Posted on 07/10/2015 5:56:53 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Perth, Australia - Up to a third of Perth's drinking water starts life in the Indian Ocean where it is drawn into an intake pump about 400 metres inland. It is pumped another kilometre into the sprawling, open-plan complex at the Southern Seawater Desalination Plant in Binningup, Western Australia (WA).
Here, the seawater goes through a complex five-step filtering process that includes 32,872 reverse osmosis membranes and 18,080 ultra-filtration membranes.
About 45 percent of the seawater entering the system gets turned into fresh drinking water that can then be piped out north towards Perth, or even as far as Kalgoorlie in the east. The rest is returned to the sea as brine.
Half a decade ago this process of turning raw seawater into drinkable tap water, or desalination, would have been controversial, but without it, Perth would probably be on water restrictions.
Basically drought proof
When Premier Colin Barnett opened the plant in 2013, he declared Perth "basically drought proof".
At the time, the soft-spoken Alberto de Miguel was working as the project manager overseeing construction on both stages of the $1.4bn project. He was also the man to help Barnett push the button which formally marked the start of the plant's operation....
(Excerpt) Read more at aljazeera.com ...
Perth is the Los Angeles of Australia.
I wonder if the final cost to the customer is comparable to non-desal water source.
Only smarter...
Nah. Seawater is free.
Yes, of course the raw water is free.
However, one must calculate & include the cost of the equipment and the multiple-steps to de-sal to know the total cost to the customer.
Israel can desalinate for about 50 cents a cubic meter.
You asked if the the final cost was comparable to the source. The source is free.
No way, because leaders there opted for desalination instead trains to nowhere like the politicians here lining up with moonbeam.
This article proves the absolute BS of the California water shortage and of all water-starved countries bordering oceans. Gov. Brown, what is that giant blue thing on your entire western border? You have the maniacs screaming “the Arctic is melting ! The sea is rising!” Well then use it, dammit! Oh wait, that would make sense.
Good grief, you’re playing the semantics game - OK, got it.
I obviously was referring to the final cost of de-sal process to the normal process.
btw, some city/county water sources do have a cost if the municipality needs to purchase its raw water.
Of course, de-sal is more costly than water sucked out of the ground or from a lake. Reverse osmosis isn't free. But great strides are being made in the design and manufacture of RO filters. In particular, the use of nanoporous graphene membranes has proven highly efficient, and there is a major company producing such filters in standard RO filter formats. That means no redesign of desal plants is necessary, just swap out the filters. The hitch is the cost of production. The good news is South Korean researchers are engineering methods to produce low cost nanoporous graphene membranes with 3D printing!
The Future of Desalinization.
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