World Cup host Qatar is among the world’s most water-stressed countries — a problem the tiny, wealthy emirate has largely paid its way out of thanks to expensive technology known as desalination. Here’s a look at how it works.
There are other types of desalination but reverse osmosis is the most common. Inland brackish waters can also be desalinated.Desalination plants are scattered along coastlines across the world, but the highest-capacity plants are located in high-income, water-starved Middle Eastern countries with ample coastline, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel. Saudi Arabia is home to the world’s largest plant.
Reverse osmosis technology has been around since the 1950s. Gulf Arab nations were among the first to embrace it. After soaring oil revenues in the 1970s and ’80s transformed them into some of the world’s wealthiest countries, they began investing heavily in the infrastructure. Israel got serious about desalination in the late 1990s following a severe drought.by researchers at the United Nations’ Water and Human Development Program.
“It simply takes a lot of energy to pull salt out of water,” said Peter Gleick, president emeritus of the California-based Pacific Institute, who has studied water resources for decades.The process has become more efficient in recent decades. But it still takes between 3.5 and 4.5 kilowatt hours of electricity to desalinate 264 gallons of water, according to an 2019of more than 70 large-scale facilities. A U.S. refrigerator uses about 4 kilowatt hours of electricity per day.
Then there’s the brine, or highly salty sludge left behind by the filtration. Some facilities dispose of it on land or inject it underground. But most desalination plants send it back into the ocean. Some dilute it before doing so.
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