The dams are full for now—but Sydney will need new water supplies as rainfall becomes less reliable
When Australia last went into El Niño, we had water supply issues in Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.
Oct 20, 2023
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When Australia last went into El Niño, we had water supply issues in Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.
Oct 20, 2023
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Conventional methods of seawater desalination include multi-effect desalination (MED), reverse osmosis (RO), and freezing desalination (FD). Some of these methods consume a lot of energy, while others produce relatively poor ...
Oct 9, 2023
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With its golden hue and light fruity flavor, the beer being sipped by Aaron Tartakovsky looks and tastes just like many others.
Oct 9, 2023
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As researchers around the world race against time to develop new strategies and technologies to fight climate change, a team of scientists at the University of Houston is exploring one possible way to directly reduce the ...
Sep 11, 2023
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The supply–demand imbalance of clean water has resulted in a global sustainability crisis. The United Nations World Water Developments Report 2023 reveals that 2–3 billion people are suffering from a shortage of water.
Sep 5, 2023
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The United Arab Emirates plans to triple its supply of renewable energy and invest up to $54 billion over the next seven years to meet its growing energy demands.
Jul 4, 2023
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To achieve more effective saltwater desalination in a new study, mechanical engineers have focused on fluid movement rather than new materials. By adding microchannels to the inside of battery-like electrodes made of Prussian ...
Jun 7, 2023
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With summer temperatures soaring, the specter of water scarcity looms large. As a possible solution to increase the availability of clean, potable water, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed ...
May 30, 2023
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Over the last year, the world's energy market has been highly volatile. The warmer-than-average winter in Europe helped avoid a gas crisis this year, but the forecast for the next winter is unclear as instabilities persist. ...
Jan 23, 2023
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It was an interesting year for technology research, as a team at Stanford University found that the practice of charging cars in the evenings or at night will overstress the electric grid in the years to come. They suggested ...
Desalination, desalinization, or desalinisation refers to any of several processes that remove some amount of salt and other minerals from water. More generally, desalination may also refer to the removal of salts and minerals, as in soil desalination.
Water is desalinated in order to convert salt water to fresh water so it is suitable for human consumption or irrigation. Sometimes the process produces table salt as a by-product. Desalination is used on many seagoing ships and submarines. Most of the modern interest in desalination is focused on developing cost-effective ways of providing fresh water for human use in regions where the availability of fresh water is, or is becoming, limited.
Large-scale desalination typically uses extremely large amounts of energy as well as specialized, expensive infrastructure, making it very costly compared to the use of fresh water from rivers or groundwater.
However, along with recycled water this is one of the few non-rainfall dependent water sources particularly relevant to countries like Australia which traditionally have relied on rainfall in dams to provide their drinking water supplies.
The world's largest desalination plant is the Jebel Ali Desalination Plant (Phase 2) in the United Arab Emirates. It is a dual-purpose facility that uses multi-stage flash distillation and is capable of producing 300 million cubic metres of water per year. By comparison the largest desalination plant in the United States is located in Tampa Bay, Florida, and operated by Tampa Bay Water, which began desalinating 34.7 million cubic meters of water per year in December 2007. The Tampa Bay plant runs at around 12% the output of the Jebel Ali Desalination Plants. The largest desalination plant in South Asia is the Minjur Desalination Plant near Chennai in India which produces 100,000 cubic meters of water per day, or 36.5 million cubic meters of water per year. According to International Desalination Association 2009, there are 14,451 desalination plants in operation worldwide, producing 59.9 million cubic meters per day (15.8 billion gallons a day), a year on year increase of 12.3%.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA