost of separating out salt and minerals. In Cyprus, where desalination supplies most of the freshwater, the process generates 2% of the country’s total greenhouse-gas emissions and uses 5% of the island’s power.
"In the US, desalination has not been widely adopted. One of the ironies of the industry is that as rainfall levels decline and drought conditions worsen — often leading to calls for desalination — the running water that would provide cheap and reliable hydropower is curtailed. The droughts that have hit the western US over the last two decades cost billions of dollars, in part because of increased energy prices.
“People like the allure of seawater desalination because it seems like you’re creating this new supply, and it’s a technology-based approach, so it seems less vulnerable,” Heather Cooley, director of research at the Pacific Institute, said."
https://sherwood.news/world/desalination-billion-dollar-industry/