Technical review and evaluation of the economics of water desalination: Current and future challenges for better water supply sustainability

Abstract

Desalination capacity has rapidly increased in the last decade because of the increase in water demand and a significant reduction in desalination cost as a result of significant technological advances, especially in the reverse osmosis process. The cost of desalinated seawater has fallen below US$0.50/m 3 for a large scale seawater reverse osmosis plant at a specific location and conditions while in other locations the cost is 50% higher (US$1.00/m 3 ) for a similar facility. In addition to capital and operating costs, other parameters such as local incentives or subsidies may also contribute to the large difference in desalted water cost between regions and facilities. Plant suppliers and consultants have their own cost calculation methodologies, but they are confidential and provide water costs with different accuracies.The few existing costing methodologies and software packages such as WTCost© and DEEP provide an estimated cost with different accuracies and their applications are limited to specific conditions. Most of the available cost estimation tools are of the black box type, which provide few details concerning the parameters and methodologies applied for local conditions. Many desalination plants built recently have greater desalinated water delivery costs caused by special circumstances, such as plant remediation or upgrades, local variation in energy costs, and site-specific issues in raw materials costs (e.g., tariffs and transportation). Therefore, the availability of a more transparent and unique methodology for estimating the cost will help in selecting an appropriate desalination technology suitable for specific locations with 2 consideration of all the parameters influencing the cost. A techno-economic evaluation and review of the costing aspects and the main parameters influencing the total water cost produced by different desalination technologies are herein presented in detail. Some recent developments, such as the increase of unit capacity, improvements in process design and materials, and the use of hybrid systems have contributed to cost reduction as well as reduction in energy consumption. The development of new and emerging low-energy desalination technologies, such as adsorption desalination, will have an impact on cost variation estimation in the future.

Modelling Production Performance of Small Scale Production Plant

“…Inefficient part of water production process act as non-value inputs ultimately contributes to reduce capacity utilization of water production performance [38]. The capital input of the process includes all expenditures associated with system implementation from the beginning of time of production project through engineering design, financing, construction, installation, commissioning and acceptance testing to start operating [39]. In this study, the major focus is on production system.…”

Desalination using renewable energy sources on the arid islands of South Aegean Sea

“…[36]. The desalination method that has a prominent position on applications is reverse osmosis [16]. This technique presents a remarkable flexibility as it allows the construction of devices and systems in a great range in terms of water that can be produced per day; starting from the construction of the smallest device intended to meet the water needs of a family to the most extensive facility for water supply of a community or a town ( Table 1).…”

An interdisciplinary modelling framework for selecting adaptation measures at the river basin scale in a global change scenario

“…The catalogue of measures includes the possibility of building a desalination plant to supply coastal municipalities. Investment and operating costs for such plants were estimated based on figures provided by local engineering companies and cross-checked with values reported in international surveys (Zhou and Toll.,2005;Ghaffour et al,2013 …”