Desalination
Seen Booming at 15% a Year as World Water Dries Up
“If we don’t take these steps today, it will become an obstacle to the development of our country,” says Loreto Silva, Chile’s minister of public works.
14
Febraury, 2013
In
the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, 158,438 residents of the city
of Copiapo suffered daily cutoffs of tap water last year as Anglo
American Plc and other companies helped suck nearby aquifers dry for
their mines. With little water left for drinking or mining, the
government of President Sebastian Pinera convinced the companies to
seek a solution to the water crisis 60 kilometers away from Copiapo
-- on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.
London-based
Anglo American is spending $107 million to build a desalination plant
on the coast that will pump about 120 liters (32 gallons) a second of
water through the desert to its Mantoverde copper mine. Set for
completion in the second half of this year, the project will provide
enough salt-free water, which is used to separate copper from ore, to
operate the mine.
Two other companies are building similar desalination plants in an effort to keep Chile’s mining-driven economic boom alive, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its March issue.
Two other companies are building similar desalination plants in an effort to keep Chile’s mining-driven economic boom alive, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its March issue.
“If we don’t take these steps today, it will become an obstacle to the development of our country,” says Loreto Silva, Chile’s minister of public works.
As
the global population soars by about 74 million people a year, water
shortages are becoming more severe. About 300 million people in rural
China had no access to safe drinking water in 2005, according to the
website of China’s Water Resources Ministry. At current rates of
growth, the demand for water worldwide may exceed supplies by 40
percent by 2030, according to the World Bank-sponsored 2030 Water
Resources Group.
276
Percent Growth
Desalination
isn’t a panacea -- it’s expensive and harmful to marine life --
but governments desperate for supplies are ramping up construction of
plants. Some of the first industrial- scale plants emerged in the
oil-rich Middle East in the 1950s. Early on, the only method for
extracting salt from seawater was by boiling it and capturing the
vapors, a costly and energy- intensive process.
As
salt-filtering technologies replace boiling and reduce the price of
desalinated water, governments in Australia, China, Israel, the
United Arab Emirates and the U.S. are tapping the oceans. From 2001
through 2011, the industrial capacity of desalinated water expanded
276 percent to 6.7 billion cubic meters (237 billion cubic feet) a
day, according to the International Desalination Association.
There
are almost 16,000 plants operating today, according to the
association, with Saudi Arabia standing out as the biggest producer.
And the industry is now growing about 15 percent a year, says Julio
Zorrilla, an international construction director at Acciona Agua, the
water unit of Acciona SA, a Spanish renewable energy company.
California
Project
“As
populations grow, countries will have no option but to desalinate
water,” he says.
A
project in Southern California faced stiff opposition from consumers
and environmental groups. San Diego, confronting a water crunch as
supplies from Northern California and the Colorado River dwindle,
approved a $922 million coastal desalination plant to provide 7
percent of the city’s drinking water last year after almost a
decade of legal challenges and debates.
San
Diego residents protested at public hearings to stop the proposal
because the costs of desalination may increase the average household
water bill by about $5 to $7 a month when the plant is completed in
2016, according to the San Diego County Water Authority.
“It
gets down to the cost of energy,” says Jeffrey Kightlinger, general
manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
Harming
Marine Life
San
Diego Coastkeeper and Surf-rider Foundation, two California
environmental groups, sued in state court to block approval of the
project because of the harm it will cause to marine organisms as
hundreds of millions of gallons of seawater are sucked into the plant
each day.
Stamford,
Connecticut-based Poseidon Resources Corp., the plant’s owner,
plans to use water that has already been drawn from the ocean to cool
a nearby power station. The lawsuits said the desalination plant will
require the power station to pull in even more water, adding to
destruction of sea life.
A
California court dismissed the lawsuits. Poseidon will also restore
66 hectares (163 acres) of wetlands in Southern California to
mitigate the plant’s harmful impact.
The
industry has introduced innovations that have reduced the costs of
desalinating water. Companies started to adopt technologies to pump
water through membrane filters to capture salt in the 1990s. That
brought down the price of desalinated water to less than $1 a cubic
meter from $3, says Ashvalom Felber, chief executive officer of IDE
Technologies Ltd., one of the world’s three largest manufacturers
of desalination plants.
Lower
Costs
And
technology developed by San Leandro, California-based Energy Recovery
Inc. and other companies that recirculates water in filtering plants
has cut energy expenses by as much as 60 percent, says Energy
Recovery CEO Tom Rooney. The technology lessens the cost of a cubic
meter of desalinated water to about 50 cents, Felber says.
Fresh
ground supplies, by comparison, run less than 20 cents, according to
the 2030 Water Resources Group.
“The
industry keeps evolving, and prices keep coming down,” Felber says.
Desalination
plants will mostly spring up in regions willing to pay a premium for
water to keep their economies growing, Rooney says. China plans to
more than triple its production to 2.2 million cubic meters a day by
2015, according to the Chinese National Development and Reform
Commission. The water will supply 15 percent of the needs of China’s
factories along its industrial eastern seaboard, the commission says.
The
country is on track to become the world’s biggest producer of
desalinated water, Rooney says.
“In
places like China, desalination is an economic slam- dunk,” he
says.
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