Member Article

Information on Desalination Companies

Desalination companies produce clean water that is suitable for drinking or use in daily chores by filtering the salt content from the salt water. Salt water is the answer of water shortage in the world because the ocean accounts for 70% of the water on the earth. Sea water is not safe for consumed as the high level of salt content is harmful for the body. Due to this reason, many desalination companies have been established to filter the sea water from the salt and brine content. Desalination companies desalinate the sea water in large scale for home, industrial and business premises.

Desalination process have help hundreds of millions of people in different parts of the world to have clean water at their disposals. For places that rely on imported water, setting up desalination companies allow them to produce their own domestic water. Many countries in the Middle East are leaders in desalination including Saudi Arabia, and Israel because these areas have hot temperature. The setting up of huge desalination companies in these areas are necessary as their areas do not provide access to the fresh water.

Reverse osmosis is the main method that desalination companies use to desalinate the sea water. In reverse osmosis, there are a lot of pumps that pump the water from the sea into a large basin. The sea water that is pumped into the basin will go through a pre-treatment stage. Chemicals are mixed with the sea water during the pre-treatment stage. Some of the salt will first be sifted out after the sea water has passed through the first set of filter in the pre-treatment stage.

After the seawater has passed the pre-treatment stage, it will go through a number of sets of membrane filters. High pressures are used to push the water so that it can go pass the membranes and be filtered into purified water in the other tank container. The water with concentrated salt solids will be on one side while the purified sea water that is without the salt will be on the other side. Usually, the desalination plant will mix in some minerals into the purified water so that it becomes safe for use as drinking water.

Desalination is very expensive due to the high energy requirement that is needed to make it work. This is the reason why desalination companies are only set up in areas that lack access to fresh water. The brine concentrated solutions that is discharged from the desalination process can be harmful to the creatures in the ocean. Many people have forecast that the salinity of the ocean will increase so it will be more costly to filter the sea water.

Despite that, there have been a lot of research and developments being undertaken to reduce the cost of desalination process. Even though it is costly to build desalination plants, it is able to serve as a backup source of water in case there is a serious drought that have emptied all the freshwater sources.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jhilmil .