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For centuries, people have sought ways to desalinate seawater to provide drinking water. Especially in arid areas of the world, governments and private companies have explored a variety of technologies to convert salt water into fresh water, using the ocean’s abundance to provide safe drinking water to areas facing severe freshwater shortages. However, this has been extremely expensive and impractical in the past. But now, a Norwegian firm thinks it has created a new way to convert water, using the power of waves.
The main reason companies avoid desalination operations is the high cost of energy. It requires about ten times more energy than any other water source, as well as producing a significant amount of carbon emissions. Therefore, large-scale desalination projects require their own power plants to operate.
Desalination operations have traditionally relied on boiling seawater to get rid of the salt. However, in recent decades more and more countries have been using reverse osmosis techniques, relying on high pressure to move salt water through a membrane and leave it trapped. This process requires less energy, although it is still far from low energy, with 4 kWh needed to produce just one cubic meter of drinking water. In addition to high energy consumption, desalination has significant setup costs, requiring expensive infrastructure and maintenance to run operations. For this reason, in areas where other water sources exist, water conservation and reuse are more popular.
However, desalination has long been a popular technique in the Middle East, much of which is extremely arid, making access to fresh water difficult. Saudi Arabia introduced two private distillation condensers in the city of Jeddah in the early 1900s as the demand for drinking water grew. Later, the Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SVCC), an independent government organization, was established in 1974 to oversee desalination projects. And in the UAE, desalination operations provide about 42 percent of the country’s drinking water needs.
Currently, many desalination operations are powered by fossil fuels, which means they produce high levels of greenhouse gas emissions. And as populations across the Middle East increase and more desalination plants are built, there are concerns about their impact on climate change. However, the plants can be powered by renewable energy sources, such as solar energy, making them much cleaner. But not everything is so simple. Laurent Lambert, assistant professor of water, energy and climate public policy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, explains that “The first fundamental issue with plants is that most desalination infrastructure is not ready for solar. Second, solar panels must be cleaned frequently, so you need water. Cleaning these panels would add to the existing water stress.”
Now, a Norwegian firm thinks it has the right method to provide greener desalination operations. Ocean Oasis has built a prototype wave-powered device that it hopes will deliver the blueprint for floating offshore desalination operations. A ten-meter-tall, seven-meter-diameter plant was installed in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands to test its performance. Ocean Oasis believes its technology will enable “the production of fresh water from ocean waters by harnessing wave energy to carry out desalination processes and pump drinking water to coastal users”.
Innovation Norway, Grieg Maritime Group, Gran Canaria Economic Promotion Society and other organizations provided funding for the project. The company hopes the project will provide a more affordable method of desalination in an area with abundant salt water resources. Low rainfall, high soil permeability and overexploitation of aquifers have left the region facing water shortages, seeking alternative ways to provide fresh water. The new technique would reduce reliance on fossil fuels to power desalination operations.
After testing, Ocean Oasis plans to build a second, enlarged structure with the capacity needed to produce water for consumption. There are high hopes for the use of wave energy in the project, as wave and tidal energy projects are still relatively small compared to other renewable energy sources. Governments are beginning to increase their funding for research and development of ocean energy projects, but it is still largely untapped.
The Canary Islands are not the only area looking to develop innovative desalination methods, with the US Department of Energy (DoE) holding a competition with $3.3 million in prizes for the most innovative wave-powered desalination proposals. In the Waves to Water award, entrants were asked to design, construct and test devices that use wave energy to produce drinking water from salt water. Oneka Technologies received the $500,000 grand prize for its Oneka Snowflake device after a successful testing phase in North Carolina.
After years of trying to develop cost-effective desalination operations, the best large-scale projects we have to date remain extremely carbon-heavy. With the support of state governments, new innovative projects are now being seen, with the potential to turn salt water into clean drinking water without harmful effects on the environment. However, these projects remain in the early stages and will require significantly more funding to roll out on a large scale.
By Felicity Bradstock for Oilprice.com
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