Desalination Worldwide
As the technology continues to advance, desalination is becoming a primary or supplemental water supply strategy from the Caribbean to the Pacific.
Recent reports indicate that around 12,500 industrial-scale desal plants are now operating worldwide.
Spain was the first European country to venture into modern desalination, installing its first plant on the water-poor Canary Islands in 1964. Today, Spain is the fourth largest user in the world. Spain’s more than 700 desal plants, the majority along the Mediterranean coast, produce enough water daily to take care of about 8 million inhabitants in the country’s “breadbasket” region.
In recent years, as Australia’s drought reached crisis proportions, this nation also has embraced desalination solutions. The cities of Perth, Sydney and Melbourne currently rely heavily on new desalination facilities, and the state of Victoria is getting set to open a plant in 2011 that will dwarf all others in the country.
Saudi Arabia, even before today’s booming economy and growing population, has always been plagued with water shortages. Until relatively recently, an estimated 90 percent of Saudi Arabia’s water was drawn from wells that tap nonrenewable “fossil water” lying deep in ancient aquifers. Another 10 percent was surface water from seasonal wadis, or streams. Tribal conflicts over water rights, diminishing water yields, and the growing inability of the nation to feed its population through wasteful ditch irrigation farming, made a water crisis inevitable.
In the 1970s, the royal family went looking for alternative strategies. They even floated the notion of towing icebergs from Antarctica to supplement supplies. But over time, modern reverse osmosis desalination was seen to hold the best promise. Plans were drawn to build a series of coastal plants, coupled with miles of distribution pipelines. By 2000, 27 desalination plants were producing more than 600 million gallons of fresh water daily in Saudi Arabia, enough to provide more than 70 percent of the nation’s water. The majority were dual-purpose plants that also generated electricity. But water shortages continued, and in 2007 the new Shoaiba III began rising on the shores of the Persian Gulf. When it became operational in 2009, it was reportedly the world’s largest desalination plant with a capacity of 232 million gallons per day (almost five times that of the Carlsbad, California facility).