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Thread: China publishes energy white paper

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[quote=SHESGOTTOBE,263781]The large energy reserves of many Middle Eastern countries, along with their relative water scarcity, have led to extensive construction of desalination in this region. Saudi Arabia's desalination plants account for about 24% of total world capacity. 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 meters of water per year. The largest desalination plant in the United States is the one at Tampa Bay, Florida, which began desalinizing 25 million gallons of water per day in December 2007.

In a December 26, 2007 opinion column in the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Nolan Hertel, a professor of nuclear and radiological engineering at Georgia Tech, wrote, "... nuclear reactors can be used... to produce large amounts of potable water. The process is already in use in a number of places around the world, from India to Japan and Russia. Eight nuclear reactors coupled to desalination plants are operating in Japan alone... nuclear desalination plants could be a source of large amounts of potable water transported by pipelines hundreds of miles inland..." Nuclear-powered desalination might be economical on a large scale, and there is a pilot plant in the former USSR.

"Indeed, one needs to lift the water by 2000 m, or transport it over more than 1600 km to get transport costs equal to the desalination costs. Thus, desalinated water is only expensive in places far from the sea, like New Delhi, or in high places, like Mexico City. Desalinated water is also expensive in places that are both somewhat far from the sea and somewhat high, such as Riyadh and Harare. In other places, the dominant cost is desalination, not transport. This leads to relatively low costs in places like Beijing, Bangkok, Zaragoza, Phoenix, and, of course, coastal cities like Tripoli." For cities on the coast, desalination is being increasingly viewed as an untapped and unlimited water storage.

Israel is now desalinizing water at a cost of 53 cents per cubic meter. Singapore is desalinizing water for 49 cents per cubic meter. The city of Perth has been successfully operating a reverse osmosis seawater desalination plant since 2006, and the West Australian government has announced that a second plant will be built to service the city's needs. A desalination plant is to be built in Australia's largest city, Sydney, and Wonthaggi, Victoria in the near future.

In Perth, Australia, in 2007, a wind powered desalination plant was opened. The water is sucked in from the ocean at only 0.1 meter per second, which is slow enough to let fish escape. The plant provides nearly 40 million gallons of clean water per day.

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