Desalination Technologies: Hellenic Experience

Abstract

Beyond doubt, desalination is growing rapidly worldwide. However, there are still obstacles to its wider implementation and acceptance such as: (a) high costs and energy use for fresh water production; (b) environmental impacts from concentrate disposal; (c) a complex, convoluted and time-consuming project permitting process; and (d) limited public understanding of the role, importance, benefits and environmental challenges of desalination. In this paper, a short review of desalination in Greece is being made. Data on the cost of desalination shows a decrease in the future and the potential of water desalination in Greece. The paper summarizes the current status in southeastern Greece (e.g., Aegean islands and Crete), and investigates the possibility of production of desalinated water from brackish water.

Energy Consumption for the Desalination of Salt Water Using Polyelectrolyte Hydrogels as the Separation Agent

“…In 2015, about 18 000 desalination plants were in operation that produced about 90 million m 3 fresh water per day to supply over 300 million people worldwide . The most reliable desalination processes that are running on a commercial scale can be divided into two main categories: (i)thermal processes such as multistage flash or multiple‐effect distillation that are flushing and evaporating the sea water; and (ii)membrane processes, in which the salt ions are rejected by a semipermeable membrane that allows only the water molecules to pass.…”

An Economic Assessment of the Global Potential for Seawater Desalination to 2050

“…Finally, a historical simulation of the unit production cost (C p ) is performed to validate the summation of unit capital and O&M costs by comparison with previous simulation results [34][35][36][37][38][39]. It should be noted that there is a range of estimated unit production costs in the present study because plant capacity is used as a capacity group from the decision tree.…”

“…This is based on the estimated results for SWRO plants with a capacity of 208,000 m 3 /d. Zotalis, et al [38] estimate the unit production cost for a SWRO in Greece and report a value of $1.21/m 3 . Our simulation results are fairly consistent with these previous published results for a number of regions and years ( Figure 2).…”

Desalination of Water Using ZVI (Fe0)

“…These plants consume 75.2 TWh (0.5% of global electricity consumption [177]). The basic cost of desalination (excluding extraction, pre-treatment, post desalination treatment, storage, distribution and wastewater disposal) is estimated for large scale (e.g., >100,000 m ) desalination costs are estimated at $1 to more than 12 m 3 [183]. An indication of the full cycle costs associated with large scale desalination is provided by the volume supply costs to industrial users in countries which rely on desalinated water for the bulk of their water supply (e.g., United Arab Emirates (UAE)).…”