11/13/2023 0 Comments Reddit distill web monitor![]() Because the technology typically requires less energy than thermal distillation, most new plants, like Tampa's, now use reverse osmosis. Seawater is forced through a semipermeable membrane that separates salt from water. The most common type of membrane separation is called reverse osmosis. Thermal distillation involves heat: Boiling water turns it into vapor-leaving the salt behind-that is collected and condensed back into water by cooling it down. There are two basic methods for breaking the bonds in saltwater: thermal distillation and membrane separation. So how is energy used to separate salt from water? A lot of these plants are in countries like Saudi Arabia, where energy from oil is cheap but water is scarce. They pumped out approximately 14.7 billion gallons (55.6 billion liters) of drinkable freshwater a day. ![]() ![]() The International Desalination Association says that as of 2007 there were about 13,000 desalination plants operating around the world. As such, this cost figure is expected to continue to rise, which is why California is now seriously considering desalination and why the city of Tampa, Fla., decided to build the biggest desalination plant in the U.S. For example, meeting growing demand by finding a new source of water or by building a new dam in a place like California could cost up to 60 cents per cubic meter of water.Īnd sometimes these traditional means of “harvesting” water are no longer available. That means it's still almost always cheaper to use local freshwater than to desalinate seawater. typically go through in a day at home.īut switch the source to a river or an aquifer, and the cost of a cubic meter of water can plummet to 10 to 20 cents, and farmers often pay far less. That's about as much as two people in the U.S. It can cost from just under $1 to well over $2 to produce one cubic meter (264 gallons) of desalted water from the ocean. It's hard to put an exact dollar figure on desalination-this number varies wildly from place to place, based on labor and energy costs, land prices, financial agreements, and even the salt content of the water. Energy and the technology to desalinate water are both expensive, and this means that desalinating water can be pretty costly. Salt dissolves very easily in water, forming strong chemical bonds, and those bonds are difficult to break. ![]() The problem is that the desalination of water requires a lot of energy. So why don't we desalinate more to alleviate shortages and growing water conflicts? There is increasing regional scarcity, though. Even with all of the water in Earth's oceans, we satisfy less than half a percent of human water needs with desalinated water.* We currently use on the order of 960 cubic miles (4,000 cubic kilometers) of freshwater a year, and overall there's enough water to go around. ![]()
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