desalination

desalination, removal of dissolved salts from seawater and in some cases from the brackish (slightly salty) waters of inland seas, highly mineralized groundwaters (e.g., geothermal brines), and municipal wastewaters. This process renders such otherwise unusable waters fit for human consumption, irrigation, industrial applications, and various other purposes. Existing desalination technology requires a substantial amount of energy, usually in the form of fossil fuels, and so the process is expensive. For this reason it is generally used only where sources of fresh water are not economically available. In addition, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions and brine wastewater generated by desalination plants pose significant environmental challenges.

The desalting of seawater is an ancient notion. Aristotle described an evaporation method used by Greek sailors of the 4th century bce. An Arab writer of the 8th century ce produced a treatise on distillation. In the 19th century the development of steam navigation created a demand for noncorroding water for boilers, and the first patent for a desalination process was granted in England in 1869. The same year, the first water-distillation plant was built by the British government at Aden, to supply ships stopping at the Red Sea port. The first large still to provide water for commercial purposes was built in 1930 in Aruba, near Venezuela. By 2019 about 18,000 desalination plants producing a total of more than 95 million cubic metres (in excess of 3.4 billion cubic feet) of potable water per day were in operation throughout the world.

Desalination processes

Desalination methods can utilize either thermal processes (involving heat transfer and a phase change) or membrane processes (using thin sheets of synthetic semipermeable materials to separate water from dissolved salt). Multistage flash distillation is a thermal process for desalting relatively large quantities of seawater. Based on the fact that the boiling temperature of water is lowered as air pressure drops, this process is carried out in a series of closed tanks (stages) set at progressively lower pressures. When preheated seawater enters the first stage, some of it rapidly boils (flashes), forming vapour that is condensed into fresh water on heat-exchange tubes. Fresh water is collected in trays as the remaining seawater flows into the next stage, where it also flashes, and the process is continued. One of the largest of these systems, located in Al-Jubayl, Saudi Arabia, can produce more than 750 million litres (200 million gallons) of desalted water per day.

Britannica Quiz

Water and its Varying Forms

In small communities where salt water and intense sunlight are both abundant, a simple thermal process called solar humidification can be used. The heat of the Sun partially vaporizes salt water under a transparent cover. On the underside of the cover, the vapour condenses and flows into a collecting trough. The principal difficulty in this process is that large land areas are required, and energy is needed for pumping the water. Another thermal process makes use of the fact that, when salt water is frozen, the ice crystals contain no salt. In practice, however, objectionable amounts of salt water remain trapped between the crystals, and the amount of fresh water needed to wash the salt water away is comparable to the amount of fresh water produced by melting the crystals.

Membrane processes for desalting include reverse osmosis and electrodialysis. Of the two, reverse osmosis is the more widely used, particularly for desalting brackish waters from inland seas. The salt content of brackish inland water, though undesirable, is considerably below that of seawater. Electrodialysis uses electrical potential to drive the positive and negative ions of dissolved salts through separate semipermeable synthetic membrane filters. This process leaves fresh water between the filters. In reverse osmosis salt water is forced against the membranes under high pressure; fresh water passes through while the concentrated mineral salts remain behind. To conserve space, the membranes are packaged in multiple layers in a collection of long tubes. One of the largest reverse-osmosis desalination plants now in operation is located in Sorek, Israel, and can produce some 627,000 cubic metres (22 million cubic feet) of desalted water per day.

Global production

In many areas of the world, particularly in densely populated arid regions, desalted water is the main source of municipal water supplies. Desalination is used in more than 120 countries, and about half of all desalted water is produced in the Middle East and North Africa. By 2019 the largest producers of desalinated water were Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait. The United States is another major producer, accounting for roughly 13 percent of the total output (mostly in Florida, Texas, and California). The majority of all desalination plants are reverse-osmosis systems, with multistage flash distillation being the second-ranking process.

In general, a population usually can afford to pay about 7–10 times as much for water for domestic purposes as it does for agricultural water. Large-scale desalination facilities promise to lower the cost of desalted water at the desalination sites to a level that most industries and some agricultural enterprises can afford. In the future it can be expected that the ocean will become an increasingly important source of fresh water. If production and transportation costs can be lowered sufficiently, it may be possible to produce fresh water to irrigate large areas that border the oceans in many parts of the world.

Get Unlimited Access

Try Britannica Premium for free and discover more.

Subscribe