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Jordan and Israel signed an agreement on 26 February to go ahead with a World Bank-sponsored project to build a desalination plant in the Gulf of Aqaba and a pipeline linking the Red Sea with the Dead Sea. The plant will be built in the southern Jordanian port of Aqaba on the Red Sea and will desalinate water to be shared by Israelis and Palestinians. The brine that is a by-product of the process will be sent north in a 180km pipeline to the Dead Sea. The project will cost around $900m (£584.5m, €803m). It will take nearly three years...

A controversial proposal to build what would be the largest desalination plant in the nation along the Huntington Beach coastline was approved early today after months of raucous debate. The Huntington Beach City Council voted 4 to 3 to approve permits for Poseidon Resources Corp. to build a $250-million desalination facility next to the AES power station on Pacific Coast Highway at the city's southern edge. The desalination plant would produce as much as 50 million gallons of fresh water daily by tapping ocean water already pumped into the power station to cool the huge electrical facility. The plant still...

Finding ways to create clean drinking water where there is none is a field of constant innovation. Desalination, the process of filtering seawater to make it fit for human use, is perhaps the most common and researchers around the globe are on a quest to bring cost-effective and portable desalination technology to rural areas where it is desperately needed. So it’s exciting news that researchers at Alexandria University in Egypt have developed a promising new method that can turn salt water into fresh water in just a few minutes. The new Egyptian method relies on salt-attracting membranes and vaporizing heat...

The researchers compiled data from the California Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, which tracks oil and gas wells around the state. Researchers determined if water had been detected while drilling, and also gathered data about depth, salinity and pressure. After looking at 360 oil and gas fields spread across eight counties, the researchers say that they’ve documented a trove of fresh water just over half the size of Lake Michigan hidden in California’s bedrock 1,000 to nearly 10,000 feet below the surface. This is almost three times more groundwater than what was indicated in previous studies, many conducted...

California has put the green lobby elite ahead of the normal human need for water, building no new reservoirs in decades and diverting the water of the Central Valley to flow to sea in order to protect a locally endangered smelt. Now an Israeli company is coming to the rescue of San Diego County, soon to be providing 10% of their water and creating 2,500 jobs through state-of-the-art reverse-osmosis technology. IDE Technologies dedicated the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere on Monday ..quenching the thirst of roughly 10 percent of San Diego County... The plant, which will be operated...

Taking the salt out of seawater helped Israel move from the constant threat of drought to a plentiful supply of water, but Israel has learned that desalination is not the only answer. Ben-Gurion University's Institute for Water Research is deep in Israel's Negev desert and away from the sea. Prof. Jack Gilron, head of the Department of Desalination and Water Treatment, and other researchers here test concepts in desalination to see if they might hold promise for industrial development. Israel has long sought solutions to the threat of drought. Commercial desalination began in the 1970s in the city of Eilat,...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Even in 2015, the New York Times is still pretending that desalination does not exist The New York Times just published this article on California’s water shortage:California Drought Tests History of Endless GrowthA punishing drought is forcing a reconsideration of whether the aspiration of untrammeled growth that has for so long been the state’s engine has run against the limits of nature.April 4, 2015LOS ANGELES — For more than a century, California has been the state where people flocked for a better life — 164,000 square miles of mountains, farmland and coastline, shimmering with ambition and...

Making drinking water out of sea water is a growing trend, but the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) says it is a potential threat to the environment that also could exacerbate climate change. The global review of desalination plants worldwide: "Making water: Desalination -- option or distraction for a thirsty world?" -- states that some of the driest and thirstiest places are turning to desalination. These include regions where water problems affect large, populous areas -- Australia, the Middle East, Spain, the United Kingdom and United States, with India and China following suit. "Desalinating the sea is an expensive, energy-intensive and...

As surely as the hot, dry Santa Ana winds bring blue skies to the coast and wildfires to the hills, severe California droughts bring calls to build desalination plants up and down the seashore. All that ocean water, begging to be converted to fresh and pumped into our pipelines, would solve our water supply problems instantly and permanently, boosters say. In the coming months, the drumbeat will only get louder. That's not only because the current drought is the longest and most severe in memory, but because a $1-billion desalination project scheduled to start operating in Carlsbad this fall will...

Instead of spending money on a bullet train, California should build desalination plants. We cannot live without water or food. California supplies 70 percent of the food for the country and we have cut off water to the farmers to save the smelt fish. The legislatures are more interested in catering to their money backers than doing what is right for the citizens of California. Which sounds better, water or rain? Anyone with an ounce of common sense and a firm grasp on reality would say water is the only answer. We don’t need a bullet train that starts in...