How does the desalination process affect the environment in Dubai?
Answers
As clean freshwater has become scarcer around the world—especially in arid regions such as the Middle East and North Africa—those countries that can afford it have increasingly turned to desalination. That energy-intensive process extracts salt from sea (or other saline) water, transforming it into water that’s fit for human consumption. There are now nearly 16,000 desalination plants either active or under construction across the globe.
“[But] they don’t just produce desalinated water,” explains Manzoor Qadir, a researcher at the United Nations University in Canada. “They also produce brine.”
Brine is the concentrated salt water that’s left after desalination. But Qadir says, “there is no comprehensive assessment” of how much is being produced. So, Qadir and his colleagues decided to come up with an estimate—which was published in the journal Science of the Total Environment and released Monday.
Qadir’s team analyzed available literature as well as a database of roughly 20,000 desalination plants (including some that are no longer active). Since there was no metric specifically for brine production, they used factors such as the type of input water and the desalination technology being used to approximate a plant’s “recovery ratio”—or how much brine is produced compared to desalinated water.
More brine than expected
The literature had long assumed a one-to-one ratio. But Qadir’s study found that the average desalination plant actually produced 1.5 times more brine than desalinated water—fifty percent more than previously thought. That translates to 51.8 billion cubic meters of brine each year, which Qadir says is enough to cover all of Florida, a foot deep.
Answer:
Desalination plants produce more waste Brine that thought. At the Dubai electricity and water authorities at Jebel Ali , natural gas is burned to produce electricity and to this desalination sea water for drinking