Desalination Technologies are Getting Better and Cheaper

By Paolo von Schirach

September 19, 2024 – There is a major freshwater crisis affecting many regions of our planet. However, desalination may provide a viable solution. Significant technological progress is making desalination plants that allow to turn salty sea water into drinkable fresh water much more affordable. This is a blessing for an overcrowded world in need of more and more fresh water –for humans, farm animals, agriculture, and industry.

For those of us living in temperate climate regions of the world, blessed with fairly regular rainfall and plenty of rivers and lakes, the availability of safe, affordable, drinkable fresh water is not an issue. We take it for granted.

But in many regions of our planet –some of them very poor— fresh water is very scarce, and therefore very expensive. This is a huge constraint on economic development, since water is essential for almost everything.

In other parts of the world, because of changed weather patterns in part due to global warming, water is no longer available in volumes that can support agriculture, industrial use and human settlements. Therefore, people will have to move and go elsewhere. These migrations away from regions that have become deserts, should they become mass phenomena, may trigger violent conflicts, as more and more humans fight for the same, essential, yet very limited resource.

While this predicament is serious, and in some places it is becoming truly dramatic, technology is coming to the rescue. Desalination technology has been around for quite some time. Built on coastlines, desalination plants pump in sea water –an inexhaustible water supply—and via diverse technological modalities, they remove the salt from sea water, turning it into fresh water, perfectly safe for human consumption and any other usage.

The problem with desalination is that it used to be prohibitively expensive, even in developed, rich countries; and totally out of reach for poor countries in Africa, Asia or the Middle East that need it the most.

That said, technologies have improved, while the high cost of operating desalination plants –desalination is an energy intensive process—is going down, thanks to renewable energy. For example, Israel used to have a huge water scarcity problem since it has very limited freshwater resources. But now Israel is completely self-sufficient when it comes to freshwater, on account of many state-of-the-art desalination plants. The Israelis have improved the technology. They increased the productivity of desalination plants, while reducing the energy needs to operate them. Saudi Arabia and other water poor but energy rich Gulf Countries do not have any affordability issues when it comes to desalination.

But there is hope for the rest of the world as well. Overall, the cost of desalination plants has gone down by about 45 per cent in recent years. Further cost reductions are in the forecast because renewable energy, now much more efficient and    affordable, can be used to operate the plants.

Furthermore, new technological advances will eliminate the problem of disposing of the salt brine collected by the desalination plants. Throwing it into the sea will cause huge environmental problems because the high salt concentration will drastically affect the ecosystem of the coastal areas. But now scientists have come up with ways to extract salt from the brine, along with other important minerals that can have important industrial use. This way brine gets recycled and the disposal issue goes away.

It should also be noted that while large desalination plants are required to supply cities, nowadays small coastal communities or even individual households can acquire scaled down desalination plants that will take care of all their freshwater needs.

That said, while desalination is becoming an affordable solution to the global water crisis, one still needs to consider initial capital costs that need to be financed, operating costs (even if reduced), and then the additional costs to pipe the new fresh water to population centers away from coastal areas where the desalination plants will be located. However, even considering these challenges, it is no longer a given that certain regions of the planet will have to be abandoned because of lack of drinkable water, this way becoming uninhabitable deserts.

Paolo von Schirach is the President of the Global Policy Institute, a Washington DC think tank, and Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Bay Atlantic University, also in Washington, DC. He is also the Editor of the Schirach Report.

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