Evaluating the costs of desalination and water transport

Abstract

[1] Many regions of the world are facing formidable freshwater scarcity. Although there is substantial scope for economizing on the consumption of water without affecting its service level, the main response to water scarcity has been to increase the supply. To a large extent, this is done by transporting water from places where it is abundant to places where it is scarce. At a smaller scale and without a lot of public and political attention, people have started to tap into the sheer limitless resource of desalinated water. This study looks at the development of desalination and its costs over time. The unit costs of desalinated water for five main processes are evaluated, followed by regressions to analyze the main influencing factors to the costs. The unit costs for all processes have fallen considerably over the years. This study suggests that a cost of $1/m 3 for seawater desalination and $0.6/m 3 for brackish water would be feasible today. The costs will continue to decline in the future as technology progresses. In addition, a literature review on the costs of water transport is conducted in order to estimate the total cost of desalination and the transport of desalinated water to selected water stress cities. Transport costs range from a few cents per cubic meter to over a dollar. A 100 m vertical lift is about as costly as a 100 km horizontal transport ($0.05-0.06/m 3 ). Transport makes desalinated water prohibitively expensive in highlands and continental interiors but not elsewhere.

Resistance and Resilience of A Stream Salamander To Supraseasonal Drought

“…At present, available technologies are based mostly on membranes and are more costly than conventional methods for the treatment of freshwater supplies. The desalination cost for seawater is estimated at around US$1/m 3 , for brackish water it is US$0.60/m 3 (Zhou and Tol, 2005), and freshwater chlorination costs US$0.02/m 3 . Fortunately the cost of desalinisation has been falling, although it still has a high energy demand.…”

“…Net benefit in total due to water use (dominated by municipal and industrial use) is projected to decrease by less than 2% over the same period (Chen et al, 2001). [WGII 3.5.1] If freshwater supply has to be replaced by desalinated water due to climate change, then the cost of climate change includes the average cost of desalination, which is currently around US$1.00/m 3 for seawater and US$0.60/m 3 for brackish water (Zhou and Tol, 2005). The cost for freshwater chlorination is approximately US$0.02/m 3 .…”

“…An analysis of malaria morbidity data for the period from the late 1980s until the early 1990s from 50 sites across Ethiopia found that epidemics were associated with high minimum temperatures in the preceding months (Abeku et al, 2003). An analysis of data from seven highland sites in East Africa reported that short-term climate variability played a more important role than long-term trends in initiating malaria epidemics (Zhou et al, 2004(Zhou et al, , 2005, although the method used to test this hypothesis has been challenged (Hay et al, 2005). [WGII 8.2…”

Optimal design of water treatment processes

“…Such factors are plant size, source and quality of feed water, site location and accessibility to electricity, distance from final users, qualified labour, energy costs and estimated plant life [70]. All of them come under the operating or capital costs of treatment facilities, as the majority of them are included in the cost estimates demonstrated in the subsequent subsections.…”

Dynamics of microbial communities in an integrated ultrafiltration–reverse osmosis desalination pilot plant located at the Arabian Gulf

“…Majority of the desalination plants in the GCC countries utilize Multi Stage Flash Distillation (MSF) but it is projected that the number of desalination plants utilizing reverse osmosis (RO) membranes will increase in the future as the technology becomes more affordable [1,2]. Compared to MSF, RO membrane-based systems are designed with a series of pretreatment steps as RO membranes can become adversely affected by rapid fouling.…”