Environmental and economic analysis for desalinating seawater of high salinity using reverse osmosis: a life cycle assessment approach

Environmental Impacts of Reverse Osmosis in Wastewater Treatment Versus Desalination to Mend the Water Cycle: A Life Cycle Assessment

“…WASTEWATER TREATMENT USING LCA LCA has been implemented to assess the environmental impacts of DPs with different plant characteristics [9], [18]. Al-Shayji and Aleisa [11] investigated the environmental impacts of all operating DPs in Kuwait.…”

“…Mannan et al [19] highlighted the regional impact on the environmental impact of a DP. Aljuwaisseri et al [9] investigated the impacts of intake water salinity and turbidity on the environmental impact. Researchers have addressed varying desalination process scenarios, including different gain ratios [19], multiple energy sources [10], [20], [21] and different capacities [22].…”

“…The Shuwaikh and Al-Zour South SWRO DPs combined contribute only 12% of the total freshwater production in the country (see Fig. 2), while the rest is produced using MSF and the newly inaugurated multieffect distillation (MED) DP [9].…”

Assessing Seawater Desalination using Reverse Osmosis and Multi-effect Distillation for Kuwait using Life Cycle Assessment: fossil fuels versus solar power

“…13: climate action. In the GCC, a staggering 30-50% of oil production is consumed by the cogeneration of electricity and desalination [2,3], which due extensive energy change has its toll on the environment and the economy. The COP21 in Glasgow, UK and The 2019 UN Environment Programme's Emissions Gap Report figures indicates that not enough action is taken worldwide to mitigate carbon emissions [4].…”

“…Our area of focus, the GCC [12], presents an intricate paradox of severe water scarcity coupled with staggered water consumption, which is a result of rentierism, socio-economic situation of the GCC region. The GCC regions have long relied on costly thermal seawater desalination, followed by high abstraction of nonrenewable groundwater resources, to satisfy their demand for water [3,13,14]. The availability of fossil fuels at a low extraction cost has slowed the conversion to energy efficient desalination in the GCC, such as multistage flash distillation (MSF) [2,14].…”