Environmental Performance of Small-Scale Seawater Reverse Osmosis Plant for Rural Area Water Supply

Abstract

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.

Carbon Footprint-Energy Detection for Desalination Small Plant Adaptation Response

“…Fahad et al [22] proved that the use and increase in the diameter of a membrane can also reduce the carbon footprint due to the high rejection of boron, bromide, and other relevant materials. Moreover, the details of research by Abdul Ghani et al [36], which undertook a more in-depth examination related to the membrane potential than in the case of Senok study, is more relevant for further study in the future. As mentioned previously, this SWRO Senok pilot plant project was developed on a small scale with a capacity of 500 m 3 per day to cover a 3000 household population.…”