scholarly journals Analyzing the Energy Consumption, GHG Emission, and Cost of Seawater Desalination in China

Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xuexiu Jia ◽  
Jiří Klemeš ◽  
Petar Varbanov ◽  
Sharifah Wan Alwi

Seawater desalination is considered a technique with high water supply potential and has become an emerging alternative for freshwater supply in China. The increase of the capacity also increases energy consumption and greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions, which has not been well investigated in studies. This study has analyzed the current development of seawater desalination in China, including the capacity, distribution, processes, as well as the desalted water use. Energy consumption and GHG emissions of overall desalination in China, as well as for the provinces, are calculated covering the period of 2006–2016. The unit product cost of seawater desalination plants specifying processes is also estimated. The results showed that 1) The installed capacity maintained increased from 2006 to 2016, and reverse osmosis is the major process used for seawater desalination in China. 2) The energy consumption increased from 81 MWh/y to 1,561 MWh/y during the 11 years. The overall GHG emission increase from 85 Mt CO2eq/y to 1,628 Mt CO2eq/y. Tianjin had the largest GHG emissions, following are Hebei and Shandong, with emissions of 4.1 Mt CO2eq/y, 2.2 Mt CO2eq/y. and 1.0 Mt CO2eq/y. 3) The unit product cost of seawater desalination is higher than other water supply alternatives, and it differentiates the desalination processes. The average unit product cost of the reverse osmosis process is 0.96 USD and 2.5 USD for the multiple-effect distillation process. The potential for future works should specify different energy forms, e.g. heat and power. Alternatives of process integration should be investigated—e.g. efficiency of using the energy, heat integration, and renewables in water desalination, as well as the utilization of total site heat integration.

Author(s):  
Alexander Fayer

This document discusses operation of desalination system permanently extracting water from hydrogel draw agent by specially selected wicks. Due to its peculiarity the system combines advantages of both forward and reverse osmosis approaches such as, low power consumption, passive process of a freshwater extraction, continuous duty cycle and scaling possibility. While in modern systems an energy consumption of seawater desalination reaches of about 3 kWh/m 3, including pre-filtering and ancillaries [1], the same parameter for the specific system expected to be as low as for local fresh water supplyi.e., 0.2 kWh/m 3


2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Y. Poussade ◽  
F. Vince ◽  
C. Robillot

Between 1999 and 2007, several successive years of severe drought put South East Queensland's water supply under immense pressure. The decision was taken in 2005 to build a seawater desalination plant and three water recycling advanced treatment plants as part of a large investment plan to secure the region's potable water supply. The infrastructure built and commissioned in the past 3 years has a combined capacity producing more than 350,000 m3 per day of very high quality water that can be used either directly (seawater desalination) or indirectly (recycled water) for supplying drinking water. All the plants primarily rely on reverse osmosis membranes for water purification which is an effective and reliable barrier to contaminants, but also requires high energy consumption and a high level of pre-treatment and chemicals. In this paper, the actual energy consumption of two of the plants (the seawater desalination plant and one water recycling plant) was investigated with the perspective of drinking water production over the July 2009–June 2010 period. Eolia™ Potable Water, a Life Cycle Analysis tool developed by Veolia Environnement Research & Innovation, was used to model the processes and estimate the greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions from both plants. As expected, the energy requirement of the desalination was higher (approximately 2.2 times) than the water recycling plant. The plants were found to be significantly more energy efficient when operated at higher flow. In both cases, the purchase of electrical energy represented by far the major contribution to GHG emissions. Indirect GHG emissions from chemical consumption could be reduced at the water recycling plant by optimising the dose of ferric chloride used at the plant and sourcing the chemical from a less distant supplier.


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.


Membranes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 781
Author(s):  
Federico Leon ◽  
Alejandro Ramos ◽  
S. Ovidio Perez-Baez

This article shows the optimization of the reverse osmosis process in seawater desalination plants, taking the example of the Canary Islands, where there are more than 320 units of different sizes, both private and public. The objective is to improve the energy efficiency of the system in order to save on operation costs as well as reduce the carbon and ecological footprints. Reverse osmosis membranes with higher surface area have lower energy consumption, as well as energy recovery systems to recover the brine pressure and introduce it in the system. Accounting for the operation, maintenance and handling of the membranes is also important in energy savings, in order to improve the energy efficiency. The energy consumption depends on the permeate water quality required and the model of the reverse osmosis membrane installed in the seawater desalination plant, as it is shown in this study.


