An Israeli company, IDE Technologies, has embarked on a testing programme for a new ecologically sustainable desalinisation process that uses half the power of traditional plants.
As a means for producing fresh water, desalinisation is generally considered to be unsustainable, as it is very expensive and requires large amounts of electricity to convert sea water or brackish inland water into drinkable water.
Though a less than ideal solution, in some countries where fresh water is unavailable, especially in the Middle East region, desalinisation is currently the best option.
IDE Technologies have built a prototype test plant in Tianjin, China, where the desalinisation plant is powered using runoff steam from a power plant. The benefits are that the community has a good source of clean drinking water as well as salt to sell, and the power plant gets water for its cooling towers as a part of the process.
The new plant is reported to be the largest and greenest desalinisation plant in China, which uses a process called multi-effect distillation (MED). According to Avshalom Felber, CEO of IDE, the plant is 50 percent more energy efficient than any other thermal distillation plant.
The process works by heating salt water from the sea with steam, which is then circulated though an evaporator that extracts fresh water, leaving only the salt. The main innovation in the design is rather than using electricity to heat the sea water, the IDE MED plant uses steam from a nearby power plant – energy that would normally be wasted.
The plant at Tianjin, about 150 miles northeast of Beijing, has been under testing operations for around a year now, producing about 100,000 cubic metres of water daily, with plans to expand capacity to double that.
For more information, visit:
http://www.israel21c.org/201105059021/environment/drinking-water-for-china-israeli-style