Case studies on environmental impact of seawater desalination

Coastal Reservoir Strategy and Its Applications

“…The first desalination plant by the multi-stage flash (MSF) evaporation process installed in 1964 in Lanzarote(Canary Islands) to over 700 desalination plants existing nowadays [19].Desalination technologies account for a worldwide production capacity of 24. for treatment of brackish water [21]. However, they have potential negative impacts [22].…”

Development of an Environmental Impact Assessment and Decision Support System for Seawater Desalination Plants

“…For example, discharge practices on the Canary Islands involve neutralization before discharge into the sea. The chemical additives, mainly sodium polyphosphate and EDTA, have been reported as being not considered very important in terms of marine environmental impacts in this case [243].…”

Landscape Changes and a Salt Production Sustainable Approach in the State of Salt Pan Area Decreasing on the Coast of Tianjin, China

“…Although there has been much progress in seawater desalination technology in the world, and the success of this technology is obvious, there are still concerns about the environmental impact that would be exerted by their application, including losses of aquatic organisms and their habitats due to the open seawater intake [10,23], decreased concentration of dissolved oxygen [22,23], and the rise in water salinity, heat, and turbidity caused by saline discharge [10,13,15,17,18,22,23,25,26]. Adverse influence is caused also by the greenhouse gas emissions generated during the thermo-electric desalination process [17,19,23], the chemical additives used as antiscalants, antifoulants, corrosion inhibitors, defoamers, chlorine, and acids [10,13,[15][16][17][18][21][22][23][24] and their reaction products [16,23], increased level of metals such as copper [10,13,15,16,23].…”

“…Adverse influence is caused also by the greenhouse gas emissions generated during the thermo-electric desalination process [17,19,23], the chemical additives used as antiscalants, antifoulants, corrosion inhibitors, defoamers, chlorine, and acids [10,13,[15][16][17][18][21][22][23][24] and their reaction products [16,23], increased level of metals such as copper [10,13,15,16,23]. The leakage of concentrated saline and seawater from the pipes leads to groundwater contamination [17,18,20,24]; in addition, noise pollution is inflicted in the RO process [17,20]. Among these problems resulting from seawater desalination, much attention has been focused on the disposal of the concentrated saline, whose inappropriate treatment would undoubtedly cause severe environmental problems.…”

“…The whole world's seawater desalination capacity was 4.5 × 10 8 m 3 /day by the end of 2005, and this technology was widely used in the countries in the Persian Gulf, and by the Mediterranean and Red Sea [10]. One concern related to seawater desalination addresses the disposal of the concentrated saline, resulting from seawater desalination, which could cause serious environmental problems in the marine ecosystem [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. However, because the proportion of the constant chemical elements contained in the concentrated saline from seawater desalination and the seawater concentrated saline are almost the same, the usage of the concentrated liquid obtained from seawater desalination for the production of sea salt can be achieved [27].…”