scholarly journals Quenching an Enormous Thirst

2018 ◽  
Vol 140 (12) ◽  
pp. 39-39
Author(s):  
John Kosowatz ◽  
Zina Saunders

Water scarcity is happening in many more places around the globe. To comabt it, seawater desalination is often a technology of last resort, due to the high energy costs needed to power the industrial-sized plants. Israel’s IDE Technologies offered an alternative to thermal technology: reverse osmosis. This article delves deeper into the technology.

Processes ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (8) ◽  
pp. 901
Author(s):  
Aondohemba Aende ◽  
Jabbar Gardy ◽  
Ali Hassanpour

Currently over 845 million people are believed to be living under severe water scarcity, and an estimated 2.8 billion people across the globe are projected to come under serious water scarcity by the year 2025, according to a United Nations (UN) report. Seawater desalination has gained more traction as the solution with the most potential for increasing global freshwater supplies amongst other solutions. However, the economic and energy costs associated with the major desalination technologies are considered intrinsically prohibitive largely due to their humongous energy requirements alongside the requirements of complex equipment and their maintenance in most cases. Whilst forward osmosis (FO) is being touted as a potentially more energy efficient and cost-effective alternative desalination technique, its efficiency is challenged by draw solutes and the draw solutes recovery step in FO applications alongside other challenges. This paper looks at the present situation of global water scarcity, and a brief leap into the major desalination technologies employed. A closer look at the key drivers of FO as a seawater desalination technique in their individual domain and its outlook as an technology are further highlighted.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
S.-J. Im ◽  
S. Jeong ◽  
A. Jang

AbstractCurrently, desalination is limited by high energy consumption and high operational and maintenance costs. In this study, a new concept of a hollow fiber forward osmosis (HFFO)-based infinity desalination process with minor environmental impacts (free-energy intake and no pretreatment or brine discharge) is suggested. To evaluate the concept, an element-scale HFFO was conducted in both conventional FO and pressure-assisted FO modes, simulating a submerged HFFO operation. In the HFFO test, the impacts of several operating conditions on the performance of the HFFO were investigated to select the best case. Based on these results, the energy costs were calculated and compared with those of a hybrid FO–seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) process. The HFFO showed a high dilution rate of the draw solution (up to approximately 400%), allowing the downstream SWRO process to operate at 25 bar with the same permeate volume production (recovery rate of 60%). Consequently, the HFFO-based infinity desalination process has an annual energy revenue of 183.83 million USD, compared with a stand-alone two-stage RO process based on a 100,000 m3/day plant.


Author(s):  
Sergio Genaro Salinas-Rodríguez ◽  
Juan Arévalo ◽  
Juan Manuel Ortiz ◽  
Ángeles Mendoza-Sammet ◽  
Eduard Borràs-Camps ◽  
...  

Abstract This chapter presents desalination as one of the technologies to alleviate water scarcity and its contribution to the sustainable development goals. An overview of the world and regional desalination capacity is presented and areas where desalination has potential for development are identified. The overall concept of the microbial desalination cells is presented and the areas where key innovations were developed is presented. A discussion on the energy costs and production costs in seawater reverse osmosis is briefly discussed.


Membranes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 377
Author(s):  
Federico Leon ◽  
Alejandro Ramos-Martin ◽  
Sebastian Ovidio Perez-Baez

The water situation in the Canary Islands has been a historical problem that has been sought to be solved in various ways. After years of work, efforts have focused on desalination of seawater to provide safe water mainly to citizens, agriculture, and tourism. Due to the high demand in the Islands, the Canary Islands was a pioneering place in the world in desalination issues, allowing the improvement of the techniques and materials used. There are a wide variety of technologies for desalination water, but nowadays the most used is reverse osmosis. Desalination has a negative part, the energy costs of producing desalinated water are high. To this we add the peculiarities of the electricity generation system in the Canary Islands, which generates more emissions per unit of energy produced compared to the peninsular generation system. In this study we have selected a desalination plant located on the island of Tenerife, specifically in the municipality of Granadilla de Abona, and once its technical characteristics have been known, the ecological footprint has been calculated. To do this we have had to perform some calculations such as the capacity to fix carbon dioxide per hectare in the Canary Islands, as well as the total calculation of the emissions produced in the generation of energy to feed the desalination plant.


Author(s):  
Mengying Jiang ◽  
Li-Ye Chen ◽  
Qian Zou ◽  
Siwei Xiong ◽  
Peigen Fu ◽  
...  

Reverse osmosis (RO) membrane technology, as an effective and eco-friendly method, has been widely used for seawater desalination and sewage treatment. However, RO membranes inevitably suffer serious organic and biological...


Membranes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Latifah Abdul Ghani ◽  
Nora’aini Ali ◽  
Ilyanni Syazira Nazaran ◽  
Marlia M. Hanafiah

Seawater desalination is an alternative technology to provide safe drinking water and to solve water issues in an area having low water quality and limited drinking water supply. Currently, reverse osmosis (RO) is commonly used in the desalination technology and experiencing significant growth. The aim of this study was to analyze the environmental impacts of the seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) plant installed in Kampung Pantai Senok, Kelantan, as this plant was the first installed in Malaysia. The software SimaPro 8.5 together with the ReCiPe 2016 database were used as tools to evaluate the life cycle assessment (LCA) of the SWRO plant. The results showed that the impact of global warming (3.90 kg CO2 eq/year) was the highest, followed by terrestrial ecotoxicity (1.62 kg 1,4-DCB/year) and fossil resource scarcity (1.29 kg oil eq/year). The impact of global warming was caused by the natural gas used to generate the electricity, mainly during the RO process. Reducing the environmental impact can be effectively achieved by decreasing the electricity usage for the seawater desalination process. As a suggestion, electricity generation can be overcome by using a high-flux membrane with other suitable renewable energy for the plant such as solar and wind energy.


2014 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 406-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arijit Maitra ◽  
Ken A. Dill

We are interested in the balance of energy and protein synthesis in bacterial growth. How has evolution optimized this balance? We describe an analytical model that leverages extensive literature data on growth laws to infer the underlying fitness landscape and to draw inferences about what evolution has optimized inEscherichia coli. IsE. colioptimized for growth speed, energy efficiency, or some other property? Experimental data show that at its replication speed limit,E. coliproduces about four mass equivalents of nonribosomal proteins for every mass equivalent of ribosomes. This ratio can be explained if the cell’s fitness function is the the energy efficiency of cells under fast growth conditions, indicating a tradeoff between the high energy costs of ribosomes under fast growth and the high energy costs of turning over nonribosomal proteins under slow growth. This model gives insight into some of the complex nonlinear relationships between energy utilization and ribosomal and nonribosomal production as a function of cell growth conditions.


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