How could desalination alleviate water scarcity?

Given that only 3% of water on earth is fresh, turning abundant saltwater into usable fresh water is an obvious way of addressing water scarcity. Desalination is becoming more attractive as it becomes more cost-competitive, technology scales up and fresh water supply dwindles.

Desalination processes can be mechanical (mechanical vapour compression and reverse osmosis), thermal (i.e. simple stills, multi-effect distillation, multi-stage flash evaporation, thermal vapour compression), or electrical (electrodialysis).

Reverse Osmosis (RO), a mechanical process that uses pressure, is the most used process and consumes less energy than the rest, as it is based on the use of semipermeable membranes that allow water molecules (smaller) to pass, but not salt molecules (bigger).

A deep dive into desalination components

Processes such as RO depend upon pipes and valves. Pipes are particularly important for desalination systems because they need to resist corrosion and leaching, which is where research into advanced solutions and specialist materials is focused on.

The seawater and brackish water desalination markets continue to grow. GWI expects capex to rise to $9.4 billion in 2027 from just under $6 billion in 2022, and opex to increase to $13.4 billion from $10.6 billion in 2022.

The above is an extract from our new whitepaper, Clean water technologies: overcoming the challenge of a drier world. Read the whitepaper to learn more about global water scarcity, and the cutting-edge technologies offering potential solutions.