2020 ◽  
Vol 69 (7) ◽  
pp. 694-703
Author(s):  
Somayeh Mohammadi Jouzdani ◽  
Mohammad Mahdi Zerafat ◽  
Peyman Daneshkar Arasteh ◽  
Hassan Vagharfard

Abstract In recent years, desalination has been turned into a fresh water supply as a solution in some areas which suffer from water shortage. Desalinated water as an industrial product causes environmental problems. The objectives of this study are investigating environmental sustainability indicators related to seawater desalination via reverse osmosis (SWRO) on the coastline of Hormozgan province to provide a better insight for current and future water and energy demands related to this alternative. The selected indicators are specific energy consumption, seawater withdrawal, and brine volume in desalination, fuel consumption, carbon emission and water withdrawal in electric power generation. Using a solution-diffusion model, the direct indicator of energy consumption was obtained as used to calculate indirect indicators from the energy generation sector. Analysis of results indicates that desalination can lead to out-of-area side effects resulting from fuel type consumed and the practical power of the power plant, in addition to the regional environmental effects that are mostly affected by total dissolved solids of feed water. Based on the results, the environmental issues should be considered for the regions where desalination was planned as the most feasible alternative for water supply. This result can help policymakers to manage water supply and demand for sustainable development appropriately.


Author(s):  
Naiara Hernández-Ibáñez ◽  
Juan Arévalo ◽  
Vicente F. Mena ◽  
Victor Monsalvo-Garcia ◽  
Frank Rogalla

Abstract This chapter presents the construction, operation, and validation of all the MIDES systems, including water pre-treatment, wastewater pre-treatment, the microbial desalination cell (MDC), low-pressure reverse osmosis (RO), and post-treatment (remineralization and disinfection). MIDES technology has been validated with different water sources: brackish water from Demo Site 1, (Racons Brackish Water Desalination Plant (BWDP), located in Denia, Spain) and seawater from Demo Site 2 (Fonsalía Seawater Desalination Plant (SWDP), located in Guía de Isora, Spain). In this chapter, the preparation of both demo sites for the reception and installation of the pilot plants is also presented.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-112
Author(s):  
Wenjing Wei ◽  
Peter B. Samuelsson ◽  
Anders Tilliander ◽  
Rutger Gyllenram ◽  
Pär G. Jönsson

AbstractMolybdenum is mainly used as an alloy material in the iron and steel industry and typically in the form of ferromolybdenum (FeMo). The current study aims to evaluate the energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) of four ferromolybdenum production cases using inventory inputs from a process model based on mass and energy conservations. The total energy required for producing 1 tonne of FeMo can vary between 29.1 GJ/t FeMo and 188.6 GJ/t FeMo. Furthermore, the corresponding GHG emissions differ from 3.16 tCO2-eq/t FeMo to 14.79 tCO2-eq/t FeMo. The main variances are from the mining and beneficiation stages. The differences in these stages come from the beneficiation degree (ore grade) and the mine type (i.e., co-product from copper mining). Furthermore, the mine type has a larger impact on the total energy consumption and GHG emissions than the beneficiation degree. More specifically, FeMo produced as co-product from copper mining has a lower environmental impact measured as the energy consumption and GHG emission among all the four cases. The inventory, consumed energy or associated GHG emission is independent on the initial ore grade and mine type in the downstream production stages such as roasting and smelting. Also, transport has the least impact on the energy consumption and GHG emission among all production stages.


2020 ◽  
Vol 248 ◽  
pp. 119220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alanood A. Alsarayreh ◽  
M.A. Al-Obaidi ◽  
A.M. Al-Hroub ◽  
R. Patel ◽  
I.M. Mujtaba

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 889-897 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sangam Shrestha ◽  
Kshitij Parajuli ◽  
Mukand S. Babel ◽  
Shobhakar Dhakal ◽  
Victor Shinde

An understanding of the nexus between water and energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is essential for sustainable water resources management. While a number of such studies on understanding this nexus have been carried out in the recent past, there have been virtually no studies that have done so for Asian cities. This study aims to plug this gap by analyzing the water–energy–carbon (WEC) nexus for Bangkok, the capital city of Thailand. Using mostly secondary data, and through interactions with concerned stakeholders, the study revealed that more than 335 GWh of energy is used per year for water supply (0.22 kWh of energy to drive 1 m3 of water from source to tap). About 276 million litres of water is consumed for total power production in Thailand; almost 16% of water supplied annually by the Metropolitan Waterworks Authority (MWA). Of this, 0.625 million litres is consumed by electricity, utilised for water supply in Bangkok. In addition 82.2 billion kgCO2-eq is emitted by the power sector annually and energy associated with water emits 187 million kgCO2-eq/year, equal to 0.11 kgCO2-eq of GHG emission from each 1 m3 of water supplied by the MWA. This study provides information on the WEC nexus in cities as evidenced by Bangkok, which can contribute to the formulation of a policy in water and energy sectors to fulfil the objective of reducing GHG emissions.


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